The Kuhn Cycle - Check your Model's progress

The Kuhn Cycle is a simple cycle of progress described by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In Structure Kuhn challenged the world's current conception of science, which was that it was a steady progression of the accumulation of new ideas. 

Kuhn identified a cycle of different stages as our knowledge progresses, from Pre-science to Normal Science and the transformations, rise and fall, crisis and changes in models we made about what we are studying.

This is a short summary:

All new fields begin in Pre-science, where they have begun to focus on a problem area but are not yet capable of solving it or making major advances.

Click a node to read about it.

Efforts to provide a model of understanding that works eventually bear fruit. The field can at last make major progress on its central problems. This puts the field in the Normal Science step where it tends to stay longer than any other step.

Over time the field digs so deep into its area of interest it discovers new questions its current model of understanding cannot answer. As more of these anomalies ("violations of expectations") appear the model grows weaker. This is the Model Drift step.

If enough unsolved anomalies appear and the model cannot be patched up to explain them, the Model Crisis step is reached. Here the model is obviously no longer capable of solving the field's current problems of interest. It's a crisis because decisions can no longer be made rationally. Guesswork and intuition must be used instead. These tend to fail.

Finally out of the struggle to form a new model of understanding one or more viable candidates emerge. This begins the Model Revolution step. It's a revolution because the new model is a new paradigm. It's radically different from the old paradigm, so different the two are incommensurate. Each uses its own rules to judge the other. Thus believers in each paradigm cannot communicate well. This causes paradigm change resistance.

Once a single new paradigm is settled on by a few influential supporters, the Paradigm Change step begins. Here the field transitions from the old to the new paradigm while improving the new paradigm to maturity. Eventually the old paradigm is sufficiently replaced and becomes the field's new Normal Science. The cycle then begins all over again, because our knowledge about the world is never complete.

More about the Kuhn Cycle.

Social Impact Models: Cat Whiskers (CWD) and Tug-Of-War (TOW) diagrams

Kaoru Ishikawa -one of the fathers of modern Total Quality concept as well as process performance improvement- was very interested in learning from failure, particularly to prevent it.

Ishikawa's Fishbone diagram and tool is one of the most used and still effective in the performance improvement toolbox

My experience working on cities' transformation projects and what Robert K. Merton called "unanticipated consequence of purposeful social action" (1936) led to develop a complementary, yet opposite model. 

In keepinmg with the analogy with Ishikawa's fishbone, I called it "Cat Whiskers".

This diagram -like the cat's whiskers- works to prevent and anticipate possible consequences, impacts and reactions to social action.  In the example below, we apply the Cat Whiskers Diagram (CWD) to Public Housing.

Think of a public housing program and ask yourself "what can go wrong?" or "what would it look like in 10 years?". Then, stick your answers to the cat whiskers below and think about it.

We can now see the potential impacts and sort out positive and negative (red) reactions. We can group them in factors, and also look at their connections.

Which in turn, took me to develop a second complementary model, which I called the "Tug-Of-War diagram" (TOW) shown below.

The TOW helps us sort out impacts and measure them in a Double Bottom Line business case model.

My article Be the Cat Whiskers was published by Performance Improvement Journal in 2018.

Concept maps

I designed this "map" of the "roots" of what ISPI calls "performance improvement" back in 2012 for a Conference. 

My intention was (and is) to show the diverse disciplines and contributions involved in improving social, organizational and individual performance. 

I would expand today several of those branches with what we have been working on in the City Doctors program since 2009. Cities are perfect "labs" to see how all the different disciplines interact and connect.

Here's an example from our Barcelona City Doctors Global Forum 2018. 

It shows how different departments actions cancel out each other in a small park in Pyla, Cyprus (below, left).The solar panel (Cyprus has one of the highest power costs in Europe) was placed under a palm tree shade -to protect it from the sun?- , the sidewalk built around the palm -forcing pedestrians to walk on the street-. 

 The diagram on the right side shows how the elements could be organized with a user-centered model such as that of City Doctors. 

A different concept -in terms of point of view and focus- follows:

The map was published in my 2012 Performance Improvement Journal article titled Beyond Human Performance Technology (HPT)

The Power of Concept

concept/ˈkɒnsɛpt/
noun                  an abstract idea.
"structuralism is a difficult concept"

synonyms:

idea, notion, conception, abstraction, conceptualization; More

a plan or intention.
"the centre has kept firmly to its original concept"
an idea or invention to help sell or publicize a commodity.
"a new concept in corporate hospitality"

Concepts or ideas are more than mere "building blocks" for intellectual capital.  They are for sure:

"mental representations, abstract objects or abilities that make up the fundamental building blocks of thoughts and beliefs. " (Wikipedia)

but in the sense I will use them in this Blog, concepts include:

1. Perspectives, points of view or approaches to objective or subjective realities that organize or reorganize existing or possible connections or meanings.
2. Frameworks that cluster, map and connect individual elements.
3. Models that represent dynamically reality 
4. Prototypes that help test and evaluate 1-2-3-4

This Blog is a shared reservoir and testing ground for concepts used in our research and articles.

The postings are notes for further (and/or) shared use in a gamut that goes from the practical innovation described by inventor James Dyson at the beginning to the more abstract and cross-disciplinary ideas presented by Buckminster Fuller below.

In  addition, there will be posts about books, experiments, video, interviews, music, arts and multiple links to other resources.