Master of Change by Brad Stulberg

Author:Brad Stulberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Guiding Your Own Evolution

Central to the argument of Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher whose work we discussed briefly in chapter 1, is that scientific progress follows a predictable cycle of order, disorder, and reorder. Kuhn’s masterwork, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, contains a few sentences that I think carry outsize importance. Toward the end of the book, Kuhn explains how scientific crises eventually transition into new and stable paradigms. “In those situations where values must be applied, different values, taken alone, would lead to different choices . . . There is no neutral algorithm for theory-choice,” he writes. To fully understand how science progresses through uncertainty,18 he goes on, one must understand the “particular set of shared values” held by the scientists trying to solve the problem. During periods of change and disorder—what Kuhn calls “crises”—a new and stable paradigm emerges not by chance, but as a result of the values held by the people who are doing the work. The scientists navigating uncertainty follow their values until they arrive somewhere new. Scientific progress is not random. It is directed by values, most notably, the scientific method, as we saw in the example of Robert Wilson, Arno Penzias, and the cosmic microwave background. The same is true for personal and organizational progress, too.

In the prior chapter, we learned to conceive of ourselves fluidly. We realized that developing complexity (differentiation and integration) is essential to thriving in relationship to our ever-changing environments. In this chapter, we learned that we don’t grow complex and evolve at random. The ways in which we differentiate and integrate, the direction our paths take over time, owes itself to a combination of our rugged core values and our willingness and ability to apply them flexibly. Put all of this together and the result is a rugged and flexible identity.

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