DC81: Chapter 1 – The end of a paradigm
Why we are seeing more control and how to move from control to collaboration.
This is the reworked Chapter 1 of the new book: Deeper Change. I created a new post because it is radically different from the last draft. This material is the first chapter and forms part of the thinking on the new organisational change strategy course.
Please provide feedback using the comments below, and I will incorporate it into the next draft. (paid subscription only).
If you want to see big, primary changes in life, you should work on your paradigm rather than just your attitudes or behaviours. – Stephen Covey
When the world felt like it could end any moment
When I was a child, I believed we were already at war.
The Cold War was everywhere, on the news, in playground jokes, in the uneasy silence of adults. I thought the word cold meant that missiles were waiting in the snow, aimed at us. For years, I carried the quiet conviction that at any moment, I might be vaporised in a nuclear blast.
It wasn’t the bombs that terrified me; it was the constant message of fear.
Every night, the television poured out disasters, scandals, and conflicts. The world was painted as hostile and broken. And yet, when I stepped outside, the air smelled of rain and cut grass, my friends laughed, and life seemed, well…, wonderful.
Later, I heard Bob Dylan’s Masters of War:
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world...
Those words cracked something open. The problem wasn’t war.
It was how we communicate; how fear becomes currency, how stories become cages.
That realisation became the thread of my life’s work: to understand why we see the world as we do and how changing our way of seeing, changes everything.
“You’re not just trying to do something marginally, incrementally better. You’re doing something that is a fundamental paradigm shift, that will have exponential impact. That means it’s harder to do, but ultimately, if it’s successful, the impact it has is far greater,”
Steve Jobs
The rhythm of paradigms
Every few centuries, humanity changes the lens through which it understands itself.
Thomas Kuhn called these leaps paradigm shifts.
The shift occurs when our shared model of reality no longer fits the evidence of our experience.
This is an important learning point.
Scientific Revolution
Five centuries ago, the Scientific Revolution offered us certainty.
The world was a machine that could be measured, predicted, and controlled.
That worldview gave us physics, medicine, industry and importantly a mindset:
If we can analyse enough, we can master the world.
Industrial Age
The Industrial Age magnified this idea.
Organisations mirrored factories. Efficiency was God.
We created management to optimise the machine.
Information Age
The Information Age fractured it.
Networks replaced, or at least softened considerably, hierarchies. Data exploded.
Systems thinking emerged with the works like Senge, Meadows, and Capra, reminding us that everything connects to everything else.
Participation Age
And now, as AI has arrived and we step into the Participation Age, a new paradigm is forming:
Collaboration between intelligences: human, artificial, collective, and ecological.
The focus is no longer prediction, but participation.
Consciousness in motion
“And so lying underneath those stormy skies
She’d say, ‘oh
I know the sun must set to rise’
This could be paradise”
Paradise - Coldplay
Across these epochs runs a quieter evolution; the evolution of consciousness itself.
From dependence (seeking control and certainty)
To independence (the rise of individual reason and agency)
To interdependence (systems, collaboration, and shared purpose)
It mirrors the human journey from child to adult to elder.
From “someone should fix this” → to “I will fix this” → to “we can evolve this together.”
It’s the same pattern that guides leadership development: novice → expert → transformational.
And it’s the same movement spirituality describes; from isolated and afraid, to integrated and whole.
Each stage served us well. None were wrong.
But each creates the conditions for the next. Not in a stage gate way, but as realms that we can choose to visit for the proper context. Like a toolbox of perceptions and related behaviours of the mind.
Every age believes its challenges are unique. Yet there are moments when the ground beneath our systems truly shifts, when what once worked no longer does, and when familiar solutions create the very problems they were meant to solve.
We are living in such a moment.
Across politics, organisations, and society, the same pattern is emerging: complexity is rising faster than our capacity to adapt, and our instinctive response is to tighten control.
The end of the agile wave
The final paradigm shift I want to cover is the micro move from focusing on agility to AI Collaboration. This is a subtle shift in how humanity expresses the large-scale macro paradigm changes, but it is significant when considering the profound impact it has had on the lives of agile coaches and all those associated with agility.
The stages of each paradigm shift
We explored the ingredients for paradigm shifts in the book Change. To recap, the stages are:
Philosophical realisation that shifts how we see ourselves
Technological inventions that significantly disrupt
Increase in the complexity of trade and commerce
Organisational shift to align with how we see ourselves, the technical revolution, and the ability to trade efficiently.
I will add a new step that has become clear to me, which is a new step between 3 and 4. This step represents a considerable shift in regulation, aiming to make sense of and control behaviour to maintain stability and bring certainty. This regulation may be a public policy, or it may take the form of rigid rules within organisations, a lockdown of freedoms through increased surveillance, and the polarisation of beliefs.
During this period, there is also a significant surge in inventions, innovations, and freedom. It is an exciting time for many and a miserable time for others. It is this paradox that we must explore if we are to improve our lives and navigate periods of change smoothly.
It is this step, and how long it lasts, that determines our quality of life during the transition phase from one paradigm to the next.
The list becomes:
Philosophical realisation that shifts how we see ourselves
Technological inventions that significantly disrupt
Increase in the complexity of trade and commerce
[new step] Lockdown of behaviours, rules, and freedom, as well as innovation, invention, and liberation.
Organisational shift to align with how we see ourselves, the technical revolution, and the ability to trade efficiently.
Power, progress, and the illusion of control
Every technological revolution offers both liberation and control.
As Acemoglu and Johnson remind us in Power and Progress, new tools can either concentrate power or distribute it.
It is worth taking a moment to understand the nature of power and what it actually is.
Someone who has power can be defined as someone who has control over the decision-making process.
To get power, it means having the social or political capital for credibility, the means of communication to control the narrative, and the optional element of coercion or force should political capital fail.
It is quite often the case that power was gained by being good at and having the right connections in the old paradigm. Changing to a new paradigm is often not in the interests of those in power, and they utilise their ability to control decision-making to maintain the status quo and actively remove or legislate out competition.
This political and social capital, however, starts to erode when the existing defended paradigm stops producing results, and the systems in which they have power do not behave as expected. Initially, there is a double-down on the old ways, and control is ramped up.
New voices start to gain political and social capital when they appear to bring more coherence and certainty than the old voices and produce a narrative that makes more sense, allowing for better decision-making.
This is why privacy and safety of communication is so vitally important. Undermining privacy by using clearly horrible cases such as child abuse and terrorism and linking anyone who fights for privacy as someone who condones these things, is a form manipulation to maintain transparency of one’s perceived enemy (the new paradigm) and maintain the ability of coercive control when they are identified. Privacy is not a nice to have, it is vital for our civilisation to continue to adapt and grow in the face of the oppressive and controlling old guard.
This swap to a new paradigm can take a long time because of this resistance.
Examples of the old paradigm maintaining control are everywhere. For example, large banks that are threatened by fintech disruptors often buy them out and either attempt to absorb or eliminate them.
Governments legislate against or regulate specific uses of technologies, for example, Monero is a privacy coin that provides end-to-end anonymity for financial transactions. It is a true form of digital cash, unlike its traceable counterparts such as Bitcoin. In response to the lack of centralised visibility over who sends money to whom, governments have legislated that Monero cannot be listed on any currency exchange, even though it is not illegal to buy or sell it.
All technologies can be used for good or ill.
The printing press spread knowledge and propaganda.
Factories created jobs and exploited labour.
The internet connected humanity and amplified division.
Control is not evil; it’s simply our first response to uncertainty.
It is how civilisation created safety.
As one paradigm ends, meaning it no longer explains or operates in a way that matches reality, then uncertainty grows, and the response is more control.
However, control always reaches a point where it constrains life more than it protects it, and then the system must adapt; a new paradigm is born.
We are at that point again.
The cycles of despair and creation
If you spend a day scrolling headlines, you’d believe the world is ending.
But if you spend the same day visiting hospitals, schools, and open-source projects, you’ll see something else entirely: a civilisation quietly healing itself.
Media thrives on destruction.
But humanity thrives on creation.
While one narrative screams collapse, another quietly builds regenerative agriculture, decentralised energy, new forms of democracy, and new ways of learning.
Every time an old system decays, the compost feeds the next one.
A Clash of Paradigms
Across both politics and organisational life, we are caught in a widening tension between control and freedom.
On one side lies the drive toward surveillance, automation, and replacement. It is the hope that data and AI can eliminate uncertainty as the gap between what we believe (the old paradigm) widens from what we experience (reality).
On the other side, lies the surge of innovation, creativity, and collaboration. It is the hope that networks of people and machines can co-create new possibilities and leverage the opportunities of a new paradigm that were not there in the old.
These are not abstract forces; they define our daily experience.
Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse traces how great civilisations collapse under the weight of their own control structures. As technological sophistication grows, hierarchies multiply, decision-making slows, and legitimacy erodes.
As power concentrates, voices shrink, and adaptability disappears, the exact mechanisms that once created order become the agents of decline.
Our modern institutions, political and corporate alike, mirror that story.
They were designed for a world of linear trade, slow feedback, and human-paced communication. Today’s environment of instant, digital, planetary scope communication and trade operates on a different clock speed. The mismatch between system design and system reality manifests as gridlock, populism, burnout, and strategic paralysis.
Governments are struggling to regulate technologies they barely understand, and Organisations are chasing agility through frameworks that recreate bureaucracy in new clothes.
As complexity accelerates, the paradigm that created the system drifts out of sync with the system itself.
We can no longer manage reality with the mental models of the industrial age. Control cannot keep up with the speed of connection.
Symptoms of the Paradigm Gap
The dissonance is visible everywhere:
In politics, citizens lose faith in institutions that seem reactive, polarised, and unaccountable. Authoritarian and nationalistic impulses rise under the promise of safety and simplicity.
In organisations, transformation programmes stall; engagement drops; leaders oscillate between micromanagement and abdication.
In individuals, anxiety grows as jobs, roles, and identities are reshaped by technology faster than they can be re-imagined.
These are not separate crises. They are different expressions of a single underlying dynamic: complexity outpacing consciousness.
The paradigms of control, whether expressed through surveillance capitalism, compliance cultures, or centralised governance, can no longer deliver coherence. The harder we push them, the more brittle they become.
This brittleness explains why so many agile transformations failed to take root. They were often introduced as new control systems in the shape of frameworks to impose predictability, rather than as invitations to evolve how people think and relate.
SAFe, for example, was deployed by large numbers of organisations that wanted the benefits of agility. However, SAFe is firmly based on the old paradigm of the industrial age and has led to further status quo, expense, and ultimately played a significant part in the demise of the word ‘agile’.
The industrial mindset, wearing agile clothes.
Personal Story: Living Under Control
I experienced this tension in a deeply personal way. My fiancée and I discovered that we couldn’t get married in my own country without first navigating an expensive and lengthy visa process. The state requires layers of forms, substantial fees, and waiting periods simply for us to be together. To avoid months of red tape, we ended up marrying in Germany instead.
It was a wake-up call, and I realised that bureaucracy and border policy now decide who can marry whom, and where, or at least for how much. To me, that feels like a profound overreach of state control into something as intimate and human as love.
The very polarising topic of migration, especially migration that puts a strain on public funds, is a very present and heated topic. The old paradigm of countries and fixed nationalities is still very present for many people. Yet, more and more of us travel and work with multinational colleagues, becoming accustomed to the freedom of travel, work, and holidays.
These are two opposing paradigms that one only reads about unless you are caught on one side or the other.
Since then, I have started to notice state control everywhere. Now, when I travel around Europe, I, like everyone else, am fingerprinted, photographed, and scanned biometrically to verify identity. These are general security measures, not personal persecution, but they symbolise something larger. They remind me how deeply control is embedded in modern life.
I remember reading George Orwell’s 1984 when I was a teenager. I did not believe anyone would allow listening devices inside their own homes that were always on. Who would allow the government or big corporations to have a microphone in their own home, always on? Hello Siri, Hey Google, etc. It’s real and it’s here. Now with Amazon Ring technologies, we have always-on, cloud-stored video of our homes as well.
For those of us working in change, especially those operating just outside the comfort zone of established power, the cost can be real. The change-agent’s path often involves exposure. This can result in loss of political or social capital, loss of positional power within organisations, and in more extreme contexts, loss of freedom itself. I.e. the loss of power to make the change that is needed.
In China, for example, dissidents and minority voices have seen their right to travel arbitrarily restricted (Human Rights Watch, 2025).
It’s not just about radicals on the fringe of change. It now touches people standing up for legitimate issues: universities and law firms in the United States that challenged Trump-era policies and later found their rights or funding threatened (FIRE, 2024); entire countries threatened with trade tariffs for disagreeing with powerful allies (Euronews, 2025); and citizens who question corporate power or algorithmic manipulation.
From social media companies selling our data to advertisers targeting children to workers monitored by AI, control has become the background noise of everyday life.
Control is everywhere: from the UK government’s pressure on Apple to weaken end-to-end encryption on iCloud, to the crackdown on privacy-focused cryptocurrencies such as Monero, new technologies that offer autonomy and privacy sit uneasily with surveillance-based governance. Control is a lot easier to politically defend than change.
As things become more polarised, everyday citizens now find themselves on the edge of change, not just activists or dissidents. The line between compliance and the need for courage grows thinner every year.
The truth about change
Change is not an event to manage; it’s a permanent condition to embrace.
It is the universe learning about itself through us.
We can fight it, deny it, or fear it, or we can participate in it, consciously.
The work of Deeper Change begins here:
To recognise that evolution: personal, organisational, and planetary, is inevitable.
And to choose hope over fear as our way forward.
This is especially true as one paradigm dies and another is born.
Because when we stop resisting change,
We discover that we were never the victims of it.
We were its authors all along.
A word to Agile Coaches
As discussed in the book “Change,” all organisations, from the smallest amoeba to the largest global corporation, must adapt or perish. When an organisation is in tune with its surroundings, everything flows smoothly. Things just work.
As the environment in which the organisation operates changes, the organisation must adapt to maintain that flow. The organisation must change.
A decade ago, agility was the right answer to align organisations to the changing world of complexity in product and service delivery.
We needed faster feedback, smaller loops, and adaptive planning.
As change makers, we named our role after this specific change. This wave of change brought in agility, and so we were called Agile Coaches. This made sense. Now, agility is not the primary adjustment organisations needed to make; all those with a role name that matched the old need for change, i.e. Agile, were seen as no longer necessary. This has led to massive layoffs and the end of agile coaching as a profession for many people. This has led to no small amount of loss and grief as hard-earned and desperately needed skills are lost forever.
I know many brilliant change makers who, tied to the name enterprise or agile coach, are now in totally different roles, due to lack of work; a sad loss for the change profession.
Agile coaches have essential skills for the next wave of adjustments. For example, excellent facilitation skills are essential when integrating AI as a team member, including creating safe containers, a solid understanding of flow and how value and profit flow through the organisation, structuring organisations for product and service delivery, and managing and mitigating systemic risk. All these and many more are required even more than ever.
But the role name doesn’t fit. It needs a new title. Will we name it after the next wave, or will we have a more generic term that fits all possible future waves of change? I hope the latter, but I expect the former.
We will only get a proper name for what we do when what we do is recognised as a set of necessary skills for organisations, regardless of what change cycle they are going through.
Otherwise, it will always be reactionary in terms of whatever wave of change is happening. Are we now AI coaches? Or change-makers ready for whatever the world throws at our organisations?
The next wave of change (philosophical shift, technical advancement, wave of innovations or control, and a shift in commerce complexity, leading to organisational change) is clearly the adoption of AI into our systems and lives.
Now, AI is part of the team. It strategises, analyses, codes, and creates.
The question is no longer “How do we move faster?” but “How do we move together?”
It is interesting to note that, as practices emerge for integrating AI, it is those organisations that mastered agility who are in a significantly better starting position than those still doing predict and control projects under authoritarian cultures.
To make agility work, it was necessary to create better ways to collaborate, and AI significantly magnifies that need. The underlying paradigm shift of moving forward together is intensifying.
The next paradigm is Collaborative Intelligence, where humans and AI learn to co-evolve, striking a balance between speed and sense-making, efficiency and empathy.
Agility reorganised work and improved collaboration.
AI will reorganise consciousness, communication, and connection.
The Mood of the Times
If you talk to senior leaders today, a single emotion dominates: exhaustion.
Executives describe relentless transformation programmes, endless reorganisations, and constant crises. A 2024 Orgvue study found that the average large organisation now undergoes nine major changes per year, up from two before 2020. In The Future of Agility Report, many leaders confessed they would rather quit than lead another change initiative.
This fatigue is not a personal weakness; it is systemic. The past decade has compressed global disruption into a single, unrelenting wave, marked by pandemics, wars, political instability, supply-chain collapse, and the emergence of generative AI. Every part of society is being rewired at once, and leaders are left trying to rebuild the plane while flying it.
The result is a pervasive sense that the way we used to run things no longer works.
For many, that realisation is disorienting. For others, it is quietly liberating. It opens the possibility that what we are experiencing is not decline, but transition.
The Collapsing Paradigm of Control
In organisations, this transition is most visible in how we approach change itself.
For nearly a century, management has been built on a single organising logic: predict, plan, and control. It is the same logic that shaped our political and economic systems. That is a belief that stability and progress come from centralised authority and the mastery of complexity through hierarchy.
That paradigm served us well in an age of slower change. But today, as The Future of Agility Report revealed, the symptoms of its breakdown are everywhere:
Leadership disengagement: only 5–10 per cent of leaders are fully engaged in their change programmes.
Operational myopia: most organisations focus on delivery, not vision or strategy.
Budget opacity: change-makers rarely know the funding or ROI of the programmes they lead.
Siloed structures: teams remain divided by function, blocking flow and collaboration.
When systems built for control meet environments defined by volatility, most leaders respond by doubling down, tightening budgets, increasing oversight, and adding layers of governance. But these efforts no longer produce stability; they produce fragility.
This is what Luke Kemp calls the Goliath effect: as systems grow larger and more complex, their very scale and rigidity become the source of their vulnerability.
Preparing for the new paradigm
It is easy to moan about the world’s problems. And it’s sometimes fun to do so. However, this is not a book of moaning; it is a book about change. The first step to moving to the new paradigm is to reframe problems as desired outcomes.
What if the turmoil we see today is not the failure of change, but the friction of emergence?
Every old system resists the birth of the new. The bureaucratic impulse to control is not evil; it is simply outdated. It cannot comprehend the scale and speed of modern interdependence.
Seen through that lens, the symptoms of failure become signals of evolution.
Leadership disengagement is pointing to the rise of collective leadership.
Siloed structures are pointing to the emergence of networked coherence.
Budget opacity is pointing to the shift toward transparency and shared purpose.
The decline of coaching roles points to learning embedded in the flow of work.
The lack of ownership in the product-owner space is pointing to the rise of entrepreneurial product owners. These individuals are taking small, high-value parts of large organisations forward with autonomy, creativity, and accountability.
Where to begin
Reframing these problems as outcomes written in the positive present continuous tense, we might start with something like this:
We are building organisations where leadership is distributed, and trust is practised daily.
We are designing networks of micro-entrepreneurs inside large enterprises.
We are embedding AI as a collaborator that amplifies human judgment, rather than replacing it.
We are cultivating cultures of learning and psychological safety where experimentation is the norm.
We are cultivating systems that sense and adapt, rather than predict and control.
These statements, framed in the present continuous, are more than aspirations; they are visualisations of the world already unfolding.
As Shakti Gawain wrote, creative visualisation is the act of imagining what we desire as already happening. By describing these futures in the present tense, we make them attainable.
Reframing problems is not a solution, but it does facilitate a shift in mindset from the negative to the positive, and sometimes that is precisely what is needed to make a change in direction.
We are moving from control to coherence, from prediction to sensing, from hierarchy to living networks.
In politics, that looks like participatory governance and civic technology.
In organisations, that looks like dynamic teaming, AI-augmented collaboration, and deliberately developmental cultures. It is the removal of formal roles and the taking on of ownership of outcomes.
In both, it requires a new social contract between people and power: trust over surveillance, capability over compliance.
In this book, we will explore practical and real ways to enable organisations to be better places to work using the new paradigm and making the most of technology and people dynamics.
The global conversation
For the first time in history, every culture is speaking simultaneously.
Ideas, languages, and beliefs collide in real time.
Western independence meets Eastern interdependence meets Indigenous relationality.
And in the middle, we sit with AI, translating, summarising, remixing, amplifying and forcing us to confront how different our worldviews have been, and how rapidly they are merging.
This collision is not chaos; it’s the birth of a dialogic world. One that learns through conversation rather than command.
Our challenge is to evolve our communication faster than our fear, and to distribute political capital and decision-making ownership whilst preserving the safety and cohesiveness of our societies and workplaces. This requires a shift in awareness and ownership.
If we don’t, we will descend into an era of fear and control.
Reflection
What paradigm are you still living inside?
Where are you clinging to control when flow is asking to emerge?
How might you see today’s uncertainty as an invitation rather than a threat?
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