Heresy to orthodoxy
From ridiculed, to opposed, to self-evident
“To all knowledge, and especially the weightiest knowledge of the truth, only a brief triumph is allotted between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial”. — Arthur Schopenhauer 1
Schopenhauer’s comment above is usually misquoted in sound bite form: “New ideas go through three phases: first they’re ridiculed; second they’re violently opposed, thirdly they’re accepted as self-evident.” 2
A new orthodoxy’s progress is essentially determined by how it overcomes opposition from those who gained success and status in the old orthodoxy. The more entrenched the opposition, the more challenging the journey.
It's human nature to stick to familiar tried and trusted ways, ideas and practices until new and better ones are discovered, proven and well-established.
It's also understandable that people with the most invested in the old are least open to the new.
Of course, those of us with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics like to imagine ourselves as highly rational, dispassionate, and objective — purely influenced by “the facts”, or as we repeatedly heard in the case of Covid,“the science”.
But it turns out that established experts are the least likely to support new ideas that challenge the status quo and, consequently, their personal status.
It’s widely known that Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity displaced the 200 year old orthodoxy of the clockwork universe, established by Sir Isaac Newton.
What’s less widely known is how Einstein managed to achieve this breakthrough, where more powerful figures in the contemporary physics community had failed.
When he conceived relativity theory, Einstein was working as a second class clerk in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland — a position that gave him two great advantages over the leading contemporary figures in the world of physics, such as Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré. 3
Firstly, his day job involved reviewing a number of patent applications for methods of synchronising clocks between distant cities.
This was becoming a pressing problem following formation of the Swiss Federal Railways in January 1902.
The planned direct link with Italy via the Simplon Tunnel, completed in 1906, would put Bern on an important international route from France.
And with train speeds increasing, it was vital that the station clock in Bern was synchronised with the station clocks in Paris and Milan.
As a result, Einstein was deeply immersed in thinking about the relationship between time, distance, speed, etc.
Einstein’s second great advantage over contemporary establishment figures was that he was an outsider to the mainstream physics community.
As a result, he wasn’t so wedded to the 200 years of Newtonian orthodoxy on which Lorentz and Poincaré had established their success and status.
In his biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson describes how Poincaré had even got as far as questioning the absolute nature of time, and that he and Lorentz were both “groping towards the same revision of our notions of space and time as Einstein, but were groping through a fog of misperception foisted on them by Newtonian physics”. 4
Despite having much of relativity theory in place, they couldn’t take the final step away from the Newtonian orthodoxy on which they’d built their careers.
The intimately human way in which new orthodoxies in science replace their predecessors was well articulated by Max Planck, founding father of the other big breakthrough in 20th century physics, quantum theory:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die — and a new generation grows up that is already familiar with it”. 5
This is sometimes paraphrased as “Science progresses one funeral at a time”.
The bottom line is that new orthodoxies — whether in science or in life more broadly — are rarely conceived or championed by those who did well under the old one.
In fact, a new orthodoxy usually meets its strongest resistance from those who achieved high status in the old one.
This is not a recent discovery, as this statement published in 1532 demonstrates:
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new”.
That’s from Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the world’s first management consultants with access to the printing press. 6
Einstein’s example is particularly illuminating because later in his career he himself was unable to accept the uncertainty principle at the heart of quantum mechanics.
Hence his famous objection that “God doesn’t play dice” in a letter he wrote to close friend Max Born in 1926.
But here’s what Born, who won the Nobel Prize in physics himself in 1954, said after Einstein’s death:
“He could no longer take in certain new ideas in physics which contradicted his own firmly held philosophical convictions.” 7
Such is the power of orthodoxies that they can capture even the former heretics who brought them into being.
Lord Kelvin, who was President of the Royal Society, the UK Academy of Sciences, from 1892-1895, made three famously erroneous predictions:
“Radio has no future”.
“X-rays will prove to be a hoax”.
“I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation, other than ballooning”.
The last one is particularly poignant given that he said it in 1896 — just seven years before the Wright Brothers achieved the first powered flight in December 1903.
In fact, writer Arthur C, Clarke could easily have been thinking of Kelvin when he said:
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is *impossible*, he is very probably wrong”. 8
The same challenge of changing orthodoxies has been repeatedly encountered in medicine, where protagonists of both the old and new truths often have a big emotional investment, because the right or wrong course of treatment can literally be a matter of life or death.
Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered antiseptic medical procedures that were massively resisted by the medical community of his day.
He insisted that doctors, some of whom had been dissecting dead bodies, wash their hands before then attending to pregnant women.
His procedures reduced mortality rates from 18% to 2%, but he and his ideas were so strongly resisted by his colleagues that he ended up a broken man — dying in a Viennese mental asylum at the age of only 47.
His sad example led to the naming of the Semmelweis Reflex — the knee-jerk rejection of new knowledge that contradicts entrenched orthodoxies. 9
In 1982, Australian doctors Barry Marshall & Robin Warren discovered that peptic ulcers are caused by a bacterium, helicobacter pylori, and not by stomach acid — which was the prevailing medical orthodoxy at the time.
By now you can probably guess that the Semmelweis Reflex kicked in and they were ignored.
So Marshall deliberately infected himself with the bacteria, endured ten days of vomiting, and swallowed an endoscope that clearly proved the theory.
Still their discovery was ignored.
Only after an uphill battle lasting more than 20 years, was it finally acknowledged — when they received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology / Medicine.
Outdated organisational orthodoxies
In 35 years of helping organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and the US create future-fit entrepreneurial cultures of innovation, agility and adaptiveness, I’ve repeatedly seen the following legacy orthodoxies prevent any meaningful progress:
“Leadership” is only done by senior executives.
“Senior executive” is assumed to be synonymous with “decision maker”.
“Culture” is mistakenly thought to be about an organisation’s “shared values”.
A future-fit culture is believed to be achievable by hiring a mainstream finders, minders, grinders management consulting firm.
If organisations are to thrive in today’s increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, these outdated orthodoxies must be replaced by the following future-fit alternatives:
“Leadership” is a capacity that must be embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted throughout the whole organisation. 10
The primary role of senior executive is creating conditions, not making decisions. 11
An organisation's culture is the prevailing system of mindsets forming and informing people’s awareness of “the way we do things round here”. 12
Since creating a future-fit culture is fundamentally about building new mindset, attitude, and behavioural muscles, the heavy lifting must be done by people within the organisation — not by outside consultants. 13
Questions for Reflection
Which of the outdated organisational orthodoxies above remain dominant in your organisation?
Which of the future-fit alternatives are currently ignored, ridiculed, or resisted?
Is your organisation becoming fit enough, fast enough, to thrive in the rapidly increasing uncertainty and unpredictability of today’s world?
Arthur Schopenhauer in the preface to the first edition of The World as Will and Representation.
Variants on the same theme have been attributed to M.K. “Mahatma” Gandhi, amongst others.
Hendrik Lorentz (1853 – 1928) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. Henri Poincaré (1854 - 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science.
“Einstein: His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson (p 133).
“Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers” by Max Planck (1949).
“The Prince” by Niccolò Machiavelli.
Ibid “Einstein: His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson (p463).
The first of Clarke’s Three Laws.
As my former Society for Organisational Learning colleague Dr Peter Senge pointed out: “Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future”. For more on this topic, see this previous article: “Leadership, not leaders”.
See this previous article: “Senior executives must give up their decision rights”.
“The toxic myth of culture as shared values” was literally plucked out of thin air by McKinsey, and since its publication in 1980 has persistently plagued efforts to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Creating a culture is like building muscles. The heavy lifting must be done by people within the organisations — not by an army of junior consulting grinders shipped in by the busload from a consulting firm.