How an individual settles into a new opinion

Here at Fouroboros Worldwide, we have special reverence for several ancient guys and girls. Lots in fact. One in particular has probably had the biggest impact on how we view things and structure our approaches to creativity, design, strategy and work. In short, how we approach and effect change. We view the former--solving problems and building communities with ideas translated into print, electrons, mangled office furniture, or architecture--as the easy part. But finding agreement on "What's the goal?" and "What matters here?", hey, now that's the real creativity. It involves so many subjectives and agendas that if taken lightly or hubristically, well, a different line of work, maybe the bomb squad, quickly begins to take on a certain romantic appeal.

Without further ado, our resident Oracle of the Realities of Change:



William James, 1842-1910

From "Pluralism, pragmatism, and instrumental truth." [scroll to bottom. Executive version (below) found here]

How an individual settles into a new opinion

The process is always the same.

The individual has a stock of old opinions already.

The individual meets a new experience that puts some of these old opinions to a strain.

* Somebody contradicts them.
* In a reflective moment, the individual discovers that they contradict each other.
* The individual hears of facts with which they are incompatible.
* Desires arise in the individual which the old opinions fail to satisfy.

The result is inward trouble, to which the individual's mind till then had been a stranger.

The individual seeks to escape from this inward trouble by modifying the old opinions.

* The individual saves as many of the old opinions as is possible (for in this matter we are all extreme conservatives).
* Old opinions resist change very variously.
* The individual tries to change this and then that.

Finally, some new opinion comes up which the individual can graft upon the ancient stock of old opinions with a minimum of disturbance to the others.

* The new opinion mediates between the stock and the new experience.
* The new opinion runs the stock and the new experience into one another most felicitously and expediently.

The new opinion is then adapted as the true one.

* The new opinion preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible.
* An outreé explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty.

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing.

New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions.

The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths . . . their influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

Phew. Now get out there and paradigm-shift, Trooper.