The Fisher Paradigm of Organizational Development -- Intellectual Capital & the Power of People

The Fisher Paradigm ©™ of Organizational Development (OD)
Intellectual Capital & the Power of People

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
Sonnet: The World is too much with us.




The Fisher Paradigm © is very simple. It is so simple that once it is described the reader will say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It is basically an intuitive model.

There are three basic spheres of influence in every group dynamic, between the person, place and thing. These spheres may be identified as:

· Personality (person) profile

· Geographic (place) profile

· Demographic (thing) profile

Each sphere of influence is constantly in a state of motion interacting with the other two, and where they intercept is where the essence of the action or insight is registered. We do this all the time but are not consciously aware of the process. Consequently, some of us are better at it than others.

It is a case of thinking with your whole body, not simply your mind. I feel people. I can feel their anxiety; can feel when they are lying; even when they find me intimidating. I also can feel when I am in danger, and when the company is self-destructive.

You know how your ears burn when you come upon friends, and know they have been talking about you, and not necessarily in flattering terms. Well, you are using the Fisher Paradigm.

As a professor, lecturer, and seminar presenter, I can tell almost immediately whether the audience will be receptive or not to what I have to say. Their collective feelings register as if taking a hot bath. Likewise, as a consultant, I can go into a strange place and wander around and glean what is wrong without yet having words to describe the feeling.

This sense, a sense that we all have without exception, became the most powerful factor in my successful selling career. I knew nothing about the art of selling, nothing about the language of "penalty of delay," and all that stuff, not even selling benefits to overcome objections. All of that was learned later so that I could communicate with salesman so trained. I write about all this in my book "Confident Selling" (Prentice-Hall 1970), a book that is as relevant today as it was then, and a book that captures the essence of "The Fisher Paradigm." I rewrote the book after Confident Selling went out of print after 20 years in print, and called it "Confident Selling for the 90s" (Top of the Mountain Press 1992). It expanded on this idea, and was actually a book about confident thinking.


Intuition is a little like catching a handful of wind, and saying, "see!" Well, you can't see it, but you can certainly feel it.

The Fisher Paradigm is therefore more art than science, and more impressionistic than real.

Reality is complex, ambivalent, ambiguous, and elusive, as much a matter of the play of the mind as of a concrete quality. But we live in a scientific age and if you cannot quantify it than it doesn't exist.

Those in the practice of organizational development (OD) are usually of a cognitive turn of mind with little appreciation of the value of their affect. I have no problem with this because statistics and demographics are important indices for The Fisher Paradigm as well. They are, however, not enough.

OD practitioners must constantly bear in mind that most behavior is irrational, inconsistent, and illogical. Trying to understand an organization as a rational model or in terms of a straightforward, naturalistic description of action will invariably miss what is actually going on in that “real world.”

What is on display in an organization is not what the OD professional must see. He must see beyond this to the metaphorical significance of behavior. Now, before that word throws you off, or turns your attention elsewhere, permit me to present a simple illustration.


Recently I was accompanying my wife to a large discount department store. As she was trying on clothes, I spent my time watching a man, woman and child shop. The man was six-foot, athletic looking, dressed in shorts, tee shirt and sneakers. He had a trim physique and prominent calves that indicated that he probably did a log of jogging. His salt and pepper goatee beard gauged his age about 46.

The woman was also trim and athletic looking in a blouse, shorts and sneakers, and well tanned. I gauged her age mid-twenties. The boy was dumpy, about twelve or thirteen, a little on the heavy side and dressed in jeans. He wore a pastel colored shirt with a collar and sneakers.

The man kept bringing more and more clothes for the boy to try on until the cart was overflowing.

The woman didn’t participate in the excitement between the two males, but maintained a bored expression with folded arms across her chest, constantly looking at her watch, and forcing a waxed smile whenever the man looked at her.

When my wife acquired the sweater she wanted, I said, “Wait! Look at that couple and the boy and tell me what you see.”

“I see a mother and father buying their son school clothes. Why?”

“Look again,” I insisted. “Study them a second. Now tell me what you see.”

“This is ridiculous,” she said, “I could stalk them if that’s what you want and it wouldn’t change. So, tell me what you see?”

“I see three spheres intersecting in The Fisher Paradigm,” I answered. “My intuition tells me that he is the father of the boy but she is not the mother. The boy is from up north visiting his father with his trophy wife and not all that happy about the experience.”

“Okay, smart guy, I’m going to see if you’re right.” She goes over and starts a conversation with the woman, who is even younger looking up close. My wife says, "Your son is quite handsome. You don’t look old enough to be his mother."

The woman nearly shouts, "I'm not. He's," she hesitates as if the words are stuck in her crawl, "he's my stepson." Then she goes on to explain that he is visiting them from Chicago. “We don’t have any children,” she adds mournfully.

My wife comes back to me, “How did you do that?”

“You already know. You just were too busy shopping. The personality profiles were all skewed: the man was enthusiastically interacting with the boy; the woman held herself apart calculating how much longer this would take. The geographic profiles were also diverse. The man and boy were in one space shopping with a vengeance, the woman in another space with folded arms constantly looking at her watch, wanting to be somewhere else. The demographic profiles were also quite unique. The man clearly was of an age to be the father, not the woman. The man and woman reflected similar physicality, but not the boy. He was pudgy, out of shape, and seemed disinclined to exercise. His pallid complexion compared to the deep tans of the adults, which indicated he must live in a climate with less sunshine, especially in the fall of the year."

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OD is concerned with the integrity of the group and that capacity depends upon the ability to see through the prestidigitations to what is truly going on. The Fisher Paradigm allows this.

With The Fisher Paradigm there is no need for reams of psychometrics, statistical indices, or longitudinal studies to make meaningful assessments. These tools can be useful in confirming or refuting intuitive insights, but they are not enough. The reason is quite basic: today studies drive the insights rather than the insights drive the studies.

The purpose of The Fisher Paradigm © is to provide an intuitive framework for gauging and interpreting the problem in terms, terms that executives can understand without confusion.

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is to illustrate how I have used it throughout my career. As readers familiar with my work know, my research laboratory is the workplace. Three of my books relate specifically to The Fisher Paradigm ©:


· Personality (Person) Profile – The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (Delta Group Florida, 1999). The Taboo deals with the adverse effects of social, cultural and psychological conditioning, which program a person, and by extension an organization into searching for answers outside itself (“searching for excellence”) when answers are created out of self-knowing and self-acceptance. You don’t borrow essence. You create essence.


· Geographic (Place) Profile – Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (St. Lucie Press, 1998). Six Silent Killers deals with the geographic social termites that burrow silently into the infrastructure of the organization weakening it to the point that when discovered it is too late for damage control. The “geography of fear” spreads “virtuous hate” which results in the ultimate destruction of 100-year-old institutions.


· Demographic (Thing) Profile – Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Worker (1stBooks Library, 2000). The Industrial Revolution is more than 150 years old, and yet most workers are treated as if well-paid serfs, when they represent the most brilliant work force in the history of man, while most managers act as if leadership is simply giving orders and expecting consensus compliance without question. The failure to recognize the change in the balance of power has led to corporate sin where both workers and managers share in the guilt.
The Fisher Paradigm © is represented in this trilogy. But for our purposes here, these experiences should suffice as an introduction into it.

Now some references to how it has worked in my life, starting with how it saved my life.

In 1974 I was contracted by the Professional Institute of the American Management Association (AMA) to investigate a riot, which occurred in Fairfax County Virginia in a community called Herndon. A white police office killed an unarmed 27-year-old black man in a convenient store in that community, which led to a riot.

My job included interviewing all senior officers, detectives and command personnel. While spending a nine-month period doing this intervention, I was also periodically conducting executive seminars for AMA across the country. In the course of this work I had the Secretary of State of Iowa, my home state, as a participant. He said that when he next got to Washington, D.C. he would look me up and we would go to dinner and a play. He was as good as his word.

D.C. is about twelve miles from Fairfax City, and I was driven there by a Fairfax County police officer, who said that he would pick me up when I called to return me to my motel in Fairfax City. It was after midnight when my friend and I parted. But when I placed the call to the officer, he said it would be about an hour before he could pick me up. I said that was okay, as I am a walker.

It is about 1:15 a.m. and I’m walking along briskly down Pennsylvania Avenue. There is practically no traffic, and there is a chill in the air as it is November. I am dressed in a dark blue Hickey Freeman cashmere topcoat, and a gray three-piece Hickey Freeman suit, wearing leather gloves. Suddenly, I notice three black youths across the street that are jiving and walking parallel to me. I pay them little mind as there are eight lanes of traffic separating us, that is, until they race ahead, cross the street, and start hanging out at the corner under the light.

Not yet a year ago, a United States senator was accosted, knifed and nearly died in the early hours of the morning in this area. That crossed my mind when I was about one hundred yards from the boys. Without breaking my stride, I processed this information:

· Personality (Person) Profile – they are three and I am one.

· Geographic (Place) Profile – this is no time for young boys to be out at night.

· Demographic (Thing) Profile – they are teenagers; I am in my late thirties. They are black, all slender, one about six foot, the other two about five-six. I am white six-four and two-ten and in good shape.

I see them up to no good (Personality), but how do they see me? I sense danger (Geographic), but somehow do not break my aggressive stride and have an incongruous sense of calm, why? I know I can’t take the three of them (Demographic) if they have a knife or gun as I have no weapon. No weapon!

Intuition kicks in. You remember what you have observed every time you ask an embarrassing question to a plains clothes detective – he adjusts his shoulder holster! You are now thirty yards from the boys, still walking with authority. When you are ten yards from them you make an elaborate move to adjust your phantom shoulder holster. Not a boy misses this. They open a path for you to pass. Without looking back, you hear they giggle, “There go the fuzzzz!”

Not leaving it at that, you hear yourself say, “Going to be a little hard to get up for school in the morning boys.” They laugh hysterically, “Yeah, man, sssccchoool is what we’re all about! Dig it!” They retreat in the opposite direction.

When I explain all this to the officer, he said, “Your quick wits just might have saved your life.” I don’t think so. I think it was just OD.

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