Barbados Group for Development of a New Paradigm for Performance Research Paper Series

This abstracting journal will post the work of the members of The Barbados Group, an international, self-selected group of scholars, consultants and practitioners whose intention is to create a New Paradigm Of Performance, the working name for which is The Ontological Foundations of Performance. This new paradigm is based on the fundamental proposition that the performance of an individual, group or organization is a correlate of the way the world in which and on which that entity is performing "occurs" for that entity. Our new paradigm also offers access to this "occurring" through a specific use of a distinct aspect of language.

We intend the new paradigm to cause a new understanding of the source of action that provides powerful access to elevating individual, group and organizational performance. Derived from such access one can see the possibility of, and we intend to provide, new initiatives, applications, and practices that will be effective in reliably, rapidly and significantly elevating performance of any enterprise or selected enterprise segment. We assert that the possibility of such initiatives, applications, and practices, and therefore even the possibility of considering them, lies outside the current paradigm.

The foundations of the new paradigm utilize the perspectives provided by the disciplines of neuroscience, complex adaptive systems science, rhetoric, and philosophy. The new paradigm reveals the importance of the correlative, linguistic, and ontological elements of action.

-\tCorrelative, in the sense that action is a correlate of the way in which the circumstances on which and in which the actor is acting (hereafter "the circumstances") occur for the actor.

-\tLinguistic, in the sense that the way in which the circumstances occur for the actor is shaped by language.

\tOntological, in the sense that there is a form of declaratory language in which "world matches word" (contrast with the ordinary use of language in which "word matches world") that can intentionally shape the way the circumstances occur for the actor thereby reshaping action even in identical objective circumstances.

We assert that within this new paradigm it is possible to gain insight into what-is-being-questioned-with-no-answers regarding performance, when performance is looked at from the current (and to-a-large-degree-exhausted) paradigm of performance. Or, to at least get past the mere "explanatory but non-actionable principles" one is left with in the current paradigm. This new paradigm also provides insights into why what worked in the current paradigm did in fact work, and provides a basis for its effective replication.

The members of the Barbados group are all listed as Advisory Board Members to the Barbados group abstracting journal.

Questions and inquiries regarding paper submissions should be directed to:

Michael Jensen at mjensen@hbs.edu.

To access all the papers in this series, please use the following URL: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Barbados-Group.html

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