Don't wait for the crisis. Finding the paradigm in the pattern. Interview by Joe Flower

Joel Barker has been talking about the future for a long time past. His message: Change happens. Change happens as paradigms shift--the way we picture the universe shifts, and life is different. Relationships and values change their meaning. And because they mean something different, we change them. Barker's question is: How do you manage this change? How do you get ahead of it, and not lag behind it? How do you become its partner and not its victim? These are challenging questions, and hundreds of corporations have invited Barker to come ask them. His client list ranges over much of the Fortune 500--from IBM and DuPont to Honeywell, Boeing, and Gulf Oil--and it includes such healthcare clients as Merck, Upjohn, the Mayo clinics, and the Sisters of Charity. Barker has worked with these questions for the past 17 years, first as director of the pioneering Future Studies Department of the Science Museum of Minnesota, then as president of Infinity Limited, Inc. He has put his answers into a video, "Discovering the Future," and two books, the 1985 Discovering the Future: The Business of Paradigms, and the new Future Edge: The Paradigm Principles Guide for the '90s. We spent a recent morning talking with him about what a paradigm is, and what happens when a paradigm shifts.