Tools for Thought

By now, the economic arc of civilization is a story we’ve all heard in its capsule description many times: we’ve gone from the Agricultural Age, to the Industrial Age, to the Information Age. Daniel Pink’s influential A Whole New Mind attempts to sketch out the contours era that follows. Pink outlines the values, skills and attributes necessary to survive and flourish in what he calls the “Conceptual Age”: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning. As the computing power and knowledge work that characterize the Information Age are becoming commoditized, intellect in itself is no longer a competitive advantage. We need six new thinking hats.

A Whole New Mind seems intended to be a prognostication epic in the mold of The Third Wave, Megatrends or The World is Flat. It’s often the case with books in this genre that their authors are astute at detecting new memes, but draw questionable conclusions from them. Let’s see how this book fares.

One: Right Brian Rising. Most readers will already be familiar with the functional differences between the brain hemispheres that Pink outlines here, since we regularly use “left-brained” and “right-brained” as adjectives. The left side of the brain is logical and analytical; the right side is non-linear and emotional. These descriptions are naturally oversimplifications, but the author uses them strictly as metaphors for general thinking modalities he refers to throughout the book as “L-Directed Thinking” and “R-Directed Thinking.”

Two: Abundance, Asia and Automation. Knowledge workers — professionals like executives, lawyers and programmers — are overwhelmingly L-Directed thinkers. In the Conceptual Age, the premium that society once placed on knowledge work will be vastly reduced, owing to Abundance, Asia and Automation. An abundant society like ours is a well-oiled delivery system for goods and services, where ubiquitous stores like Target offer cheap products fashioned by A-list designers. Pink argues that the prosperity unleashed by L-Directed Thinking “has placed a premium on less rational, more R-Directed sensibilities — beauty, spirituality, emotion.”

Asia (a proxy for all overseas labor) is a market where knowledge workers can be had at service sector rates. Salaries for programmers, engineers and accountants in North Africa, South America and Eastern Europe are typically 10-15% of those of their Western counterparts. We’ll need to do what foreign workers cannot do equally well for much less money: forging relationships, taking on unique challenges, and managing at the visionary, big picture level.

Automation has encroached on knowledge work, eliminating rote tasks. Software can, without the aid of a physician, perform preliminary medical diagnoses for many common illnesses by applying decision trees to lab results. Some software can even write software. Medical and legal databases online enable a level of self-help among consumers once unimaginable. As automation replaces the rote element of knowledge work, professionals must elevate their skills and services to a more conceptual level to compete.

Three: High Concept, High Touch. In the Conceptual Age, creators and empathizers are the main actors. Creators in must ask themselves three questions of their work.

• Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
• Can a computer do it faster?
• Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

The attributes that fulfill these criteria are of a character that Pink calls high concept: the ability to create beauty and narrative, to see patterns and opportunities, and to integrate disparate ideas into novel inventions.

High touch is the ability to empathize, to find and elicit joy, to find and create purpose and meaning. Jefferson Medical School now incorporates an “empathy index” in measuring physician effectiveness. Artistic pursuits gain new credibility in the job market: while Harvard’s MBA program admits 10% of applicants, UCLA’s MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program admits only 3%. “MFA is the new MBA.”

Four: Design. This is the first of six core competencies for the Conceptual Age. Artistic impulses once devalued by career-biased schooling are now held in high esteem, as evidenced by the proliferation of design colleges in the last two decades. Design is critical for three reasons: prosperity and technology have democratized access to it, it allows companies to differentiate their products in the marketplace, and more people than ever are aware of design’s role in their environment (in the 1980′s, most people wouldn’t know the difference between Courier and Times Roman fonts). If a toaster is used for a few minutes a day, but on display the rest of the time, aesthetics plays a greater role than utility. The end of the chapter, and each chapter that follows, contains a “Portfolio” section with interesting exercises, suggestions and resources.

Five: Story. Facts are a dime a dozen in the age of the internet. What matters now is putting facts in context, which is why people still pay good money for info products. Story provides the means to lift people out of information overload by establishing context and relevance. Story establishes rapport, which is why the “narrative medicine” movement is gaining traction. When patients talk about their illnesses, they usually do so as a narrative. In narrative medicine, doctors are encouraged to listen to their patients’ story instead of interrupting them with fact gathering questions. Story is also effective for clarifying mission and purpose within an organization, which is why “organizational storytelling” programs have been established within institutions like the World Bank.

Six: Symphony. People in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse and seemingly disparate disciplines. Symphony (systems thinking, gestalt thinking, holistic thinking) is the ability to perceive and coordinate situational elements to good effect, and to grasp the relationships between relationships. This faculty provides opportunities for three types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor and the metaphor maker. Boundary crossers move between multiple disciplines and fields of interest. Inventors combine two or more unrelated ideas into a useful synthesis. Metaphor makers enrich our experience of concepts and facts by presenting them in novel contexts.

Seven: Empathy. The ability to attune oneself to another is a critical high concept, high touch skill in the Conceptual Age. Since overseas knowledge workers with attributes measurable by IQ are in healthy supply, the demand for workers with empathy and emotional intelligence will increase. The Stanford Business School, for instance, now teaches a course in “Interpersonal Dynamics.” Work that can be reduced to rules requires little empathy, while the work that remains will require it.

Eight: Play. Pink contrasts the movement of “laughter clubs” spearheaded by an Indian physician with an Industrial Age counterpoint: a Ford assembly line worker in 1940 who was fired for smiling on the job. Games, humor and joyfulness take on a new importance in the Conceptual Age. Companies like Glaxo and Volvo have organized laughing clubs to help grease the wheels of their social functions. The author adds a section on the rise of the video game industry, which is now more lucrative than the motion picture industry. He cites studies documenting how games can be used to enhance work performance.

Nine: Meaning. Pink describes an increasing trend toward the pursuit of meaning, using Viktor Frankl’s work (Man’s Search for Meaning) as a point of departure. If Frankl, could pursue meaning within the walls of a concentration camp, Pink maintains, we should be able to pursue meaning from the comfort of our abundant lives. Ronald Inglehart’s World Values Survey shows that respondents regularly express greater concern for spiritual and immaterial matters. Spirituality and happiness are increasingly being taken seriously in organizational environments. Pink notes the rise of yoga studios, evangelical bookstores and all variety of “green” products as evidence of a new concern for the role of spirit. Happiness is now a matter of clinical study, and the shift in psychological research from pathology to more humanistic and “positive” frameworks is gaining credibility.

Will this book change your mind?

While A Whole New Mind has a spotty line of argument, it’s an entertaining and thought provoking read, especially if you’re choosing a college major or thinking about changing careers (questions like “Can someone overseas do it cheaper?” are useful to ask). You may end up thinking twice about pursuing a “safe” line of work. The book is an easy read — you can read it in one sitting, or you can grasp 80% of Pink’s theses by reading the first three chapters. The resource sections at the ends of the chapters are fascinating in their own right.

Why “a spotty line of argument”? I edited out my point-by-point objections to Pink’s theses to make this review flow better, but I’ll summarize them into two broad ones here.

First, there’s no reason to assume that overseas workers are less capable of R-Directed Thinking than “we” are. In the Eighties, it was regularly argued that offshored manufacturing would liberate Americans from toil to concentrate on higher-paying, more fulfilling knowledge work. But the bell curve of intellectual aptitude doesn’t flatten based on free market ideals. Five years from now, competitors to IDEO or 37 Signals could just as easily come from Bangalore or Manila as they could from Chicago or San Francisco.

Second, there’s no reason to assume that abundance equals freedom from want, or creates a demand to satisfy transcendental values. I would argue just the opposite — that people in rich countries are preoccupied by their abundance, and dote on their possessions to avoid existential reflection. Just as reporting of crime goes up when actual crime rates go down, perceived scarcity seems to increase with ownership. In a world of more useful things for more useless people, it’s hard for me to agree that a widespread high concept, high touch ethos is a forgone conclusion.

Technorati Tags: Books