FIVE MINDS FOR THE FUTURE
In his path breaking book "Five minds for the future", the great exponent of multiple intelligence, Howard Gardner, has come up with five dramatic Personae that he believes should be developed in future for a balanced development and survival of human beings as one flock.
The world is going through a seismic change. Knowledge is expanding exponentially. No one can say what the human experiment will look like on the other side of its rebirth canal. But, if we fail to adapt to future: The poorly-educated will suffer . If one doesn't develop his “multiple intelligences” skills, he will be in the same boat as the high school dropout collecting an hourly wage at Wal Mart.
He believes that the world of the future -with its ubiquitous Search engines, Robotics and computational devices- will demand capacities that until now have been mere options.
Gardner’s five minds-Disciplined Mind, Synthesizing Mind, Creating Mind, Respectful Mind and Ethical-are not personality types, but rather mindsets or ways of thinking available to anyone who invests the time and effort to cultivate them: “how we should use our minds.” He says that these five minds should be developed and work in unison with one another to produce great thinkers, artists, professionals and leaders
He acknowledges that such a prescription of minds for future cannot ignore consideration of human values. With a humanistic approach he quotes Benjamin Franklin-"We must indeed all hang together, or more assuredly, we shall all hang separately". So his first three minds are related to cognitive abilities while the rest two are related to the individual and social mindset.
Gardner uses in this book a variety of illuminating models, anecdotes from developmental psychology to group dynamics, demonstrating their utility not just for individual development, but for concrete success in a full range of human endeavors, including education, business, science, art, politics and engineering.
Disciplined Mind
First and foremost, every professional of the future must master at least one discipline which will take normally about 10-years . If you don't have at least one discipline under your belt, you are "destined to march to someone else’s tune.” I could understand why plumbers and electricians make more money in Canada than some generalists there. This is very true in today's knowledge society. Routine people are to be doomed. A decade of devoted practice in a discipline alone can make someone a complete professional and there is no short cut to it. The disciplined mind also knows how to improve skill and understanding and learns new techniques fast
If you don't master at least one discipline, then you and your kids “will not be able to succeed at any demanding workplace and will be restricted to menial tasks.”
Synthesizing Mind
As information inundates, Synthesizing mind takes information from different sources, understand and evaluates that information objectively in a coherent manner to put to use. We have plethora of knowledge but we crave for integration and coherence of that knowledge. Knowledge should knit a pattern for assimilation. There were many 'Elements' but only the mind of Mendeleev could synthesize it into a periodic table. The same can be said about Charles Darwin who synthesized the concept of natural selection, Sigmund Freud who developed the concept of unconscious, Adam Smith who introduced division of labor or the management Guru Michael Porter who formulated strategy as a synthesis of five forces that determine the profit of any business. Powerful synthesis can be seen in art also as in the case of Picasso's Guernica that depict violent forces of Spanish civil war. Perhaps the most famous artistic synthesis since the ascent of man is the biblical synthesis made by Michelangelo on the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel
Nobel prize winning Physicist Murray Gell-Mann has asserted that the mind most at premium in 21st century will be the mind that can synthesize well. While the future would need us to build the mind of discipline, the fact is that all complex problems, in whatever field we can think of, would necessarily require multi-disciplinary approaches to resolve. Organizations often convene multi-disciplinary team to investigate and make Root cause analysis of problems. Synthesizing is a formidable challenge as one needs to sift massive information and converge it into meaningful analysis. Many educational institutions fail to cultivate synthesizing skills to tackle critical situations such as an Aircraft highjack to a Cardiac surgery or the Global Financial crisis and recession experienced now
Major decisions would require inter-disciplinary thinking and great synthesizing capability. An effective synthesis often require four steps- A Goal, A Starting point, Selection of Strategy , Draft or prototype and Feedback
If you don’t learn to synthesize knowledge, you and your kids will be “overwhelmed by information and unable to make judicious decisions about personal or professional matters.”
Creating Mind
This is required to break new ground. It puts forth new ideas, poses unfamiliar questions, conjures up fresh ways of thinking, arrives at unexpected answers. Ultimately, these creations must find acceptance among knowledgeable consumers.
Corporate visionary John Seely Brown has quipped that in the world of tomorrow, people will say '" I create: therefore I am". Unlike in the past where creativity was disdained, discouraged and destroyed (Galileo, Vincent Van Gogh, Darwin), the new era just survives on it. All innovations in Automobile, PC, Communication devices- Ipod, Blackberry, mobile phone, Music thrive on it despite its thin half-life. Those who do not embrace innovation are muscled out by those who do.
People like Edward De Buno (father of Lateral Thinking) had emphasized earlier the importance of thinking out of the box and striking out in unfamiliar direction. In fact, not marching to other's tunes is to be creative. Has the domain in which you operate been significantly changed by your contribution? If so, it is a an act of creativity, as was in the case of Mozart, Albert Einstein, James Joyce, Picasso etc.
Allowing a childhood of untrammeled explorations in different fields, asking open-ended questions, allowing group discussions, accepting variety of responses to a question, applauding people to make new mistakes, suppressing criticism , developing hobbies, allowing interaction with creative people etc are some means to nurture creativity
Why is it that we drain ourselves of curiosity and childlike sensibility by the time we reach adulthood? What a loss! Gardner writes that “the mind of the five-year-old represents the height of creative powers.” This capacity however wanes by the time they are in their 20s. For example, give a five-year-old a pencil. Moments later, the child converts it into an imaginary airplane and can fly it for hours. This capacity to see one thing and conceptualize it as something it is not, is what visionary leadership and breakthrough innovation is all about. Where the world sees a computer, Steve Jobs sees an iPod. Where telecom companies saw switches and instruments, John Chambers simply saw software and the Net
If you don't maximize your creative capabilities, you and your kids will be “replaced by computers.”
The Respectful mind goes beyond mere tolerance. Respectful persons welcome human diversity, seek to understand and work with others, and cultivate an atmosphere of openness and reciprocity. This is best manifest in the Native American tradition of passing the talking stick and not ending a dialogue until *everyone* agreed with the outcome
Recognizing that nowadays one can no longer remain within one’s shell or on one’s home territory, the respectful mind notes and welcomes differences between human individuals and between human groups, tries to understand these “others,” and seeks to work effectively with them. In a world where we are all interlinked, intolerance or disrespect is no longer a viable option. (I am reminded of the cartoon controversy in Denmark and the Islamic scarf controversy in France. The attitude of cracking ethnic jokes, Kiss up and kick down approach etc are signs of being disrespectful)
We saw earlier that the professional of the future would need to master a given discipline and at the same time, all complex problems and their solutions are inter-disciplinary in nature. That means solutions would need many experts to come together and collaborate. Now that is the precise point. Bring in five experts from five fields and you will get differing views and as they argue and fall apart, the world moves on. Hence, true professionals must learn how to develop a respectful mind so that other experts collaborate with them.
If you don’t learn respect for others, and you and your kids won’t be worthy of others’ respect - in fact, you will “poison the workplace and the commons.
Ethical Mind
This mind ponders how workers can serve purposes beyond self-interest and how citizens can work unselfishly to improve the society and the planet. The ethical mind then acts on the basis of these analyses. It goes beyond the self, understands the value to the group of ethical behavior.
Trust lowers the cost of doing business in today's corporate world. Ethical revelation of the “true cost” of goods and services protecting the 'Good Earth' will allow us to create infinite wealth and sustainable peace by eliminating the fraud, waste, and exploitative characteristics of many governments and corporations.
Ethical individuals ponder their roles as workers and citizens. They carry out good work… work that is excellent, ethical, intrinsically responsible and personally meaningful. They consider their roles as citizens of their community, their region, and the globe and act in constructive, non egocentric ways. If we all have a strong moral and professional conscience, we would want to do “Good Work” and contribute to the global peace and prosperity.
Why it is paramount in today’s ethically hobbled world? Well, he quotes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks whose profound wisdom follows: “When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends.”
If you don’t live ethically, you and your kids will help to create a planet you won’t want to live in
Concluding Thoughts
Why these five and not others? Because, says Gardner, these minds are at a premium now. Their scarcity suggests they’re likely to be even more highly-prized in the future. He leaves it to the individuals how he or she wants to synthesize these five minds.
The well-rounded mind, the fully engaged life — that’s Gardner’s grail. These are not new ideas. What’s new is the notion that our personal survival depends on multi-disciplinary learning. "Education is inherently and inevitably an issue of human goals and human values" Gardner is damn right on this golden statement.
In an interview with the 'Guardian' in November, Gardner said, “Think of a world of the future and if I was a policymaker, what kind of minds I would like to cultivate.” That cultivation would ideally begin at birth and continue throughout someone’s life.”Our survival as a planet,” he writes, “may depend on the cultivation of this pentad of mental dispositions.”
Thomas Jefferson said,”A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry”, and in these days of extremism and fundamentalism, we have greater challenges in educating our citizens. It would be easier if all Presidents and Prime Ministers adopted this book as part of their roadmap back to civilization, morality, and sanity
