I hope that all you left-brained, linear, logical lawyers, accountants and software engineers out there will keep reading. Let me warn you. I’m going to briefly summarize Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Don’t be threatened.
God gave us a brain with two halves; He intends for you and me to use both. Unfortunately, our Western culture and education has been built around what Pink calls L-Directed Thinking (left brain dominated thinking). This form of thinking is: sequential, literal, functional, textual, and analytic. It has been the critical thinking skill of the passing Information Age.
R-Directed Thinking (right brain dominated thinking), however, is on the rise. This form of thinking and of attitude toward life is: simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual, and synthetic. Pink argues that it is the type of thinking that will be critical in the emerging Conceptual Age.
To develop this type of thinking, we must master what Pink calls six high-concept, high-touch senses. I’ll briefly describe these six R-Directed aptitudes below—but why not buy the book and choose some exercises from his “portfolios.” Not only are they a hoot, they will help strengthen the atrophied muscles of your right hemisphere.
The Six Senses
1. Design is utility enhanced by significance. Think of making a brochure. Utility is a brochure that is easy to read. Significance is when the brochure is enhanced (by a graphic designer) to also transmit ideas or emotions that the words themselves cannot convey. In today’s economy, design is critical. Good design brings pleasure, meaning and beauty to life. To be a designer is to be an agent of change.
2. Story is context enriched by emotion. Facts are ubiquitous and thus less valuable. What matters most in a world of widely available, instantly accessible facts is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact. That’s what stories do.
Stories are not only easy to remember, they are how we remember. “Narrative imaging—story–is the fundamental instrument of thought,” says Mark Turner. We are ideally set up to understand stories for they help us understand how we fit in and why that matters. We must learn to listen to each other’s stories and embrace the authorship of our own lives.
3. Symphony is the ability to put together pieces. It is the capacity to synthesize rather than analyze; to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair. Symphony is largely about relationships; those with the aptitude for symphony understand the connections between diverse and seemingly separate disciplines. They are what Pink calls boundary crossers, inventors, and metaphor makers.
4. Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling. It is the ability to stand in others’ shoes, to see with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts. It is not sympathy–that is, feeling bad for someone else. Empathy is feeling with someone else, sensing what it would be like to be that person.
5. Play admits that people rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it. Play moves away from sober seriousness to a playfully light attitude that is at the heart of all creativity. Play manifests itself in the Conceptual Age in three ways: games, humor, and joyfulness. Today fun and games are not just fun and games–and laughter is no laughing matter.
6. Meaning recognizes what Viktor Frankl discovered in Nazi Concentration Camps: “man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but rather to see meaning in his life.” The search for meaning is a drive that exists in all of us. We don’t want to be a people who have enough to live, but nothing to live for; to have the means but no meaning. To begin the search for meaning, people are taking spirituality seriously and taking true happiness seriously.
So, how are you at design, at story, at symphony, at empathy, at play, at meaning?
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