Five minds needed for the times

“The empires of the future will be the empires of the mind.”

Recalling the Churchill quotation, the well known developmental psychologist Howard Gardner of the multiple intelligence theory, wrote in his book “Five Minds for the Future” (2006) that the world of the future “with its ubiquitous search engines, robots and other computational devices” will demand new capacities or “minds” that will equip a person to deal with the expected, the unexpected and what cannot be anticipated.

Gardner says: “Without these minds, a person will be at the mercy of forces that he or she can’t understand, let alone control.” These five are the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind and the critical mind. Here is a brief descriptive summary of each type of mind.

The disciplined mind has mastered at least one way of thinking. It has a mastery of major schools of thought including the arts, history, mathematics and science. It also has mastery of one professional craft like management, writing, medicine, music and law.

Much research confirms that it takes up to ten years to master a discipline. It is interesting that this is normally the amount of time it takes to finish a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a doctoral degree.

The disciplined mind also knows how to work steadily over time to improve skill and understanding. He says, “Without at least one discipline under his belt, the individual is doomed to march to someone else’s tune.”

The synthesizing mind has the “ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others.” It achieves this by taking information from different sources, understands and evaluates the information objectively and puts it together in ways that make sense to the synthesizer and also to other persons.

The work of synthesizing has always been valuable in the past. Among the greatest works of synthesizers are the Bible and the books of Aristotle – and Physics, Metaphysics, Poetics, Rhetoric and many others.

But this capacity to synthesize becomes even more critical as voluminous information mounts at dizzying rates.

“The creating mind has the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena.” Its foundation must be discipline and synthesis. However, it breaks new ground by putting forth new ideas, posing unfamiliar questions, conjuring up fresh ways of thinking and arriving at unexpected answers.

The creating mind “seeks to remain at least one step ahead of even the most sophisticated computers and robots.”

One of the most fascinating theories of Gardner is that a critical mass of persons engaged in creative activity constitutes the optimal formula for ensuring continuing innovation. He points to different examples in history. “Athens in the 5th century BC; Florence during the Renaissance; Vienna and Paris in 1900 and Silicon Valley in the 1990s.”

Albert Einstein was an unknown patent officer until his scientific papers were recognized by journal editors and knowledgeable colleagues. Gardner says: “The same story can be told about the writings of James Joyce; the paintings of Pablo Picasso; the managerial strategies developed by Peter Drucker and Michael Porter; the musical compositions of Richard Wagner, Duke Ellington and John Lennon; the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman.”

This emphasizes the importance of awards and recognition like the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Awards in the Philippines.

The respectful mind is aware of and appreciates differences among human beings. It recognizes that today one can no longer remain within one’s shell or home territory and therefore must “note and welcome differences between human individuals and between human groups, try to understand these ‘others’ and seek to work effectively with them. In a world where we are all interlinked, intolerance or disrespect is no longer an option.

“Humans exhibit a deep-seated tendency to create groups, to provide distinctive marks for these collectivities and to adopt clearly positive or clearly hostile attitude toward neighboring and more distant cohorts.”

Gardner’s proposal: “In a world composed of a few hundred nations, thousands of groups speaking, thousands of languages and more than six billion inhabitants, we can no longer simply draw a curtain or build a wall that isolates groups from one another indefinitely.

“We homo sapiens must somehow learn how to inhabit neighboring places – and the same planet –without hating one another, without lusting to injure or kill one another, without acting on xenophobic inclinations even if our own group might emerge triumphant in the short run.

“The ethical mind ponders the nature of one’s work and the needs and desires of the society in which one lives. This mind conceptualizes how workers can serve purposes beyond self-interest and how citizens can work unselfishly to improve the lot of all. The ethical mind then acts on the basis of these analyses.”

The key, therefore, is to determine the metric for identifying what a “good worker” is. Gardner describes the worker with an ethical mind.

“A good worker has a set of principles and values that she can state explicitly or at least acknowledge upon questioning. The principles are consistent with one another… The worker keeps these principles in mind constantly; asks whether she is abiding by them and takes corrective action when she does not. The worker is transparent – to the extent possible, she operates out in the open and does not hide what she is doing… Most important, the worker passes the hypocrisy test; she abides by the principles even when they go against her own self-interest.”

These five minds are particularly at a premium today and are vital for these challenging and uncertain times.

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