We can see some of that in the writings of David Weinberger and Sam Arbesman, who both, while not tackling ‘thought’ directly, write about the complexity of modern life. They show us how we resolve this complexity traditionally by breaking it into chunks, and developing hyper-specialization to tackle the various aspects of the thing. What each of us know greatly expands, but what there is to know expands even faster. The result is that there are fewer people who can deeply understand the whole of a thing, or that might consider the consequences, intended and otherwise, that may happen down the road.
A companion to these two authors is David Epstein’s Range, which postulates that generalists are often better equipped than specialists to innovate and navigate uncertainty. Their key to success is an ability to cultivate a diverse range of experiences, skills, and knowledge, accrued from a breadth of interests and expertise. They are also less tied to traditional solutions, tools, and domains, and more likely to ‘think out of the box’. This broad foundation and fresh outlook enable generalists to excel in complex and uncertain environments where problems don’t have clear-cut solutions.
What Epstein doesn’t point out, however, is that in standard environments, specialists are still the default, and generalists are not rewarded. While the world may need generalists more than ever before, most of the time one is not rewarded in business, academia, government, and other settings for being a curious broad-thinking problem-solving generalist.
To cultivate these new forms of thought, then, people will need to accept this dichotomy. To develop generalist skills, we will need to seek out the kinds of roles and opportunities that not only broaden our experience, but test our comfort zone. Perhaps at the expense of traditional success. The ideal would be to seek out and find diverse experiences that also might reward or encourage us on our path.
Specialization is not wrong, of course. McGilchrist points out that “Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance”. These left-brain oriented behaviors give us “nothing less than civilizations,” he says.
But it is “second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole.” While the left hemisphere needs certainty, clarity, and confidence, and is of vital importance, the right has the paramount ability: it “makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.”
This new form of thought will also be humbler. As Weinberger says, “these days the smartest person in the room is the room”. So, in addition to a person having inter-disciplinary experience, they should also not see themselves as uniquely suited to solving a problem. If they are humble, and collaborative, they can use their experience to relate to other stakeholders and resources in such a way as to catalyze and engage them more effectively. This form of thought is curious, and solution and stakeholder focused, not self-oriented. The goal is to uplift the room, and by doing so, uplift others. Not, as is so traditional in western culture, to prove how smart you are.
These are some of the characteristics of the new forms of thinking I currently think are needed in the world, at least to address emerging complex problems we face at the intersection of thought and Technology. It will be built on a very diverse intellectual foundation, leverage a sometimes incoherently complex variety of life experiences, looks non-judgmentally at problems and solutions from multiple perspectives, and occasionally sees surprising connections not visible to a traditional expert. In short, it is right-brain thinking in a left-brain world.