Daniel Pink on Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
“Lawyers. Doctors. Accountants. Engineers. That’s what our parents encouraged us to become. They were wrong. Gone is the age of…
“Lawyers. Doctors. Accountants. Engineers. That’s what our parents encouraged us to become. They were wrong. Gone is the age of “left-brain” dominance. The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers — creative and emphatic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault-line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.”
So begins the blurb of Daniel Pink’s brilliant book, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future”. Whilst I can’t do the complete 267 pages total justice in one post, here’s my best shot at a summary. Grab a coffee and enjoy.
The brain
Scientists have long discovered that a neurological “Mason-Dixon line” divides the brain into 2 regions. As far back as Hippocrates, and until very recently, the left-side was considered the crucial part — rational, analytical and logical — in other words, everything that we needed. On the other hand, says Pink, the right hemisphere was mute, non-linear and instinctive — and its purpose was one that humans had outgrown.
After a set of experiments in the 1950s on patients who had had epileptic seizures and so needed removal of the corpus callosum (the part connecting the 2 hemisphere), it was found that the left hemisphere reasoned sequentially, excelled at analysis and handled words. On the other hand, the right hemisphere reasoned holistically, recognised patterns, and interpreted emotions and non-verbal expressions.
With the various research carried out on the brain’s hemispheres, 4 major conclusions can be drawn:
Left controls the right side of the body, and vica versa
Left is sequential; right is simultaneous
Left specializes in text; right specializes in context
Left analyzes the details; right synthesizes the big picture
(Recommended: Iain McGilchrist’s fantastic RSA-animated TED Talk “The divided brain” — watch here. Aside: I was lucky enough to see Iain in-person at a Virgin Disruptors event on Education in 2015 — a brilliant speaker)
Leading a happy, healthy and successful life depends on both hemispheres of your brain — indeed, however much we talk about the 2 hemispheres in isolation, they are actually designed to work together as one single unit.
However, whilst L-Directed thinking was once which thrived in the Information Age, R-Directed thinking is now taking the driving seat.
Why? 3 main reasons:
ABUNDANCE
Over the last 50 years, we have increasingly been living in a more materially-abundant world. For example, there was a time when there were no jeans — we now have the choice of 100s of brands, colours, styles. And that’s just jeans.
(Recommended: The above also gives rises to “the paradox of choice”, which Barry Schwartz talks about in his TED talk of the same name, here)
“Abundance has brought beautiful things to our lives, but that bevy of material goods has not necessarily made us much happier. The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven’t budged. That’s why more people — liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it — are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning.” — Daniel Pink
(Read also: “Money vs Happiness”, which also talks about material abundance, happiness and Maslow’s heirarchy - here)
As Pink goes on to write, the pursuit of purpose and meaning has become an integral part of our lives.
Of course, material wealth hasn’t reached everyone in the developed world, let alone the vast numbers living in the less developed world. However, abundance has freed millions of people from the struggle for survival and, in the words of Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert William Fogel:
“(Abundance has) made it possible to extend the quest for self-realization from a minute fraction of the population to almost the whole of it.”
2. ASIA
Introducing this topic, Pink describes the intelligent engineering and computer sciences graduates helping Northern American banks, whilst earning no more than $14,000 dollars a year (a more-than-healthy salary in that part of the world), based in Mumbai, India.
Some astonishing facts:
India’s colleges and universities produce circa 350,000 engineering graduates each year
More than 1/2 of the Fortune 500 companies now outsource their software work to India
Throughout India, Chartered accountants are preparing US tax returns, lawyers do legal research for American lawsuits, and radiologists are reading CAT scans for US hospitals — all as a direct result of globalization (this is both extraordinary and, in my view, quite frightening)
“Any job that is English-based in markets such as the US, UK and Australia can be done in India. The only limit is your imagination.” — Daniel Pink
And this is not just happening in India. This L-Directed white collar work is migrating to other parts of the world, too.
As the cost of communicating with the other side of the world falls practically to zero, the lives of North Americans and Europeans will change dramatically.
“This is precisely what happened to routine mass production jobs, which moved across the oceans in the second half of the 20th Century. And just as those factory workers had to master a new set of skills and learn how to bend pixels instead of steel, many of today’s knowledge workers will likewise have to command a new set of aptitudes. They’ll need to do what workers abroad cannot do equally well for much less money — using R-Directed abilities such as forging relationships rather than executing transactions, tackling novel challenges instead of solving routine problems, and synthesizing the big picture rather than analyzing a single component.” — Daniel Pink
3. AUTOMATION
Here, Pink introduces us to the demise of John Henry, which subsequently became a parable of the Industrial Age — the parable being that machines could now do some things better than human beings, and as a result a measure of human dignity had been sacrificed.
Equally, Gary Kasparov, arguably the best chess grandmaster of all time, met his match when he came up against supercomputer Deep Blue. In 2oo3, their 6-match tournament came to a draw. (Kasparov says he can examine 1–3 moves per second, whilst Deep Blue can examine 2–3 million possible moves in that time)
“I give us only a few years. Then they’ll win every match, and we may have to struggle to win even a single game.” — Gary Kasparov
Here in the UK, I am aware personally aware of at least one large corporation seriously looking at Artificial Intelligence as we speak, and how computers might replace tasks being conducted by a significant portion of their workforce.
(Read: “The Robots Are Coming for Wall Street” — here)
“Any job that depends on routines — that can be reduced to a set of rules, or broken down into a set of repeatable steps — is at risk.” — Daniel Pink
A typical human being can write about 400 lines of code per day. Appligenics applications can do the same work in less than a second.
Similar trends are happening across various roles and industry sectors.
“Engineers and programmers will have to master different aptitudes, relying more on creativity than competence, more on trait knowledge than technical manuals, and more on fashioning the big picture than sweating the details.” — Daniel PinkPink goes on to describe the shift now taking place from the Information Age (20th Century) to the Conceptual Age — of creators and empathizers.
So what’s the solution? What can we do to survive Abundance, Automation & Asia?
In Part Two of the book, Pink identifies the 6 fundamental human abilities that he sees as essential for both professional success and personal fulfilment in the 20th Century — and how we can go about mastering them. He dedicates a chapter to each of the following:
Design
Story
Symphony
Empathy
Play
Meaning
A Whole New Mind is one of my favourite reads from the last 12 months. I’d recommend it.
If you want to see what others have had to say about the book, you can read the reviews on Goodreads.
“A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and offers a provocative and urgent new way of thinking about a future that has already arrived.” — an extract from the book’s blurb
from,
Jasraj