Book review: A Whole New Mind

august, 12 2010

A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink

This isn't a book to open the mind of designers or people with an artistic school of thought. They know this ideas since forever. This one is for people that don't know how to stop analyzing things. In other words, all the rest of us.

So, here are two important things you can questions about yourself:

Could mom and dad have been wrong by telling us to become accountants, lawyers, engineers or physicians?

Having good grades, going to college and pursuing a profession, how can that be not enough?

Here is an excerpt of "A Whole New Mind" by Daniel H. Pink:

"Modern medicine is a marvel. Powerful machines, like the MRI that took pictures of my brain, are letting us glimpse our body's inner workings. New drugs and medical devices are saving many lives and improving many more. Yet, those spectacular advances have often come at the expense of a more mundane, though no less important, aspect of care. The medical system can "completely eliminate the person story," says Dr. Jack Coulehan of Stony Brook University Hospital in New York. "Unfortunately, medicine sees anecdote as the lowest form of science." You've probably had this experience yourself. You're waiting in the exam room at your doctor's office. When the doctor comes in, two things are almost certain to happen next. You'll begin telling a story. And your doctor will interrupt you. Twenty years ago, when researchers videotaped doctor-patient encounters in an exam room, they found that doctors interrupted their patients after an average of twenty-one seconds. When another set of researchers repeated the study more recently, doctors had improved. They now waited an average of twenty-three seconds before butting in."

In this book, Pink takes the reader to review our cultural compulsion to be analytic. His thesis is questioning the typical reaction of a citizen of the Knowledge Age.

If we aren't in the Knowledge Age anymore, what would happen with people thinking with the analytic mode only? Could too much analysis give more trouble than solutions?

I believe it can and some studies proves it does. That trouble is what I call geekism (which I've previously mentioned here) and what other authors refers to as the Curse of Knowledge. What Pink is saying, is that the Knowledge Age won. We proved that we can process things analytically well enough and we are starting to experience the next thing.

He gracefully develops the idea that we already are in the post-Knowledge Age. His main argument is that abundance, automation and Asia are pushing people to start asking this "three questions:

1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I'm offering in demand in an age of abundance?

If the answer to question 1 or 2 is yes, or if your answer to question 3 is no, you're in deep trouble. Mere survival today depends on being able to do something that overseas knowledge workers can't do cheaper, that powerful computers can't do faster, and that satisfies one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age."

What Pink is telling you here is that, if what you do hasn't a high concept and a high touch, it doesn't have a chance to be desirable. Fashion business people knows this since day one. But for people who won't embrace the artistic school of thought, words like desire, high concept and touch are a mystery, a black box. And about things without description... I can tell what I've heard from a teacher in an engineering class: "what isn't documented doesn't exists". But that kind of training is the kind of thing that makes people to be compulsively analytic or, to add some drama, to become technocratic jerks without the slightest signal of good taste.

This book is the Pink's try to compensate this issue. First he tells you: if people doesn't wish your concept, then you may be in trouble. Then, in the second part of the book, he gives you tools and techniques to develop what, in his view, are the things you're going to need most:

1. Design
2. Story
3. Symphony
4. Empathy
5. Play
6. Meaning

While he develops those, he continues to go deeper in the thesis of the Conceptual Age. To give an idea of it, in the Story chapter, he explains how Dr. Rita Charon, a Columbia University Medical School professor is attempting to place story at the heart of diagnosis and healing. She picked up a PhD in English to go with her MD launching the narrative medicine movement in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that called a new approach to medical care:

A scientifically competent medicine alone cannot help a patient grapple with the loss of health or find meaning in suffering. Along with scientific ability, physicians need the ability to listen to the narratives of their patient, grasp and honor their meanings, and be moved to act on the patient's behalf.

Today, at Columbia, all second-year medical students take a seminar in narrative medicine in addition to their hard-core science classes. There they learn to listen more emphatically to the stories their patients tell and to "read" those stories with greater acuity."

Do you think isn't that allowing those students to connect better what they learn with the meaning of what they're going to do?

Don't you wish to interact with people with this school of though just in other industries?

So, don't we need more of this kind of leading cases in other careers too?

If you start wondering about the business world, you have 3M giving top executives storytelling lessons. Also XEROX is recognizing its potential. On the other hand, NASA started to use it in knowledge management.

If you don't have interesting stories to tell, your thesis won't spread. That's why politicians are eager to show themselves in public with some celebrity by their side. Sports are safe adventures. They are icons in popular stories.

Something the reader won't see in the book though, is the emergent economies perspective. While Pink's arguments are convincing for developed economies, for the rest it will look a little weaker. But abundance and automation are affecting people globally. The lack of overseas work felt from emerging economies aren't preventing the Conceptual Age consequences to happen in those places too.

This is something he didn't wrote about but I think that it'll patch the Conceptual Age:

Jacqueline Novogratz is making a remarkable job. Among her many efforts and achievements, she is helping to combat malaria in Africa but you can't just give for free some anti-mosquito nets expecting to change the culture affected by it. You can't even expect to give reasons and change it. Or at least not the reasons you're thinking.

IDEO's work was needed to design the experience of using bed nets in that population. People started to change their behavior not because the bed net was keeping their children free of the mosquito but because children "sleep better" and "the nets are colorful so the house looks prettier" in the eyes of the neighbors.

For the rest of us, I can provide some reasons: we are talking about 500 million people and an economical cost estimated in 13 billion dollars.

So when you see ideas, like peer pressure and social pressure being, used way beyond the fashion business, way beyond the richest audience, you start to question about what taste means in a whole new way. Suddenly you start to realize you actually can see things with a whole new mind and do the reengineering of experiences for a given sub culture and make a difference there.

Here is my synthesis for this book: chances are you're (or are going to be) educated in a system that overrates your analytical skills and it also pretends your other talents aren't at an equal level. In the end it will slowly reward you to be obedient and untalented to express yourself in emotional ways. Making long story short: that will screw your communications skills. But instead of negation or victimization, you need to use our broken educational system and stay prepared to compensate the issues caused by that yourself. The Gestaltic sudden perceptions and the intuitive knowledge are underrated, so be prepared to analyze stories differently learning to read the meaning in all things.

Maybe that's why most lawyers, accountants, doctors, engineers and many other people with tendencies of geekism are simply hopeless. But in, the end, who knows... Pink himself went to Law School, so maybe some of them can change after all.

I definitively recommend this book to: