Facing Tomorrow's Challenges Calls for Right-brain Thinking

A generation ago, students were given a formula to follow: Get good grades, go to college and use that education to find a good job. Students with good language skills were advised to become lawyers; those who were good in math or science were encouraged to become engineers or go to medical school.

"Those are the rules that I got. Those are the rules that middle class kids all over the advanced economies got," said Pink. "That was how the world worked. And our education system was very much geared towards that. It was designed to build those sorts of capacities -- those lawyer-, engineer-accountant-sort of abilities. My argument is that those sorts of abilities still matter, but they matter relatively less today, and a different set of abilities matters more."

To face today's challenges, it's not only important what we learn; it's important how we learn. Responding to the challenges of tomorrow's world requires more right-brain thinking.

Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind summarizes his theory by pointing out three drivers of change in today's world: Asia, automation and abundance. By "Asia," Pink referres to the movement of jobs overseas to countries like China and India.

The common characteristic of the work moving overseas is that it is routine, Pink asserted. "Routine is a death sentence for the economy today," said Pink. "Any work that is routine is disappearing from not only this country but from any advanced economy." Pink classified as routine any "work that can be reduced to a script, to a spreadsheet, to a formula, to a series of steps that has a right answer. If you can write down the steps and it has a right answer, that kind of work isn't valuable. That kind of work just races to wherever it can get done the cheapest."

If routine work is not off-shored, much of it can be automated. Many Americans turned to cheap accountants in India to process last year's tax return, Pink pointed out. But a far greater number turned to software such as Turbo Tax. "Last century, machines replaced our backs and our muscle. This century, software is replacing our brain," Pink said.

In a country where 98% of homes already have a color TV set, for example, coming up with a better color television is not an economic advance. "The real thing is to come up with hulu.com -- to deliver television in a way that nobody knew they were missing. These are big, bold, conceptual sorts of breakthroughs."

Pink noted that many right-brain abilities -- such as design, storytelling, synthesis, empathy and pattern recognition -- are difficult to outsource, so people who are strong in these abilities could find their skills in demand.

Companies seeking engineers say they want people with engineering skills who can innovate, communicate, thrive in a multicultural environment and work with a sense of passion, to name a few. "These are not the cognitive skills that you develop through multiple-choice tests. These are not routine things."

It's possible that schools need to develop new metrics and methodologies to bring more right-brain learning into the classroom, Pink suggested. Even traditionally left-brain focused careers can benefit from expanding right-brain capabilities. Jefferson School of Medicine in Philadelphia, for example, has developed an index that measures physicians' ability to empathize with their patients, Pink noted. The index showed that the more empathetic the doctor, the better the patient outcome was likely to be.

In another case, medical schools at Yale and Harvard have begun taking students into art museums to increase their observation skills, Pink said. The logic is that in today's world, a huge amount of medical information is already available online. But learning to observe a patient is something that can't be memorized from a checklist.

"Doctors have to be able to ask the right questions," said Pink. "That calls for extraordinary observation skills -- the observation skills of a painter, of a sculptor. So, medical schools are taking students to art museums to make them better diagnosticians. And, lo and behold, doctors who receive this type of diagnostic training are better diagnosticians than those who haven't."

Pink calls the results of these experiments "a great irony" for the educational system as a whole. "We want to prepare kids for science-oriented careers, so we cut out the arts. Meanwhile, people who are preparing for science-oriented careers are bringing in the arts."

Source: Knowledge@Wharton, 6/10/09