Thinking for a Change

Discovering the Power to Create, Communicate and Lead

Michael Gelb

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781722521097
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

The coauthor of Lessons from the Art of Juggling teaches us how to "re-think the way we think, " by introducing an approach to thriving on change called "synvergent thinking, " the art of balancing convergent and divergent thinking modes, logic and imagination, reason and intuition.

If humanity is to pass safely through its present crisis on earth, it will he because a majority of individuals are now doing their own thinking.

—Buckminster Fuller

Part I

SYNVERGENT THINKING, MIND MAPPING,

AND

PROBLEM SOLVING

Chapter I

Synvergent Thinking

Elements of the word synvergent:

Converge: “To tend to come together at one point”

Diverge: “To go in different directions from a common point”

Verge: “To he in the process of change or transition into somethingelse”

Syn: “A prefix meaning with, together with, at the same time, by means of…”

Synergy: “Combined or cooperative action or force”

Synergism: “The simultaneous action of separate agencies, which, together, have greater total effect than the sum of their individual effects”

System: “A set or arrangement of things so related or connected as

to form a unity or organic whole”

(All definitions from the second edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.)

In the first human societies, thinking was primarily animistic and “right brained.” Native people experienced themselves as one with the earth. Every tree, every animal, every cloud possessed its own sacred spirit. Mother Earth reigned. As human societies evolved, the feeling of oneness with nature was gradually replaced by the need to control the environment. Analytical thinking began to dominate, and paternalistic societies pushed Mother Earth into the background.

Now we require a new synthesis, not a back-to-nature movement or a continuation of our shortsighted resource squandering, but rather a new integration of technology and soul, power and altruism, business and humanness. Our success and fulfillment as individuals and our continuing survival and evolution as a species, demand that we cultivate a new way of thinking—that we move beyond either/or, win/lose, us/them ways of looking at our world.

Convergent thinking is focused, analytical, detailed. It is the primary mode for balancing your checkbook, copyediting a manuscript, or pruning a tree. Divergent thinking is diffuse, free flowing, and imaginative. It is the primary mode for spontaneous humor, brainstorming, and free association. Synvergent thinking is the synergetic combination of convergent and divergent thinking. It is the primary mode for thriving with change, ambiguity, and paradox.

Dancing with Dissonance

This kind of thinking has always been associated with genius. Great artists, scientists, and spiritual masters lead humanity forward by digging from dominant paradigms, blending imaginative vision with reason and practicality. Conflict and paradox are the catalysts that propel genius to change the world. Mona Lisa’s smile, Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, and Jesus’ injunction to “love thine enemy” all emerged from a transcendence of apparent opposites.

Learning to embrace change, paradox, and ambiguity is the touchstone of a creative life. Poet John Keats mused that to be creative one must demonstrate a high degree of “negative capability.” He described such a person as one “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

The ability to embrace opposites touches the essence of being. Just as day follows night, our capacity for joy is born in sorrow. We are each the center of a unique and special universe and totally insignificant specks of cosmic dust. Of all the polarities we’re challenged to reconcile, none is more daunting than life and death. The shadow of death gives life its potential for meaning. As playwright Eugene Ionesco suggests, the ephemeral often seems like the only thing of lasting value.

As change accelerates, ambiguity multiplies, and illusions of certainty become more difficult to maintain. Many people react with a kind of paralysis. They wait to be told what to think and what to do. They wait for a new job description, a new identity. The pace of change will continue to accelerate. Too many people are waiting and hoping for things to settle down. They won’t.

Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.

—Voltaire

The ability to dance with dissonance—to master ambiguity and paradox—can no longer be only the province of geniuses and mystics. Poise in the face of uncertainty must become part of our everyday standard of effectiveness at work and at home.

This poise requires the courage to face reality, with all its polarities and conflict. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The synvergent thinker holds multiple pairs of opposing ideas in mind, simultaneously, and still functions happily.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr enlightens the matter further with this complementary thought:

There are two kinds of truth:

small truth and great truth.

You can recognize a small truth because

its opposite is a falsehood.

The opposite of a great truth

is another great truth.

Synvergent thinkers embrace the anxiety that accompanies the search for great truths. Most people do not know when they are anxious. They react to anxiety with some form of automatic avoidance behavior such as excessive talking, reaching for a cigarette, or fantasy. To surf the tsunami of change we must learn first of all to know when we are anxious. As we become conscious of our anxiety we can learn to accept it, experience it, and free ourselves from limiting compulsions of thought and action.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

—Henry Moore

The willingness to make inner changes, to let go of the vestiges of old habits, anxieties, and outworn paradigms, is a prerequisite for synvergent thinking. Change management, like time management, begins with self-management. We must accept responsibility for living our priorities and managing our attitudes in the face of circumstances that are often beyond our control. To face change with equanimity, we must find something inside ourselves that is unchanging. Without this inner work, techniques and strategies of change management are shallow palliatives.

Of course, this inner work isn’t easy. As Emil Sinclair pleads in Herman Hesse’s Demian, “All I ever wanted was to live from the promptings of my true self. Why was that so very difficult?” This journey demands that we shine the light of consciousness on deeply grooved habits. This demands a relentless process of questioning that leaps the pitfalls of narcissism and self-indulgence.

Man must strive with all his might to become what he really is.

—Meister Eckhart

Perhaps the greatest challenge for those who would master change is the willingness to take action in the face of uncertainty. We must be committed to act—even while aware that we could be wrong. This commitment is easier to make when you understand that your brain is designed over millions of years of evolution to be the most profoundly powerful learning and problem-solving tool in all known creation. Your brain is more complex, flexible, and powerful than any super-computer. Its neural circuitry is estimated to be at least 1,400 times more complex than the entire global telephone network.

As you read these words, your 100 billion neurons are shimmering with over 100,000 chemical reactions every second. The number of possible connections or patterns of thought that your brain can make is significantly greater than the number of atoms that exist in the universe. The best estimate of the number of atoms in the universe is 10²⁰⁰. One conservative estimate of your brain’s potential to make connections, offered by Prof. Pyotr Anokhin of Moscow University, is the number 1 followed by 6.5 million miles of standard-sized IBM typewritten zeros.

FEAR IS THE MIND KILLER

What becomes of this remarkable birthright? More often than not, it is compromised by fear—the fear of failure and embarrassment, passed on from generation to generation that locks in fear of the unknown. This pattern is often exacerbated in the first few years of school. Think back to your school days. Remember when you or someone else in your class was very excited about answering a teacher’s question— “Ooh, ooh, please call on me!” Remember the enthusiasm with which you blurted out a truly original, creative, self-expressive answer? And the teacher responded, “No, that’s not the answer I was looking for.” Remember the mocking laughter of the rest of the class, followed by a little voice inside each child’s mind, warning, “Never, ever do that again.”

In most cases, schooling does not develop originality, delight in ambiguity, or self-expression. Rather, the thinking skill that’s rewarded is figuring out the “right answer”—that is, the answer held by the person in authority, the teacher. This pattern holds through university and postgraduate education, especially in a class where the professor wrote the text.

Furthermore, our way of testing and grading reinforces a pernicious pattern of short-term, superficial thinking. In a study done at Harvard University, summa cum laude graduates who received all A’s in their final exams were given those same exams one month after graduation. They all failed. As brain researcher Leslie Hart observes, “Final exams are final indeed.”

The fear-based, authority-pleasing, rule-following approach to education may have served to provide society with assembly-line workers and bureaucrats, but it does not do much to prepare people for the world as it is today.

I CAN’T /1 CAN: PSYCHOPHYSICAL, SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

Growing up with a fear of failure and embarrassment builds a pattern of thinking that stifles initiative and dulls the ability to think synvergently. This “I can’t” pattern is a psychophysical, self-fulfilling prophecy that manifests in a wide variety of life areas. One classic example is the “I can’t” associated with singing, which often originates in the following scenario.

It’s choir day in the third grade and Johnny is singing along with the rest of the children when his teacher, Ms. Tracy, stops the class. “Someone is singing off key. Johnny, I think it is you. Come up to the front of the room and sing.” Mortified, Johnny sings, and he is more off key than before. Everyone laughs.

What happens to Johnny’s vocal chords under the stress of this embarrassment? They contract. What does this do to the quality of his singing voice? It gets worse. How does the response to his solo affect him? He decides, “I can’t sing,” and for the rest of his life he does not sing. His “I can’t” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Another common “I can’t” is “I can’t draw, I’m not artistic”: It is time for art class in the fourth grade at Clifton Elementary School and all the kids are busy drawing airplanes. David’s drawing is rather abstract. When the teacher puts the drawings up on the wall at the end of class, David’s is not among them. Suzy’s fate is even worse. Her unconventional, idiosyncratic representation of an airplane, hung on another wall, is offered as an example of what an airplane does not look like.

Both David and Suzy decide, “I can’t draw, I’m not artistic.” For the rest of their lives they do not even try.

Other common pessimistic, self-fulfilling prophecies include: I can’t speak in public, be creative, do mathematics, dance, lose weight, make enough money, get along with the opposite sex, be happy….

Organizationally, the “I can’t” becomes the “we can’t.” I lead many seminars for junior- to senior-level managers, where the participants are very excited about what they learn but hesitant to apply it in the workplace. When asked the reason for their hesitancy, they usually say something like, “We can’t apply it because ‘they’ won’t let us.”

I once encountered a heavy dose of the “they” phenomenon during interviews prior to a series of seminars for the management team of a $600 million company. Over five weeks I led mixed-level groups of up to 70 people, until all 580 managers, including the CEO and all senior executives, had attended. “They” were all there. At the beginning of each session, I asked everyone to turn to the person sitting next to him or her and write “They” on the colleague’s nametag,

We are “They.”

Organizationally and individually, creative things get done by people who think, “I can.” An “I can” attitude is grounded in a willingness to take responsibility for one’s own life and acting as though thoughts and actions flow primarily from choices not circumstances. The “I can” attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy that leads to success. It turns the vast potential of your brain “On,” awakening and focusing your power to learn and create.

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