The Hindu Business Line : ‘The best and most lasting changes are voluntary’

No one is born good or bad. How they turn out depends on the values of those around them, the models that they observe, the reactions to their behaviours, the events of the wider world, experience and luck.

Mr Howard Gardner, author of ‘Five Minds for the Future’.

Human beings have great potentials for good and evil, says Mr Howard Gardner , the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“We have Slobodan Milosevic but also Nelson Mandela. Both Goethe and Goebbels were outstanding in the German language; one created great art, the other fomented hatred. Mohandas K. Gandhi, in my view, was the most important human being of the last 1000 years,” mentions Mr Gardner in a recent email interaction with Business Line.

“No one is born good or bad. How they turn out depends on the values of those around them, the models that they observe, the reactions to their behaviours, the events of the wider world, experience and luck.”

Mr Gardner, a leading thinker about education and human development, has studied and written extensively about intelligence, creativity, leadership, and professional ethics. His most recent books include: ‘Good Work, Changing Minds’, ‘The Development and Education of the Mind’ and ‘Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons’. His latest book ‘Five Minds for the Future’ ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com) was published in April 2007.

Excerpts from the interview:

Since habits die hard, do you think older people can change? Is transformation possible in a 50-year-old, for example?

My books are deliberately directed to a wider audience. I am not just writing for the 50-year-old man or woman, or just for the 30-year-old professional, or just for the parent, the teacher, or the policymaker. Rather, I am trying to address any person, of any age, who is interested in the kinds of cognitive and social abilities and skills that have always been important, but that, I believe, are at a particular premium in the 21st globalised century.

As for a 50-year-old person changing, I agree that it is not typical but it is certainly possible. In my book Changing Minds, I discuss a dramatic example. Before September 11, 2001, George Bush saw himself as a caretaker president, mostly interested in redeeming his father’s loss, without a clear domestic or foreign agenda. Thereafter, almost over night, he came to see himself as a transformational president, an entirely different kind of person, with entirely different priorities and behaviours. I personally feel that the world has suffered as a result of this major transformation, but no one can deny its reality.

How can new ideas such as what you describe in ‘Five Minds’ be put to effect in organisations?

As a person and as a scholar, I don’t believe that you can or should impose changes on people, or increase pressures on them. Rather, you should lay out ideas, possibilities, and let them decide what to pay attention to and how to respond. The best and most lasting changes are voluntary, not those that are forced. Look at how little of the Soviet regime lasted, once the Iron curtain fell down. Or how quickly Estonia or Poland changed, once they had the opportunity to do so.

When I first wrote about multiple intelligences 25 years ago, I was not even thinking about education. Yet now, a quarter century later, this idea has been one of the most influential in the world of education and also has considerable influence as well in business —for example, through the ideas of emotional intelligence. In my case, I did nothing to proselytise. Rather, the idea intrigued people and they took the initiative in running with it.

I have the same attitude toward the ideas in Five Minds. I try to describe the five minds vividly, portray their importance, and hope that readers will be stimulated by my presentation. And I can report that in a number of sectors, readers and ‘early adapters’ are paying attention to these ideas and pondering how best to implement them.

People with special skills tend to think they are different from others. Is that healthy or disruptive?

People without special skills also think that they are different from others! No one thinks of herself as being average, or just like others. People do differ in how self-important, conceited, egocentric they are. I don’t particularly like people who parade around considering themselves special. From my vantage point, it is up to others to decide if you are special.

In my chapter on ‘the creative mind’ in Five Minds, I argue that no person (nor his doting mother or father) can decide that he/she is creative. That decision can only be made by knowledgeable others. And that is certainly true about the Ethical mind, the mind that we need so desperately today, all over the world. It does not matter if I think I am ethical; it matters what those who know me best would say.

Your model calls for revolution in the way we think. Where do we start?

A journey of a thousand miles begins a step at a time. Many of us have not been respectful of others, as we should be. I plead ‘guilty’. One of the things that I have stopped doing is telling jokes that are at the expense of groups. It is a small step but one such a step leads to another. I would say the same with respect to each of the minds. For example, as pertains to the ethical mind, it is very important that one not just ignore ethical violations. Rather, one should find the right time and locus to speak up, and to express one’s unease with an ethical violation. Once one abandons one track (disrespectful, unethical) for a more positive direction, evolution ultimately becomes revolution. Of course, there are also potentials for backsliding, and it is very helpful to have a friend or associate who can give you honest feedback about whether an imagined change is a real one.

Self-interest is an ubiquitous phenomenon. What does your book offer to a workplace filled with self-interest?

You need to make a distinction between selfish self-interest and enlightened self-interest. All of us have interests in our own success and our own self-preservation and there is nothing wrong with that; we would not be here if our biological predecessors had been completely altruistic or self-negating. I prefer the view of Rabbi Hillel: “If I am only for myself, what am I? If I am not for myself, who will be? If not now, when?”

The challenge is to pursue those practices and policies that help others, as well as oneself; and to have a strong set of values that one adheres to, even when they go against one’s self-interest.

Those who believe in a Darwinian world should not complain if they end up with the short end of the stick. I prefer the values of liberal democracy, as carried out in Scandinavia, where it is recognised that we are not all equally fortunate; everyone deserves a safety net, a degree of trust, and one of the obligations of the more fortunate is to help the needy.

Of course, if a person is completely self-centred there is nothing anyone else can do about it. That is why my own current efforts are directed at young people, who are more open to change. For more on our own efforts, see goodworkproject.org.

The more skilful and knowledgeable we become, the more we lose touch with our heart. Do you agree?

I don’t agree. One can use one’s skill and knowledge in conjunction with one’s own emotions and values, or ‘head’ and ‘heart’ can grow apart, or one can trump the other. Gandhi increased his knowledge and skills for almost 80 years but he certainly did not lose touch with his emotional centre and his long time goals and values.

I believe that you are referring to the defence mechanism that we call ‘intellectualising.’ Sometimes when people can put things into words, they believe that is a substitute for feeling and action. But there is no necessary link between the two.

There are plenty of people who are ignorant and without skills but who are also emotionally dead or totally misguided. Also, without knowledge and skill, your ‘heart’ can be very misleading. Many tyrannies are based on appealing to the heart, and trying to suppress rationality.

Is it possible for one to develop all the ‘five minds’ — the disciplined, synthesising, creating, respectful, and ethical minds?

Of course, it would be ideal if people could develop all five kinds of minds — that is why I wrote this book. But I also point out that it is difficult to do so and that putting them together is itself a challenging act of synthesis. Also, there are tensions between and among the five minds. Respect can pull you in one direction (keeping your mouth shut when a treasured leader does something unethical), while ethics (speaking up) pulls you in another, more risky but more justifiable direction. Also, being creative may mean overthrowing the model or teaching of your mentor, and that can be seen as disrespectful. And so one always has to monitor the ‘state’ of each kind of mind and never expect that they are all going to work together seamlessly or without conflict.

Life is a developmental process (as is certainly understood in the Hindu tradition). A number of your questions imply that we are fixed and can’t change. As a developmental psychologist, I completely disagree with this implication. So long as a person is alive and wants to bring about change, there is always possibility. My mother is about to turn 96 and she continues to grow and change all the time, and I expect that she will until she dies. And I hope the same applies to me. In a fast changing global world, this is not merely an option — it is an imperative.

Do you see any parallels between ‘Five Minds’ and what philosophers have said?

I do believe that individuals can tend towards an integrated persona, and that is what the great psychologists — like Freud or Jung — and the great religions (like Buddhism) strive to achieve. However, all lives are ‘lives in the process of formation and transformation.’ No one is forever integrated — it is always an act of construction and there will inevitably be setbacks.

One of my heroes, Jean Monnet, the father of the European Union and the Common Market, said, “I regard every defeat as an opportunity.” Gandhi spoke of Experiments with Truth. That ‘I will try again’ attitude is the key to an integrated life, I believe.

Can you say something more on creative mind and synthesising mind?

I see an order in the ‘Five Minds’. First one has to develop one or more disciplines, otherwise one will not have the expertise needed to succeed at work. Because we are all deluged with new information, including in our fields of expertise, we need to be able to synthesise knowledge: determine what is important, what to pay attention to, what to ignore, how to put it together in ways that make sense to others and to ourselves. That is the Synthesising imperative. So first, Discipline, then Synthesis.

As the current slogan has it, Creating is ‘thinking outside the box.’ Almost everything that can be described as rule governed will be done better by machines, and so the premium will fall increasingly on individuals and groups that can come up with new answers, and, even more important, new questions.

But, as I argue in ‘Five Minds’, you cannot think outside the box unless you have a box that has been well stocked. And the disciplined mind and the synthesising mind provide the stock, the substance, the material, the skills, that allow one to venture outside the box.

The trick is to be disciplined and synthesising early in life, because creativity tends to be the terrain of young people. As your first question implies, it is more difficult for 50-year-olds to break out of old habits than it is for 25-year-olds. But remember, change is never impossible unless you think that it is.

Won’t interdisciplinary learning dilute innate talent of a person?

I don’t believe in innate talent in the strict sense. I do believe that individuals differ in their potentials in different spheres, and that early teaching, training and motivation determine whether a potential flowers into a talent. My own guess is that some of us have potentials to be outstanding in one area — like chess, or music, or physics. I call that the ‘laser mind.’ Others have potential to be able to synthesise, to do interdisciplinary work; I call that the ‘searchlight’ mind. Mozart and Einstein had laser minds; Bill Clinton and Tony Blair have searchlight minds.

One of the challenges for parents, teachers, and executives, is to figure out which potential is stronger in an individual — laser focus or searchlight breadth — and to encourage the development of that potential.

D. MURALI

G. RAMESH

http://InterviewsInsights.blogspot.com

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