A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (7 page)

Automation is also changing the work of many doctors. Much of medical diagnosis amounts to following a series of decision trees—Is it a dry cough or a productive one? Is the T-cell count above or below a certain level?—and honing in on the answer. Computers can process the binary logic of decision trees with a swiftness and accuracy humans can’t begin to approach. So an array of software and online programs has emerged that allow patients to answer a series of questions on their computer screens and arrive at a preliminary diagnosis without the assistance of a physician. Health care consumers have begun to use such tools both to “figure out their risk of serious diseases—such as heart failure, coronary artery disease and some of the most common cancers—[and] to make life-and-death treatment decisions once they are diagnosed,” reports the
Wall Street Journal.
²⁹
At the same time, there’s been an explosion of electronic databases of medical and health information. In a typical year, about 100 million people worldwide go online for health and medical information and visit more than 23,000 medical Web sites.
³⁰
As patients self-diagnose and tap the same reservoir of information available to physicians, these tools are transforming the doctor’s role from omniscient purveyor of solutions to empathic advisor on options. Of course, the day-to-day work of physicians often involves challenges too complex for software alone—and we’ll still rely on experienced doctors to diagnose unusual diseases. But, as I’ll show later in this book, these developments are changing the emphasis of many medical practices—away from routine, analytical, and information-based work and toward empathy, narrative medicine, and holistic care.

A similar pattern is unfolding in the legal profession. Dozens of inexpensive information and advice services are reshaping law practice. For example, CompleteCase.com, which calls itself “the premier online uncontested divorce service center,” will handle your divorce for a mere $249. At the same time, the Web is cracking the information monopoly that has long been the source of many lawyers’ high incomes and professional mystique. Attorneys charge an average of $180 per hour. But many Web sites—for instance, Lawvantage.com and USLegalforms.com—now offer basic legal forms and other documents for as little as $14.95. As
The New York Times
reports, “Instead of asking lawyers to draft contracts at a cost of several thousand dollars,” clients now find the proper forms online—and then take “the generic documents to lawyers, who customize them at a cost of several hundred dollars apiece.” The result, says the
Times,
is that the legal industry “may be on the verge of fundamental changes . . . [that] could reduce the demand for traditional services and force lawyers to lower fees.”
³¹
The attorneys who remain will be those who can tackle far more complex problems and those who can provide something that databases and software cannot—counseling, mediation, courtroom storytelling, and other services that depend on R-Directed Thinking.

T
O RECAP
, three forces are tilting the scales in favor of R-Directed Thinking. Abundance has satisfied, and even oversatisfied, the material needs of millions—boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals’ search for meaning. Asia is now performing large amounts of routine, white-collar, L-Directed work at significantly lower costs, thereby forcing knowledge workers in the advanced world to master abilities that can’t be shipped overseas. And automation has begun to affect this generation’s white-collar workers in much the same way it did last generation’s blue-collar workers, requiring L-Directed professionals to develop aptitudes that computers can’t do better, faster, or cheaper.

So what happens next? What happens to us as our lives get clipped by automation and Asia—and reconfigured by abundance? I’ll examine that in the next chapter.

Three

HIGH CONCEPT,

HIGH TOUCH

T
hink of the last 150 years as a three-act drama.
In Act I, the Industrial Age, massive factories and efficient assembly lines powered the economy. The lead character in this act was the mass production worker, whose cardinal traits were physical strength and personal fortitude.

In Act II, the Information Age, the United States and other nations began to evolve. Mass production faded into the background, while information and knowledge fueled the economies of the developed world. The central figure in this act was the knowledge worker, whose defining characteristic was proficiency in L-Directed Thinking.

Now, as the forces of Abundance, Asia, and Automation deepen and intensify, the curtain is rising on Act III. Call this act the Conceptual Age. The main characters now are the
creator
and the
empathizer,
whose distinctive ability is mastery of R-Directed Thinking.

I’ve depicted this progression in Figure 3.1, broadening the story to include the Industrial Age’s predecessor, the Agriculture Age. The horizontal axis shows time. The vertical axis shows a combination of affluence, technological progress, and globalization (what I’ve shorthanded ATG). As individuals grow richer, as technologies become more powerful, and as the world grows more connected, these three forces eventually gather enough collective momentum to nudge us into a new era. That is how, over time, we moved from the Agriculture Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age. The latest instance of this pattern is today’s transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age once again fed by affluence (the abundance thatcharacterizes Western life), technological progress (the automation of several kinds of white-collar work), and globalization (certain types of knowledge work moving to Asia).

Figure 3.1

F
ROM THE
A
GRICULTURE
A
GE TO THE
C
ONCEPTUAL
A
GE

In short, we’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we’re progressing yet again—to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers.

Figure 3.2 depicts this same evolution, but in a way that might speak more to the right side of your brain.

Figure 3.2

And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures. We’ve moved from an economy built on people’s
backs
to an economy built on people’s
left brains
to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people’s
right brains.

When economies and societies depended on factories and mass production, R-Directed Thinking was mostly irrelevant. Then as we moved to knowledge work, R-Directed Thinking came to be recognized as legitimate, though still secondary, to the preferred mode of L-Directed Thinking. Now, as North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan evolve once again, R-Directed Thinking is beginning to achieve social and economic parity—and, in many cases, primacy. In the twenty-first century, it has become the first among equals, the key to professional achievement and personal satisfaction.

But let me be clear: the future is not some Manichean world in which individuals are either left-brained and extinct or right-brained and ecstatic—a land in which millionaire potters drive BMWs and computer programmers scrub counters at Chick-fil-A. L-Directed Thinking remains indispensable. It’s just no longer sufficient. In the Conceptual Age, what we need instead is a
whole
new mind.

High Concept and High Touch

To survive in this age, individuals and organizations must examine what they’re doing to earn a living and ask themselves 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 your 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.

That is why high tech is no longer enough. We’ll need to supplement our well-developed high-tech abilities with abilities that are high concept and high touch. (As I mentioned in the Introduction, high concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention. High touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.)
¹

High concept and high touch are on the rise throughout the world economy and society. But for the most persuasive evidence, it helps to look in the most unlikely places. Take medical schools, long a bastion for those with the best grades, highest test scores, and the keenest powers of analytical thinking. Today, the curriculum at American medical schools is undergoing its greatest change in a generation. Students at Columbia University Medical School and elsewhere are being trained in “narrative medicine,” because research has revealed that despite the power of computer diagnostics, an important part of a diagnosis is contained in a patient’s story. At the Yale School of Medicine, students are honing their powers of observation at the Yale Center for British Art, because students who study paintings excel at noticing subtle details about a patient’s condition. Meantime, more than fifty medical schools across the United States have incorporated spirituality into their coursework. UCLA Medical School has established a Hospital Overnight Program, in which second-year students are admitted to the hospital overnight with fictitious ailments. The purpose of this playacting? “To develop medical students’ empathy for patients,” says the school. Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia has even developed a new measure of physician effectiveness—an empathy index.
²

Or leave American teaching hospitals and head for the world’s second largest economy. Japan, which rose from the ashes of World War II thanks to its intense emphasis on L-Directed Thinking, is now reconsidering the source of its national strength. Although Japanese students lead the world in math and science scores, many in Japan suspect that the nation’s unrelenting focus on schoolbook academics might be an outdated approach. So the country is remaking its vaunted education system to foster greater creativity, artistry, and play. Little wonder. Japan’s most lucrative export these days isn’t autos or electronics. It’s pop culture.
³
Meanwhile, in response to the mind-melting academic pressures on Japanese youth, the Education Ministry has been pushing students to reflect on the meaning and mission of their lives, encouraging what it calls “education of the heart.”

Then, when you’ve returned from Japan, check out a third unlikely setting—the mammoth multinational General Motors. A few years ago, GM hired a man named Robert Lutz to help turn around the ailing automaker. Bob Lutz is not exactly a touchy-feely, artsyfartsy kind of guy. He’s a craggy, white-haired white man in his seventies. During his career, he’s been an executive at each of the big three American automakers. He looks and acts like a marine, which he once was. He smokes cigars. He flies his own plane. He believes global warming is a myth peddled by the environmental movement. But when Lutz took over his post at beleaguered GM, and
The New York Times
asked him how his approach would differ from that of his predecessors, here’s how he responded: “It’s more right brain. . . . I see us being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.”
⁴