“The key to success is to risk thinking unconventional thoughts. Convention is the enemy of progress. As long as you’ve got slightly more perception than the average wrapped loaf, you could invent something.”
—TREVOR BAYLIS, inventor
The ability to forge these kinds of inspired, inventive relationships is a function of the right side of our brains. Cognitive neuroscientists at Drexel and Northwestern universities have found that the flashes of insight that precede “Aha!” moments are accompanied by a large burst of neural activity in the brain’s right hemisphere. However, when we work out problems in a more methodical L-Directed way, this “eureka center” remains quiet.6 Our ability to activate this right hemisphere capacity has become more urgent as we transition out of the Information Age. In business today, the journey from innovation to commodity is so swift that successful individuals and organizations must be relentless. They must focus maniacally on invention—while outsourcing or automating much of the execution. This requires those with the ability and fortitude to experiment with novel combinations and to make the many mistakes that inevitably come with an inspiration-centered approach. Fortunately, despite what some might believe, all of us harbor this capacity to invent. Listen to Trevor Baylis, the British stuntman-turned-inventor who invented a windup radio that can be used without batteries or electricity: “Invention isn’t some impenetrable branch of magic: anyone can have a go.” Most inventions and breakthroughs come from reassembling existing ideas in new ways. Those willing to have a go at developing this symphonic ability will flourish in the Conceptual Age.
THE METAPHOR MAKER
Suppose you’re at the office one day and your boss says, “Lend me your ears.” As we learned in Chapter 1, because the literal meaning of those four words computes only in a gruesome way, the left hemisphere will get a bit panicky and look beseechingly across the corpus callosum for assistance. The right hemisphere will then calm its partner, put the phrase in context, and explain that “lend me your ears” is a metaphor. The boss doesn’t really want you to pull a Van Gogh. He just wants you to listen to what he’s about to say.
Metaphor—that is, understanding one thing in terms of something else—is another important element of Symphony. But like so many aspects of R-Directed Thinking, it struggles against an undeserved reputation. “The Western tradition . . . has excluded metaphor from the domain of reason,” writes the prominent linguist George Lakoff. Metaphor is often considered ornamentation—the stuff of poets and other frilly sorts, flowery words designed to perfume the ordinary or unpleasant. In fact, metaphor is central to reason—because, as Lakoff writes, “Human thought processes are largely metaphorical.”7
In a complex world, mastery of metaphor—a whole-minded ability that some cognitive scientists have called “imaginative rationality”—has become ever more valuable. Each morning, when we rise from our slumber and flick on the lights, we know we’ll spend much of the day paddling through a torrent of data and information. Certain kinds of software can sort these bits and offer glimpses into patterns. But only the human mind can think metaphorically and see relationships that computers could never detect.
Likewise, in a time of abundance, when the largest rewards go to those who can devise novel and compelling creations, metaphor-making is vital. For instance, Georges de Mestral noticed how burrs stuck to his dog’s fur and, reasoning metaphorically, came up with the idea for Velcro.8 A computer couldn’t have done that. “Everything you create is a representation of something else; in this sense, everything you create is enriched by metaphor,” writes choreographer Twyla Tharp. She encourages people to boost their metaphor quotient, or MQ, because “in the creative process, MQ is as valuable as IQ.”9
“Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.”
—TWYLA THARP
Metaphorical thinking is also important because it helps us understand others. That’s one reason that marketers are supplementing their quantitative research with qualitative investigations into the metaphorical minds of their customers.10 For instance, a method developed by Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman supplements polls and focus groups by asking subjects to bring in pictures that describe their feelings toward particular goods and services—and then to fashion those pictures into a collage. Through this technique, Zaltman elicits the metaphors customers use to think of products—coffee as an “engine,” a security gizmo as a “companionable watchdog,” and so on.
But the benefits go well beyond the commercial realm. Today, thanks to astonishing improvements in telecommunications, wider access to travel, and increasing life spans, we come into contact with a larger and more diverse set of people than any humans in history. Metaphorical imagination is essential in forging empathic connections and communicating experiences that others do not share. Finally—and perhaps most important—is metaphor’s role in slaking the thirst for meaning. The material comforts brought forth by abundance ultimately matter much less than the metaphors you live by—whether, say, you think of your life as a “journey” or as a “treadmill.” “A large part of self-understanding,” says Lakoff, “is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.”11 The more we understand metaphor, the more we understand ourselves.
Seeing the Big Picture
In any symphony, the composer and the conductor have a variety of responsibilities. They must make sure that the brass horns work in synch with the woodwinds, that the percussion instruments don’t drown out the violas. But perfecting those relationships—important though it is—is not the ultimate goal of their efforts. What conductors and composers desire—what separates the long remembered from the quickly forgotten—is the ability to marshal these relationships into a whole whose magnificence exceeds the sum of its parts. So it is with the high-concept aptitude of Symphony. The boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker all understand the importance of relationships. But the Conceptual Age also demands the ability to grasp the relationships between relationships. This meta-ability goes by many names—systems thinking, gestalt thinking, holistic thinking. I prefer to think of it simply as seeing the big picture.
Seeing the big picture is fast becoming a killer app in business. While knowledge workers of the past typically performed piecemeal assignments and spent their days tending their own patch of a larger garden, such work is now moving overseas or being reduced to instructions in powerful software. As a result, what has become more valuable is what fast computers and low-paid overseas specialists cannot do nearly as well: integrating and imagining how the pieces fit together. This has become increasingly evident among entrepreneurs and other successful businesspeople.
For instance, one remarkable recent study found that self-made millionaires are four times more likely than the rest of the population to be dyslexic.12 Why? Dyslexics struggle with L-Directed Thinking and the linear, sequential, alphabetic reasoning at its core. But as with a blind person who develops a more acute sense of hearing, a dyslexic’s difficulties in one area lead him to acquire outsized ability in others. As Sally Shaywitz, a Yale neuroscientist and specialist in dyslexia, writes, “Dyslexics think differently. They are intuitive and excel at problem-solving, seeing the big picture, and simplifying. . . . They are poor rote reciters, but inspired visionaries.”13 Game-changers such as Charles Schwab, who invented the discount brokerage, and Richard Branson, who has shaken up the retail music and airline industries, both cite their dyslexia as a secret to their success. It forced them to see the big picture. Because of their difficulty analyzing the particulars, they became adept at recognizing the patterns. Michael Gerber, who has studied entrepreneurs of all sorts, has reached similar conclusions: “All great entrepreneurs are Systems Thinkers. All who wish to become great entrepreneurs need to learn how to become a Systems Thinker . . . to develop their innate passion for seeing things whole.”14
“The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.”
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br /> —SID CAESAR
Both academic studies and firsthand observations are showing that pattern recognition—understanding the relationships between relationships—is equally important for those who aren’t intent on building their own empire. Daniel Goleman writes about a study of executives at fifteen large companies: “Just one cognitive ability distinguished star performers from average: pattern recognition, the ‘big picture’ thinking that allows leaders to pick out the meaningful trends from a welter of information around them and to think strategically far into the future.”15 These star performers, he found, “relied less on deductive, if-then reasoning” and more on the intuitive, contextual reasoning characteristic of Symphony. The shifting terrain is already prompting some archetypal L-Directed workers to recast who they are and what they do. One example: Stefani Quane of Seattle, who calls herself a “holistic attorney,” dedicated to taking care of your will, trust, and family matters by viewing them in context rather than isolation, and examining how your legal concerns relate to the entirety of your life.
More and more employers are looking for people who possess this aptitude. Sidney Harman is one of them. The eightysomething multimillionaire CEO of a stereo components company says he doesn’t find it all that valuable to hire MBAs. Instead,
I say, “Get me some poets as managers.” Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obliged to interpret and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world turns. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow’s new business leaders.16
Business and work, of course, are far from the only places where seeing the big picture is helpful. This aspect of Symphony has also become crucial for health and well-being. Take the growing appeal of integrative medicine, which combines conventional medicine with alternative and complementary therapies, and its cousin, holistic medicine, which aims to treat the whole person rather than the particular disease. These movements—grounded in science but not dependent solely on science’s often L-Directed approach—have achieved mainstream recognition, including their own branch of the National Institutes of Health. They move beyond the reductionist, mechanistic approach of conventional medicine toward one that, in the words of one physicians’ professional association, integrates “all aspects of well-being, including physical, environmental, mental, emotional, spiritual and social health; thereby contributing to the healing of ourselves and our planet.”17
The capacity to see the big picture is perhaps most important as an antidote to the variety of psychic woes brought forth by the remarkable prosperity and plentitude of our times. Many of us are crunched for time, deluged by information, and paralyzed by the weight of too many choices. The best prescription for these modern maladies may be to approach one’s own life in a contextual, big-picture fashion—to distinguish between what really matters and what merely annoys. As I’ll discuss in the final chapter, this ability to perceive one’s own life in a way that encompasses the full spectrum of human possibility is essential to the search for meaning.
ON THE FINAL DAY of drawing class, we approach the week’s crescendo. After lunch, we each tape our small mirrors to the wall. We position our chairs about eight inches away and begin to draw our self-portraits once again. Bomeisler warns us of the perils lurking in the looking glass. “We’ve used the mirror to prepare ourselves to face the world. Clear your mind of any thoughts you’ve had about that and concentrate on the shapes, the lights, and the relationships,” he says. “You want to see what your face looks like on this particular day in this particular place.”
At lunch, I swap my glasses for contact lenses so I won’t have to draw the shadows cast by my spectacles. Given my performance on the first self-portrait, I’ll take any edge I can get. I begin with my eyes—really looking at them, seeing what shape they are, where the color ends and the whites of my eyeballs begin, realizing that the width between my two eyes is exactly the same as the width of each individual eye. My nose, though, gives me fits—in part because I keep thinking of a nose instead of just seeing what’s plain on my face. I skip that part—and for the longest time, my self-portrait has a big empty spot in the center, a Venus de Milo of proboscises. When I get to the mouth, I draw and redraw it nine times until I get it right because the early renditions keep looking like that Magikist sign. But the shape of the head comes easily because I just erase the negative space around it.
To my amazement, what emerges on the sketchpad begins to look a little like me on that particular day in that particular place. Bomeisler checks in on my progress, touches my shoulder, and whispers, “Fantastic.” I almost believe he means it. And as I pencil in the finishing touches, I experience a tiny hint of the kind of feeling a terrified mother must have after she’s lifted a Buick off her child and wonders where her strength came from.
When I’m done, after seeing the relationships and integrating those relationships into the big picture, this is me.
Listen to the Great Symphonies.
Listening to symphonies, not surprisingly, is an excellent way to develop your powers of Symphony. Here are five classics the experts recommend. (Of course, particular recordings—with different conductors and orchestras—will vary in style, interpretation, and sound. )
Beethoven’s 9th Symphony— One of the most famous symphonies of all time, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is always a treat. I’ve found that on each listening something new surfaces—in part because the context in which I’ve listened alters and shapes the meaning.
Mozart’s Symphony No. 35, “Haffner Symphony”— Notice how Mozart brings in the woodwinds at the end to create a whole that dramatically surpasses the sum of the parts.
Mahler’s 4th Symphony in G Major— I doubt that inspiration was Mahler’s aim, but his 4th Symphony always sounds inspiring to me.
Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture— You’ve heard this one many times before. But next time, get a recording that uses actual church bells and cannons—and listen carefully to how the components fit together.
Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 in G Major, “Surprise”— To master the aptitude of Symphony, you must be open to surprise. When you listen to this, marvel at how Haydn uses surprise to broaden and deepen the music.
Hit the Newsstand.
One of my favorite exercises in conceptual blending is the “newsstand roundup.” If you’re stymied on how to solve a problem, or just want to freshen your own thinking, visit the largest newsstand you can find. Spend twenty minutes browsing—and select ten publications that you’ve never read and would likely never buy. That’s the key: buy magazines you never noticed before. Then take some time to look through them. You don’t have to read every page of every magazine. But get a sense of what the magazine is about and what its readers have on their minds. Then look for connections to your own work or life. For instance, when I did this exercise, I figured out a better way to craft my business cards thanks to something I saw in Cake Decorating— and came up with a new idea for a newsletter because of an article in Hair for You. Warning: your spouse might give you uncomfortable looks when you come home toting Trailer Life, Teen Cosmo, and Divorce Magazine.
Draw.
A great way to expand your capacity for Symphony is to learn how to draw. As I discovered myself, drawing is about seeing relationships—and then integrating those relationships into a whole. I’m partial to the Betty Edwards approach, because it proved so valuable to me. About a dozen times a year, Brian Bomeisler (and other Edwards disciples) teach courses like the one I took. If you can spare the time, the five-day workshop is well worth the investment. If you can’t, Edwards and Bomeisler have a Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain video. And Edwards’s classic book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, is available at most booksellers. (More info: www.drawright.com) For those of you with more curiosity than patience, consider playing around with a five-line self-port
rait—that is, drawing your self-portrait using only five lines. It’s a great big-picture exercise and plenty of fun. Here’s one of mine:
Keep a Metaphor Log.
Improve your MQ (metaphor quotient) by writing down compelling and surprising metaphors you encounter. Try it for a week and you’ll understand the power of this exercise. Keep a small notebook with you and scribble when you read a newspaper columnist write that pollsters have “colonized” the minds of our leaders—or when your friend says, “I don’t feel rooted.” You’ll be amazed. When I last kept a log, I came upon such an array of metaphors that the world seemed richer and more vivid. It will also inspire you to create your own metaphors in writing, thought, or other parts of your life.
Follow the Links.
Play your own version of six degrees of separation courtesy of the Internet. Choose a word or a topic you find interesting, type it into a search engine, and then follow one of the links. From the initial site you visit, select one of its links, and venture on. Repeat this process seven or eight times, always clicking a new link from the site you’re currently viewing. At the end of your journey, reflect on what you learned about your original topic and the diversions you encountered along the way. What did you encounter because of your casual detours that you might otherwise not have found? What patterns or themes (if any) emerged? What unusual connections between seemingly unrelated thinking did you accidentally discover? Following the links is a commitment to learning by serendipity. A variation: Go with pure chance by using a random web site generator like U Roulette (www.uroulette.com) or Random Web Search (www.randomwebsearch.com). Beginning with a site you never would have visited can take you to places you never expected—and enhance your appreciation for the symphonic relationships between ideas.