SYNTHESIS
Symphony (what Daniel Pink calls the aptitude for synthesis) is the ability to put together the pieces. It is the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze; to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair.Sidney Harman, the eighty-something multimillionaire CEO of a stereo components company says he doesn’t find it valuable to hire an MBA. Instead, he says, “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 system thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow’s new business leaders.”
Our new age 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, which 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 being outsourced to powerful software. What has become more important is what fast computers and low-paid overseas specialists cannot do nearly as well: integrating and imagining how the pieces fit together. Pattern recognition – understanding the relationships between relationships – is equally important.
Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Riverhead Books, 2006
The most important scientific discovery about learning in recent years comes from cognitive researchers who have examined student understanding. In a typical paradigm, a secondary school or college student is asked to elucidate a discovery or phenomenon with which she is not familiar but which lends itself to explanation in terms of a concept or theory that has been already studied. The results are surprising, consistent, and disheartening. Most students, including those who attend our best schools and receive the highest grades, are not able to explain the phenomenon about which they are being questioned. Even more alarming, many give precisely the same answer as those who have never taken the relevant courses and have presumably never encountered the concepts relevant to a proper explanation. These students may have accumulated plenty of factual or subject matter knowledge, but they have not learned to think in a disciplined manner.Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future, Harvard Business Press, 2008
As synthesizers, people will need to be able to gather together information from disparate sources and put it together in ways that work for themselves and can be communicated to other persons. The synthesizing mind takes information from disparate sources, understands and evaluates that information objectively, and puts it together in ways that make sense to the synthesizer and also to other persons. Valuable in the past, the capacity to synthesize becomes every more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates.Synthesis requires us to put together elements that were originally discrete or disparate. Here are the most common kinds, along with some impressive illustrations.
• Narratives – The synthesizer puts material together into a coherent narrative. Examples range from the Bible to a contemporary history or social science textbook.
• Taxonomies – Materials are ordered in terms of salient characteristics. Consider the Dewey decimal system in the library, The Linnaean classification of plants and animals, a periodic table of the elements of the earth.
• Complex concepts – A newly stipulated concept can tie together or blend a range of phenomena. Charles Darwin achieved such a synthesis in his concept of natural selection; Sigmund Freud developed the concepts of the unconscious.
• Rules and aphorisms – Much of folk wisdom is captured and conveyed by short phrases, designed to be memorable and widely applicable. “Think first, act second.” “Don’t try to juggle too many balls at the same time.” “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
• Powerful metaphors, images, and themes – Individuals may bring concepts to life by my invoking metaphors. Darwin described evolution as a branching tree and speciation as a tangled bank; corporations create brands in words, graphics, and jingles.
• Embodiments without words – Powerful syntheses can also be embodied in works of art. Consider Picasso’s Guernica, in which the violent forces of the Spanish Civil war are captured in a single cubist-style mural; Michelangelo’s illustrations of Biblical events on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Syntheses exist as well in other arts: Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Stravinsky’s ballet Le scare du printemps, Martha Graham’s modernist re-creations of southwestern Native American rituals.
• Theories – Concepts can be amalgamated into a theory: Darwin’s theory of evolution combines the concepts of variation, competition, natural selection, and survival until reproduction; Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is built on the concepts of repression, infantile sexuality, free association, and the unconscious.Any effort to synthesize entails four loosely ordered components:
1. a goal – a statement or conception of what the synthesizer is trying to achieve
2. a starting point – an idea image or any previous work on which to build
3. selection of strategy, method, and approach
4. drafts and feedbackHoward Gardner, Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business Press, 2008
Metaphor – understanding one thing in terms of something else – is an important element of synthesis. In a time 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.“Everything you create is a representation of something else; in this sense, everything you create is enriched by metaphor,” writes Twyla Tharp, dancer and choreographer. “Boost your metaphor quotient (MQ) because in the creative process, MQ is as valuable as IQ.”
Metaphorical thinking is also important because it helps us understand others. 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.
Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Riverhead Books, 2006
