Pink Is the New Black in the Systems Thinking World
By Janice Molloy
The systems thinking community is all abuzz about Daniel Pink. If you don't know him, he's the author of Free Agent Nati
on: The Future of Working for Yourself; A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future; and The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. He also writes articles for publications including Wired and the New York Times, and a public television special, "Daniel Pink: Living on the Right Side of the Brain," premiered on PBS this spring.
Since A Whole New Mind was released in 2005, FOPs (friends of Pegasus) have been extolling Pink's virtues. So after months of being wait-listed at the library, I finally got my hands on the book to see what all the excitement is about.
Seeing the Big Picture
I'll write about Pink's work in more depth sometime in the not-too-distant future, because, as his proponents point out, A Whole New Mind is chock full of fascinating material that is highly relevant to the work we do at Pegasus. In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here's a snippet from the chapter named "Symphony":
"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."
Pink continues: "[T]he Conceptual 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." He goes on to say, "Seeing the big picture is fast becoming a killer app in business. . . . 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" (from Working with Emotional Intelligence, Bantam, 1998).
Comments like these are obviously music to the ears of those of us who believe in the value of systems thinking for improving our organizations and our world. What do you think of Pink's perspective on the skills and abilities that will be crucial for success in the new millennium?
To Guide Your Own Discussions
Pink recently posted two discussion guides on his website, one for business and one for educators.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker.