A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future
Forecasts for the Next 25 Years
THE FUTURIST, September-October 2002
Page 4.Breadth: The Intervals Between the Notes
Breadth is a quality of mind, the capacity to relate disparate facts to coherent theory, to fashion tactics that are part of a strategy, to act today in ways that are consistent with a studied view of the future.
No one person can know enough to send a team of people to the moon, in the sense that grandpa and grandma could know everything important about managing their corner grocery store. (The best of the old grocers virtually kept the inventory in their heads, but imagine trying to keep in your head the list of spare parts for the space shuttle.) So different kinds of people, with very different kinds of knowledge, skills, personalities, personal goals, and networks of friends and acquaintances, have to be brought together in organizations designed to transmute their separate expertise and their collective insights into wise day-to-day decisions in the service of a shared objective, together.
Breadth is not a contradiction of depth, but its complement. Everything really is related to everything else: The person who plumbs the depths of any specialty finds more and more connections with every other specialty. The astronomers who reach far back in time to postulate a big bang must in scholarly honesty ask the humanistic next questions: Why the bang? Who set it off? What does it mean? And so the experts come, by the circuitous route of pure reason, to speculations that can only be explorations of faith.
The Scientific Revolution and its younger siblings, the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution, were made possible by our capacity to divide into separate disciplines the proven methods of inquiry, and to retrieve from bins of manageable size and complication the knowledge we accumulated by observing, experimenting, and theorizing. But in the latter part of the twentieth century, we came to realize that most of our troubles stem from neglecting the interconnections of knowledge and the interdisciplinary character of all real-world problems.
Violinist Isaac Stern was once asked why all professional musicians seemed to be able to play the same notes in the same order, yet some sounded wonderful and others did not. Stern paused and scratched his head. "But it isn't the notes that are important," he objected. "It's the intervals between the notes." A wise comment, not only about music but about other forms of knowledge. It's not mainly our capacity to dig out "the facts," but rather the educated reason and practiced intuition to relate them to each other and arrange them in meaningful patterns, that makes the human brain something more than a data-collecting machine with a computerized memory.
Just the same, the executive leader is very likely to be unsuccessful unless he or she has, earlier in life, been a first-rate specialist. It really doesn't matter in what field. In the offbeat words of poet Charles Olson:
Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more about that than is possible to any other man. It doesn't matter whether it's Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast: One saturation job (it might take 14 years), and you're in, forever.
You don't leave behind the attitudes that served you so well when your primary task was to get to the bottom of whatever-it-was. The get-- it-all-together person needs above all to be good at judging whether the experts who stream through the executive office, creating a chronic condition of information entropy on the executive's desk, are getting to the bottom of their subjects. An executive who has never had personal experience with specialized research and analysis won't even know what competent expertise feels like. It's not a new idea. Liu Shao, writing about human relations management in China, said it 1,700 years ago: "You cannot recognize in another a quality you do not have yourself."
An Exciting Profession
Each of us has known some people who would pass the tests implied in what I have written about the generalist role, about integrative thinking, about making what hasn't happened before happen now. Indeed, in any successful effort, from a summer camp to a television show to a corporate merger to a peacetime alliance, you will find working generalists near the center of activity. They are the people who furnish most of the glue that holds people together and the imagination around which other people mobilize.
Most of them might even object at first if you were to call them leaders; they describe themselves, and their peers describe them, as camp counselors, artists, businesspeople, or diplomats. But their common talisman is their concern for the general outcome-and their willingness to do something about that concern.
Paradoxically, the leaders who listen most attentively to what the Declaration of Independence calls "the general opinion of mankind" may seem (to their peers, to the establishment, to the media, and even to members of the general public for whom they purport to speak and act) to be uttering heretical thoughts, prescribing for undiagnosed diseases, proposing bizarre solutions-- because others have not exercised the wider curiosity or done the integrative thinking that come more naturally to the generalist.
"Getting it all together" can be an exciting profession, but it can also be a vulnerable one. The first reaction to your good idea may recall that pungent line from a Ring Lardner story: "Shut up, he explained." The resistance to what has never been done before may remind the generalist of actor Peter Ustinov's claim that one of his grade-school teachers wrote on his report card, "Peter shows great originality, which must be curbed at all costs."
Each of us who presumes to the kind of leadership that welcomes innovation while it is still new has to try hard to think about what the Club of Rome called the problematique, the constantly changing general context. I mean this quite literally. None of us can expect to act on more than a tiny corner of the great complexity. But in our interrelated society, itself part of an uncompromisingly interdependent world, we have to think about the whole complexity in order to act relevantly on any part of it. A 1980 convention of futurists in Toronto summed up the generalist mandate in four nowfamous words: "Think Globally, Act Locally."
The message comes through, loud and clear, from the most prophetic of our contemporary public philosophers. In his book Managing in Turbulent Times, Peter Drucker poses the puzzle of pluralism: "Each institution pursues its own specific goal. But who then takes care of the common weal?" His answer (and mine) is the specialized professional who graduates into general leadership. "He does not cease to be a 'professional'; he must not cease to be one. But he acquires an additional dimension of understanding, additional vision, and the sense of responsibility for the survival and performance of the whole that distinguishes the manager from the subordinate and the citizen from the subject."
Scary as it is to be a citizen-leader so defined, we have to agree with John W. Gardner's exhortation in "The War of the Parts Against the Whole." This is a moment, he writes,
when the innumerable interests, organizations and groups that make up our national life must keep their part of the bargain with the society that gives them freedom, by working toward the common good. Right now. In this time of trouble. Their chances for long-term enjoyment of pluralism will be enhanced by a long-term commitment to the common good as we go through this difficult passage. At least for now, a little less pluribus, a lot more unum.
It's not an easy philosophy. But don't blame the messengers who bring the news; blame the delightful complexities and stimulating dynamics of a society in rapid transition. And be assured by one who has been there that the exhilaration usually exceeds the exhaustion. *
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