Leadership gurus claim that Great Leaders have several qualities. First, there are the charm-school virtues of charisma, courtesy, empathy, and emotional appropriateness. Leaders inspire people, so they should have visionary foresight and the ability to articulate a compelling direction, persuade others, motivate action, and manage expectations. Character figures into the mix, hence the need for values, ethics, trustworthiness, and the projection of an admirable image. Don’t forget all the stuff about discipline and self-mastery and, with it, calls for self-awareness, reflection on experience, maturity, and self-control. Great Leaders know their limits, so they know when to delegate, when to help, and how to influence with a silky touch. Finally, leaders are politically savvy, for they know the art of strategizing, networking, negotiating, and brokering deals. (Although most gurus fail to mention street-fighting political maneuvers; the grab for power is considered too unseemly for some reason.) The gurus would quibble with my choice of terms. But most would admit that these qualities are, in a nutshell, the “core” ones.

All that considered, there is a conspicuous absence … or at least an area of relative neglect. It’s the idea that leaders must actually demonstrate intelligence, analytical skill, and good judgement. Only recently have pop-leadership books come out that attempt to correct this blind spot. Previously, the gurus took it for granted that Great Leaders are smart because they didn’t want to insult their book-buying audience. That assumes too much. A powerful person with a full repertoire of leadership abilities except for an open and nimble mind is like the proverbial child with a loaded gun. Which one do you think is more dangerous?

Five Minds for the Future
by Howard Gardner (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), pp. xi, 196.

I plan to review a few of the books about leadership thinking skills in the coming year. A good place to start is Five Minds for the Future by the psychologist Howard Gardner. You might remember Gardner as the father of the theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1983). This is the idea that there is no singular, monolithic notion of intelligence—as most IQ theorists would have you believe—but instead there are different types of intelligence. For example, someone might have an intelligence that gives them an advantage in mathematics and logic, or they may have one that makes them better at musical creativity. I’m with Gardner on this. The so-called Intelligence Quotient is bankrupt as a scientific measure. For more about this, I highly recommend Stephen Murdoch’s book IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea (2007).

Gardner’s new book looks at five “broad uses of the mind” or “mental dispositions” that leaders should try to develop within themselves. These are not expert abilities nor narrow skills. Nor is this a new theory of intelligence. Gardner makes it clear that he’s describing fairly broad intellectual orientations. His choice of “minds” is contrasted with the myopic preoccupations found within the educational systems and workplaces of today. The former emphasizes rote learning, conformity, and ranking students according to their absorption of information. The latter tends to downplay the arts and humanities, as well as ignore the qualities needed to thrive in a diverse workplace. That means that intellectually enlightened leaders need to be able to anticipate and cope with resistance from those with conservative and faddish mindsets, as well as understand the risks inherent in investing too much in any one of the five “minds”.

Gardner starts with the disciplined mind. Becoming disciplined is not the same as becoming fluent in a subject area or body of information (”inert knowledge”). A discipline—be it scholarly or professional—is a way of thinking and set of intellectual habits. For example, to “think scientifically” involves a way of observing the world, asking the right questions, generating and scrutinizing new ideas, figuring out causal relationships, and drawing lessons from findings. Gardner claims that there are four steps to achieving a disciplined mind: (a.) figure out which topics and concepts are truly important; (b.) study the topics for a long, long time; (c.) genuinely understand the topic using several approaches, such as debate, graphic depictions, storytelling, and logical exposition; and (d.) “perform” based on that understanding, or learn more by putting an existing understanding to use. By developing this deep knowledge and “literacy”, a person become more curious and thinks about matters with greater flexibly. The goal is to steadily improve until becoming a master of a discipline and, ideally, more than one discipline.

The synthesizing mind is the “ability to knit together information from disparate sources into a coherent whole.” (p. 46) This involves being able to think with a tidy mind and focus on what’s important while adventuring through a large volume of complex knowledge. Gardner lists eight ways to synthesize information: narratives; taxonomies; complex concepts (i.e., concepts with several dimensions); rules and aphorisms; metaphors, images and themes; works of art; theories; and theories about theories (”metatheories”). Gardner regards interdisciplinary work as the ultimate form, whereby a person synthesizes ideas based on a deep understanding of two or more domains. We should avoid developing a laser intelligence (deep understand, little interdisciplinary curiosity) or searchlight intelligence (no depth of understanding, only interdisciplinary meandering). Again, Gardner hails the importance of looking at things from multiple perspectives while avoiding desultory thinking (leaping “from one half-baked idea to another”).

The creative mind comes up with genuinely novel and useful idea. These are ideas that are acknowledged as truly innovative by a broader group and, hence, influence the development of a domain of knowledge. Not only does a person need to first master a discipline or area of practice, but the broader cultural and institutional context needs to provide support and opportunity. According to Gardner, innovative ideas tend not to come from “eureka” moments, “thinking laterally” (a swipe at Edward de Bono), nor from solving well-defined problems. Moreover, many innovative ideas do not come from individuals toiling alone, but come from groups and potentially even diffuse networks. Gardner claims that corporations talk a lot of Big Talk in support of creativity but lack the will to follow through; as with most human collectives, there is a bias for conservatism and against radical change. I’d argue that Gardner is wrong to exclude small but meaningful innovations. Most acts of creativity come in this form and, indeed, the accumulation of small innovations can amount to something grand.

Next, Gardner talks about the respectful mind. Human are constantly detecting differences, assigning labels to distinctions, and interpreting based on those labels. Thinking respectfully involves being conscious of this process and being sympathetic and constructive towards others who are different from ourselves. This is more than just tolerance and political correctness, but is a deep understanding and collaboration with others. R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. (1999) does a much better job of describing this knowing respectfulness in his discussion of “diversity maturity”.

Whereas the respectful mind is an orientation towards others, the ethical mind is an orientation towards our primary roles in society. Gardner describes ethical thinking as striving to “do good” as a citizen and professional. This is a very nationalistic and communitarian notion of ethics. As Gardner puts it, the ethical orientation is “a conviction that one’s community should possess certain characteristics of which one is proud and a commitment personally to work towards the realization of the virtuous community.” (p. 129) This strikes me as a slack definition of ethics. I can think of many unethical things that can be justified by this orientation. Indeed, it’s very difficult to pin-down what sorts of things are ethical or non-ethical given this definition. Overall, the chapters about the respectful and ethical minds are the ones where Gardner’s argument really loses momentum.

Before I comment further on Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future, I’d like to discuss another book that adds a bit more detail to the picture.

The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking
by Roger Martin (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), pp. xii, 210.

Roger Martin’s book The Opposable Mind is devoted exclusively to the parallels between the synthesizing and creative minds. Gardner acknowledges these parallels but only in passing (pp. 98-100). Martin adds an extra wrinkle by claiming that many tricky business dilemmas come in the form of opposing (but not entirely satisfying) options. The leader with the opposable mind refuses to settle for one option or the other. Instead, synthesis and creativity are used to fashion a better solution that satisfies the desired customer-base. And that, purportedly, is the key to business success. To put it more succinctly: this book tries to tell how creative thinkers bridge inadequate business models to generate something new.

Martin starts with integrative thinking, the equivalent of Gardner’s synthesizing mind. Integrative thinkers “embrace the mess” that comes with solving complex problems in a holistic way, instead of simplifying problems into wieldy, better-known chunks. They can juggle a diverse array of ideas and explanations in their heads, in other words. Such thinkers perceive the world as full of systems of multi-directional, multi-causal relationships, as opposed to those who think in one-directional causal domino-chains. Solutions to problems aren’t conceived in a way that compartmentalizes ideas into bureaucratic specializations. The logic of zer0-sum games and either/or tradeoffs is not accepted. Integrative thinkers don’t treat prevailing ways of seeing and doing things as the one-best-way. They treat explanations and approaches as competing hypotheses and the raw material with which new hypotheses can be fashioned. This requires the integrative thinker to have enough self-awareness to separate personal beliefs from the stance taken on a particular issue. If so, that person will be sensitive to a wider variety of considerations that might lead to a solution to a tricky problem.

The second process (or “set of tools”) results in creative resolutions to complex problems. The first part is generative reasoning, which does not rely solely on inductive logic (developing a theory by inferring from observable patterns in reality) nor deductive logic (testing a pre-developed theory by comparing it to observable reality). Instead, it involves Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of abductive logic. This means starting with the known facts and carefully considering the factors that would explain such facts, then embarking on an iterative process of trial-and-error and theory development. It’s true that many solid empirical theories form this way, although Martin doesn’t go into much detail about how this plays out in practice. Second, there is a consideration of teleological causation; that is, not just detecting that one thing causes another thing to happen (i.e., material causation), but also asking why such a relationship does (or should) exist. Finally, assertive inquiry involves being open-minded while testing ideas with others and not lapsing into bullying advocacy and argument. Those familiar with probative dialogue methods will recognize this as a way of generating and scrutinizing ideas through open-minded, in-depth conversation. As Martin points out, all of this presumes that the thinker has the self-belief and time to develop creative resolutions.

There is much to agree with here. However, I have two reservations about Martin’s model.

First, apparent solutions to business problems don’t usually come in the form of two opposing but unsatisfying options. Some hack writers like to present business as a bunch of superficial trade-offs, such as “compete on either price or quality” or “cater to either the mass market or the lucrative niche”. All of the tricky problems in the worlds of business and government are not about such simplistic dichotomies. If Gardner were to chime-in on this debate, he’d probably agree. He suggests that the synthesizing mind usually bringing together multiple and diverse bodies of knowledge, not just the opposing arguments of feuding camps or off-the-rack solutions. The truly wicked problems are the ones with no apparent solution whatsoever, although various sources of knowledge can each offer a partial insight. That’s where integrative/synthesizing thinking is the most potent. Martin doesn’t offer much insight here, however.

Second, even if presented with two opposing but unsatisfying options, Martin doesn’t address some of the potential pitfalls of integrative thinking when it’s done badly. A major pitfall is the Goldie Locks syndrome, whereby a decision-maker splits the difference between options in an attempt to come up with a muddling and mediocre middle-way. Another example is the decision-maker who crafts a solution that tries to be all things to all people and, in so doing, satisfies no one (the joint-decision trap, a coinage of Fritz Scharpf; Scharpf, 1988). Or there are the attempts to integrate inherently incompatible schools of thought that paper over the underlying contradictions (usually with the help of jargon, vagueness, and blind-spots). I could go on. Integrating bodies of knowledge requires a wariness of such pitfalls. Gardner touches on this in his discussion of “lumpers”—people who compulsively link together diverse bits of information to the point of absurdity. He also talks about the problem of relativism—the view that competing ideas and values can not be judged as anything but equally valid or acceptable. However, Gardner too could have gone into more detail about the risks of interdisciplinary thinking and synthesis.

I also have a major reservation about Martin’s book in general. It reads like an article padded to book length with the help of verbose case examples of questionable fit. Indeed, that article would be “How Successful Leaders Think” in the June 2007 edition of Harvard Business Review. Count ’em: seven pages including illustrations. Few significant points are dropped in the article. The book, however, comes with a repetition that gets downright monotonous. Repeating yourself in a speech may help the audience remember key points. Repeating yourself ad nauseam without nuance in a book doesn’t quite serve the same function. It causes faces to frown. I’d like to coin a new term for this type of padded prose: the bookicle.

Gardner’s list of case examples is just as bad. I’m astounded at how often Amazon, Ebay, Google, General Electric, and Wikipedia are trotted out to justify some argument or another in business books. On the flip side, Worldcom, Arthur Anderson, Enron, and Nazis seem to be the handy cases that are used lazily to discredit an idea. Gardner’s list of examples includes these and a few others of this ilk. These aren’t so much “case” examples as they are “make-your-case” examples, to borrow a term from Corcoran et al. (2004); they’re the examples you use when you can’t actually be bothered to research more relevant and interesting ones.

My biggest reservation about Gardner’s book is the squishiness of the “minds”/”mental dispositions” idea. Martin is closer to the mark by looking at thinking skills, which tend to be a more identifiable set of intellectual techniques. I can think of several thinking skills that will provide genuine leaderships advantages in the future, including: (a.) design thinking, or the ability to conceive of new things of beauty, function, and meaning; (b.) visual thinking, or the ability to imagine and explain ideas by using visuals and words, instead of just words; and (c.) critical thinking, or the ability to scrutinize information and ideas instead of taking them at their face value. Perhaps I’m advocating something closer to Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind (2005), which includes chapters about synthesis (”symphony”) and respect (”empathy”), but also design thinking. The problem with Pink’s book is that it really looses the plot in the later chapters, more so than Five Minds for the Future.

In the final analysis, Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future and Martin’s The Opposable Mind have their moments but aren’t satisfying guidebooks to the future of leadership thinking. I’ve noticed that both books are prominently displayed in airport bookstores. Perhaps therein lies their real purpose: to encourage travelling leaders to think about thinking during otherwise mind-numbing flights.

Review By Peter Stoyko

Update (26.01.10)