Gardner’s thinking is consistent with, and mirrors, our own experience with clients and client teams. We have found that the closest thing to “genius” solutions were consistently achieved when we were able to tap into what we call the “collective native intelligence” of the teams, and everyone in those teams, with which we have worked. We need to emphasize that neither Gardner nor we are speaking here in terms of the conventional dimensions of diversity. Our shared notion of leveraging multiple intelligences is more about approaching thinking with different frames of rigor or discipline in thinking than it is about thinking “Polish” or thinking “privileged.”
Gardner’s (and our) approach would not exclude such perspectives, but those dimensions are secondary to tackling solutions with a disciplined mind, or a synthesizing mind, or a creative mind, or a respectful mind, or an ethical mind, or best of all – all of these disciplines and more in the room. There is no doubt that a trained engineer will likely approach something differently than a trained artist or a skilled sailor. But consider the exponential possibilities of leveraging all three of those disciplines in one individual. Then multiply that trained mind impact by the number of persons on the team. That is the power of collective native intelligence harnessed to solving a problem or creating a new reality.
Factoring in the Improbable
You can’t know what you don’t know until you know you know it; but, by now, you should know enough to allow space for what you don’t know in your thinking. This statement aligns with the story of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his tale of The Black Swan. The man is a highly successful, options trader on Wall Street, retired. He has written several fascinating, informative, and challenging books in addition to The Black Swan: The impact of the Highly Improbable, Fooled by Randomness; The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, and Antifragile; Things that Gain from Disorder. They all deal with incorporating the unexpected into disciplined thinking.
While Danny Kahneman traffics in the probable, the knowable, and the certain, Taleb concerns himself, clearly, with what lives at the other end of the continuum of certainty. The two men have stretched the dynamics, art, science, and practice of thinking about thinking to wondrous new dimensions.
The men are as different as their theories. There’s even a bit of competitive tension in the air whenever they meet. To anyone familiar with Michael Lewis’ book The Undoing Project, such a push/pull of intellects mirrors Kahneman’s relationship with his long-time partner Amos Tversky. According to an account of one of such meeting between Nassim and Kahneman, posted by Jason Voss, CFA in Behavioral Finance, the blog of the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute –
“Taleb is well known for a parable he tells of a turkey (presumably in the United States) and of a turkey farmer. From the perspective of the turkey, the farmer is a wonderful character, providing endless food, adequate shelter, and ample opportunities for socializing with its kind — until the day the farmer slaughters the turkey for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Kahneman criticized this story by pointing out that Taleb places extreme emphasis on black swan events. After all, every turkey dies, but these turkeys actually have a very good life for all of their days. Kahneman also thought that an explanation for Taleb’s intense focus on black swan events was due to one of behavioral economics’ chief findings: anchoring. In other words, Taleb is a man with a hammer for whom most problems look like nails.”
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