Orbit Change Conversations

Vijay’s comment about how “a programmer’s way of thinking is highly structured, logical and methodical” reminded me of a book that I read recently, Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind”.

Daniel argues that the era of lawyers, accountants and software engineers is coming to an end. These professions won’t go away but will lose some of their sheen. He believes that we are in the midst of a transition from the Information Age to the “Conceptual Age”. Just like factory workers dominated the Industrial Age and knowledge workers dominated the Information Age, a set of people will dominate the Conceptual Age. These will be people who are comfortable with holistic, intuitive and non-linear reasoning. They will be “creators and empathizers”, “pattern recognizers and meaning makers”. All this means that a new set of right-brain directed professions like designers, inventors, teachers, counselors and storytellers will rule the roost.

It’s a persuasive argument, especially because he doesn’t denigrate the reductionist, analytical and functional left-brain thinking but calls for a better balance (hence the title “whole” new mind). He says that…

Left-brain-style thinking used to be the driver and right-brain-style thinking the passenger. Now R-directed Thinking is suddenly grabbing the wheel, stepping on the gas, and determining where we are going and how we’ll get there. L-Directed aptitudes – the sorts of things measured by the SAT and deployed by CPAs – are still necessary. But they’re no longer sufficient. Instead, the R-Directed aptitudes so often disdained and dismissed – artistry, empathy, taking the long view, pursuing the transcendent – will increasingly determine who soars and who stumbles. It’s a dizzying – but ultimately inspiring – change.

What does this change mean for us in the IT industry? Dan Pink talks of six essential right-directed aptitudes. I have translated them into six ways that this new world will impact us…

1. Differentiating our product, service or experience will depend on design (iPod obviously comes to mind.). This design has to be “beautiful, whimsical and emotionally engaging.
2. Storytelling will become important in influencing our colleagues. Fashioning a compelling narrative will be needed even in the workplace. I guess blogging will be a vehicle to do that.
3. “Metaphor-quotient”, that is being able to think in terms of metaphors, will be crucial for synthesizing the big-picture from the information and knowledge glut around us. In other words, synthesis will be more important than analysis.
4. Powers of empathy will be crucial to understanding customers. This will be important whether you are delivering a product, a service or an experience.
5. More and more learning will happen through play. Immersive worlds like Second Life and Neopets and virtual reality education (more affordable though diluted forms are appearing – see this news story about emotion-aware teaching software) are taking us there.
6. Happiness will come from finding meaning in life either through spirituality or by being part of something bigger than yourself. Antiheros like Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Linus Torvalds of Linux will become the norm.

New Paradigms, new worlds
Today if you want to build an online application, say for hosted business analytics software, you need more than technology. You also need to know sociology so that you can build a community and need to understand enough economics to monetize that community. This is not the traditional usability engineering or human-computer interface problem. It’s a different paradigm which, for want of a better word, I sometimes refer to as human computing. The future semantic web is a classic example of this. It’s as much of technology challenge as a sociology challenge.

Another way of thinking of this change is to see it as a marriage of Hollywood and Silicon Valley (or Bollywood and Bangalore). If you look around you, these hybrid worlds are already arriving.

Take gaming for instance. Some successful computer games, such as Sim City, Ultima Online and Everquest, are outselling Hollywood films. They are more emotionally engaging and immersive because they allow players to tamper with and change the action, creating their own characters and storylines.

Blogging, social networking, virtual worlds (like Second Life) and virtual education are other examples. These too are hybrid worlds that are at the intersection of traditional entertainment/media and computing. There is a lot of innovation happening at this intersection.

How would the software engineers fare in this emerging world?
Given all this change, a question to ask is: How would the software engineers fare in this emerging “high-touch, high-concept” world? Would they fade into the background like electrical engineers did after the power infrastructure was built-out? Or will they re-invent themselves to remain the torchbearers for the conceptual age? Could they even become the high-priests of the new age dominating the ranks of “creators and empathizers”, “pattern recognizers and meaning makers”?

I am cautiously optimistic. There are three reasons for this. First, despite the caricature that’s painted of geeky nerdy engineers, they are pretty good at collaboration (just look at Linux), believe in elegant design and certainly have the capacity to think conceptually. They are also creative, if you believe as I do that coding is a creative activity. What this says is that even today, a good software engineer has a reasonable level of R-Directed abilities.

Second, I think the field will invent itself. It has done so many times in the past. Just look at how programming languages have changed in the last thirty years. 70s was about COBOL, 80s was about C, 90s saw Java gain prominence, and now Perl/PHP/Python are coming to the fore. So there is a good history of dealing with change.

Finally, if you look at the nature of innovation itself, it’s changing and that change is being driven by the software folks. Open-source software, blogging and computer gaming is changing not just the ways in which the software, media and entertainment industries work but is helping people rethink how we organize education, healthcare, cities and, indeed, the political system.

Given all this, I would like to believe that in the new emerging world that Daniel Pink paints for us – a world of tacit roles which are not just knowledge-rich but also interaction-rich – the geeky nerdy folks will step-up to the challenge. Let me know what you think.

[Also, check-out Garr Reynolds wonderful post “From design to meaning: a whole new way of presenting?” on his Presentation Zen blog. Don’t miss the links to other sources at the end of his post.]

[Update: Some days later, I reflected on how the field of computer science will change in my post, Computer Science With a Soul.]

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