A Whole Strategy for Seeing, Thinking, and Leading

The arts and humanities teach us to see differently—to experience the world in a more holistic and imaginative way.

Modern life, which is dominated by bureaucracy and scientific thinking, requires us to think and act according to rational methods. What we mean by “rational” varies by setting and circumstance, but it usually includes the following considerations:

  • Following facts and data:
  • Thinking in hierarchy:
  • Requiring logical consistency:
  • Assessing problems step by step:
  • Determining causality:
  • Working in a division of labor:

This kind of thinking makes sense in specific, bounded ways. Thinking like this has enabled modern institutions to mobilize vast communities, assess masses of data, and produce high-value goods and services. Along the way, this mode of thinking has spurred endless invention and innovation. These modern techniques, as thinkers from Smith to Marx to Habermas have noted, have transformed civilization and nature. No force has ever been as revolution in human history than this rationality.

This way of thinking can be limiting as well. When rationality rules, people break problems down into coherent pieces, then assess those pieces and how different variables cause various outcomes. In any organization, most people are responsible for their piece of the whole—almost never for understanding the whole. As a result, the overarching moral issues rarely occupy people’s attention. The legitimacy of the whole operations are assumed.

The arts and humanities offer an approach to explore issues that get lost in the shuffle in modern rational society.

The arts and humanities teach us to:

  • Ask moral as well as logistical questions about all phases of an operation
  • Question the limited goals of organizations and their members
  • Look for invisible phenomena: << The humanities foster, a sensibility, for latency, and awareness that what seems hidden or absence completes the whole
  • Look for invisible connections
  • Embrace seemingly illogical—and even absurd—questions
  • Question the underlying basis of ideas and arrangements
  • Undermine the automatic, comfortable ways of thinking
  • Look for ways to “disrupt”
  • Embrace values that fall outside rational, self-seeking

Looking Forward