Sitting in the Middle
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 by John MaedaToday RISD Trustee Dick Haining sent me this link from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I have personally observed Daniel Pink’s message from his popular book A Whole New Mind have had a resounding din in a variety of sectors for the past few years. We know that right-brainedness is important, and yet our traditional K-12 educational system is gradually shifting society towards more left-brainedness due to the way that national and other standardized testing systems like the SAT grade younger people. It’s easy to measure how many math problems a child will get right; it’s not as easy to measure how well they understand or can emulate Caravaggio.
I now increasingly feel that it isn’t a matter of a preference for the left- or right-brained approach to an issue. Instead it’s a matter more of how well and how nimbly one can shift between their two hemispheres and come to a set of possible solutions that lean left (logic), right (feeling), and smack dab in the middle.
I’m certainly not alone in my comfort for the middle-brain approach. In the book Governance and Leadership by Richard Chait et al he names an extremely constructive mode of collaboration called “generative thinking.” Relatedly Roger Martin at the Rotman School refers to a mode of thought where “ambiguity is okay” as integrative thinking; David Kelley at Stanford refers to a kind of experiment-provoking line of breadth-first problem-solving as design thinking. Essentially the world is converging towards a divergent mode of thought — today we can do both. We can be an artist and an engineer; we can be an accountant and a graphic designer; we can be a computer programmer and a CEO; we can be one thing and another even when we’re using diametrically opposed thinking styles.
Given that I grew up in a large family where I often had to sit in the back seat squished in the middle “on the bump,” I am now glad that I was pre-conditioned to being a middle-ish kind of guy.








