Howard Gardner’s latest book — Five Minds for the Future — is a prescriptive thought piece by one of the world’s leading researchers in psychology and cognition. In the book, Gardner defines five “minds” — highly refined cognitive capabilities — that he suggests are critical for survival in a deeply connected world. (In the new connected world, “in the long run, it is not possible for parts of the world to thrive while others remain desperately poor and deeply frustrated,” he writes).

The five are:

• The disciplined mind — which has mastered at least one distinctive way of thinking (e.g., a profession, craft, etc.)
• The synthesizing mind — which take information from disparate sources, understands it, and reformulates it in a way that makes sense to the synthesizer and to others.
• The creating mind — which breaks new ground.
• The respectful mind — which notes and welcomes differences between human individuals and groups and seeks to work effectively with them
• The ethical mind — which ponders the nature of one’s work and the needs of society.

This is a fascinating avenue of research — and one which builds on a long-running project that Gardner and several distinguished psychology peers have been running for more than 10 years: The GoodWork Project. This is an effort to find examples of individuals and organizations which do work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners — and then understand how and why it works, to inspire more good work.