Why is it important to look at thought pieces like Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future, which really deals with describing positive, individual cognitive capabilities? In my view, this is an important (but often overlooked) aspect of understanding the driving forces behind organizational change. Let’s look at ethical principles as an example.

A previous post on the growing consensus on codes of conduct describes the work of several researchers (published in Harvard Business Review) who suggest that there are eight key principles that guide world-class ethical standards. These include:

Dignity principle: Respect the dignity of all people. Protect the health, safety, privacy and human rights of others; refrain from coercion; and adopt practices that enhance human development in the workplace, the marketplace and the community.

Citizenship principle: Act as responsible citizens of the community. Respect the law, protect public goods, cooperate with public authorities, avoid improper involvement in politics and government, and contribute to community betterment.

These principles are only meaningful to the extent that they are internalized (i.e., become operative and active parts of an individual’s mental models) and acted upon by members of the organization. The dignity principle comes alive via Gardner’s “respectful mind,” which notes and welcomes differences between human individuals and groups and seeks to work effectively with them. The citizenship principle would largely depend on development of Gardner’s “ethical mind,” which ponders the nature of one’s work and the needs of society.
One could make similar relationships between Gardner’s respectful and ethical minds and other CSR principles. Donna Wood describes the “Principle of Public Responsibility” for businesses, which states that businesses are responsible for outcomes related to their primary and secondary areas of involvement with society. An organization must be led by and composed of individuals with the cognitive capabilities described in the “ethical mind” to sort through the difficult and ambiguous territory related to this principle.

The critical point here is to look at living such principles as, in part, an exercise in architecting organizational activities and practices to develop the respectful and ethical minds. In his book, Gardner writes a bit about this in the concluding chapters. Developing these minds takes individual reflection (am I making progress, each year?); clear alignment on mission and purpose (do we have the same, positive goal?); and the presence of role models who live and reinforce respectful and ethical practices (how do high performers act?).

My reading of his insights also suggests that this is best done within the context of one’s professional discipline (e.g., marketing, sales, etc.). Excellence in the work products that are part of a profession is related to an individual’s development within Gardner’s other three minds: the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind and the creative mind. And to develop any of those is at least a 10-year effort (Gardner’s general benchmark) for deep understanding of a profession, trade or discipline. Thinking “ethically” as a marketing professional must incorporate a effective integration of the ethical viewpoint within the deep expertise of the professional capabilities that produce excellence in work effort.
When you look at the success cases of individuals who represent the best of socially responsible business practices, I suspect you will find clear evidence of that integration of respect, ethics and professional expertise.

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.