Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guests are Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur. Dawna Markova is an inspirational speaker and writer, and is internationally known for her groundbreaking work in helping people learn their passion and live on purpose. As one of the editors of the Random Acts of Kindnes series, she helped launch a national movement to counter America’s crisis of violence. Angie McArthur is one of the creators of the Worldwide Women’s Web, a network formed in 2001 to retain women in corporate leadership roles.
Dawna and Angie together have written a new book called Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently—where they teach how to recognize our own mind patterns and map the talents of our teams, with a goal of embarking together on an aligned course of action.
With Sounds True, Dawna Markova has created the audio series The Open Mind, where she offers a complete seminar on six different learning patterns—how to recognize them and how to apply this system to yourself and others.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Dawna, Angie, and I spoke about intellectual diversity and why this is so important in our time, and what it might mean for our educational system to acknowledge that people learn and think differently. We also talked about different types of attention—focused, sorting, and open attention—and also three different processing styles—auditory, visual, and kinesthetic—and how this creates six different mind patterns, [as well as] what it might mean to know our own mind pattern and also discover the mind pattern of others. We talked about four different domains of thinking—analytic thinking, innovative thinking, relational thinking, and procedural thinking—and how we actually gain energy when we’re allowed to function in our natural domains. Finally, we talked about what makes someone a good collaborator, and the joy and wonder of discovering how to think with someone who thinks differently. Here’s my conversation with Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur:
Now, Dawna, I want to start off—because I’ve known you for a long time. We recorded the audio series The Open Mind together well over a decade ago. I know that now you’re in your 70s. You’ve written over 17 books. As I was doing a little online research, it said that you’re a long-term cancer survivor who was told that you had six months to live over 30 years ago—in and of itself a remarkable thing.
As you and I were catching up the other day, you mentioned to me that you recently asked yourself three questions—three questions about what might be unfinished for you in your life. I thought these questions were so beautiful and helpful. I wanted to start our conversation by you sharing with our listeners those three questions.
Dawna Markova: Well, I would love to do that because each time I share them, they are medicine for me and a compass for me. So, the questions—very simply—are:
What’s unfinished for me to give?
What’s unfinished for me to learn?
What’s unfinished for me to experience?
TS: How did you come to those three questions? The process inside that brought you there is interesting to me.
DM: I didn’t come to them. They came to me.
So, it was during one of my learning moments with cancer, which has come to me—I stopped counting—I think six times as a teacher. I actually died on an operating table. It was very traumatic. I was being wheeled from the operating room to the morgue by an orderly, and during that time that that was happening, I had the experience of falling upward. That’s what it felt like. I don’t know any other way to describe it.
There was a conversation, maybe. The word means “to turn toward.” So, there was a turning-towards between what some people would call my soul or my spirit or—I don’t know; it didn’t introduce itself—and it asked me those questions.
Actually, the first question it asked was, “Have you had enough joy?” I don’t know how old I was. I can’t remember that now. But, I was a lot younger than I am now and I said, “No, of course not.”
Then I had the awareness of how many moments I had been given to live and how few of those moments I had actually been living and fully present. Then there came the question, “What are you waiting for?” And then there came those three questions.
TS: Now, Dawna, I didn’t know that cancer has come to you six times. I’m curious to know: in those different cases, how [have] you emotionally made it through six different reappearances?
DM: Well, I don’t know that I make it through. I think of it as a teacher that comes to visit me. I’ve never been very good at winning fights—my sister always won the fights when we would struggle. So, when people would tell me cancer was an enemy and I had to fight the enemy, it didn’t make sense. I mean, I don’t fight when I battle with a mosquito. So, there was no way. It just wasn’t a zeitgeist that I could hold.
But, I love to learn. I’ve always engaged very deeply with my teachers. So, each time it has come, I’ve thought of it as a teacher—and a teaching and a learning. And I do have more confidence in myself about learning. The only test I’ve ever flunked is phys-ed. But, other tests I do quite well in. So, I don’t think of cancer as a test—but I do think of it as a learning experience.
TS: And then when these questions came to you—“What’s unfinished to give, to learn, and to experience?” —what are your current answers for those questions?
DM: Well, it would be very current. I mean, I would have to do it this hour because those questions are like a mantra for me.
What’s unfinished for me to give in this moment is an understanding of what I call “intellectual diversity” —an understanding of how we can recognize and reconcile our differences. That’s coming in the form of another form [that is] unfinished for me to give, [which] is that I’m passing on as much as I can the legacy of my learning and experiences to Angie, who I call “my daughter-in-love.” She is married to my son, and I am passing on to her what I know about writing and communicating with and through writing.
That’s also an experience because there is a—I don’t like the word “collaboration.” Really, I’m tired of it now that we’ve been publicizing a book about collaborative intelligence. But, there is an intelligence that has grown between us, and it has also grown each one of us individually. I have never experienced that before—not in this way.
So, that’s what’s unfinished for me to give, to experience, and to learn—is to—again and again, almost moment by moment—how to fully inhabit the moments that I have. And I’ve been practicing that for a long time.
TS: Well, before we leave that, tell me what you have learned about inhabiting our moments, your moments, this moment.
DM: I do a practice—I mean, I’ve been practicing this for decades, as so many of us have. I do a practice whenever I need to—which is very frequently—where I come back to my senses.
So, I come back and say—I call it “simple attention” —and I say out loud—because this works with how my mind processes information—just what I see without stories. So, I’m seeing a computer screen. I’m seeing the white paper on my desk.
Then, for me, the next thing is I bring my attention to what I’m hearing. I’m hearing the wind in the bamboo and I’m hearing the birds at the bird feeder and the chirping of the birds and the birds arguing.
Then, for me, the last one is what I’m actually feeling and sensing in my body. So, I’m tasting the tea on my lips and I’m feeling a kind of aching between my shoulder blades and I’m feeling this little gold-fishy feeling inside of my ribs.
That’s my particular sequence. Intellectual diversity [and my years of experience] would say that everybody sequences in a different way. But, those are the ways that I bring myself home or I think myself home—back into my senses.
TS: Now, I want to go into this idea of “intellectual diversity.” This is the topic of the book that you and Angie have co-written. I would say “collaborated,” but since you said you were sick of that word, I’m going to see if I can avoid it as much as possible.
DM: I’ll, [inaudible] the word, so you can use it.
TS: OK, yes. Intellectual diversity—you wrote a book called How Your Child Is Smart, and there’s a theme that runs through your work, which is this conviction that all people are smart in different ways. So, I want to talk about that and understand how you and Angie see these different kinds of smart—and unpack for me, if you will, both of you, this idea of intellectual diversity.
Angie, maybe you can share a little bit about how you orient towards this topic of intellectual diversity—why it’s important to you.
Angie McArthur: Oh, it’s a good question. I think we really seem to understand diversity when it comes to cultural differences, race differences. I grew up overseas, so that was sort of the lens with which I looked at the world. When I first got to know Dawna 19 years ago and this whole body of work around the different ways in which we actually think, I was absolutely fascinated.
I came out of McGill, graduating in communication theory. But, I never before understood on a cellular level what it [means] to appreciate and understand a person’s intelligence when they show up in a different way than you do.
So, for instance I tend to be a little quieter. I need a lot more space between my words and my thoughts. So, in meetings or in experiences or in school in the past, I may not have been the child with the answer the quickest. But, let me write my answer and I’d be right there.
So, I think what Dawna’s work really opened up for me was this whole understanding and all these ways in which we perceive differences in the world, and differences with one another—is that we label them prematurely. We make assumptions about people, and often those assumptions are not necessarily in the most positive light.
So, the child that fidgets a lot or the person that’s more quiet, or perhaps the person that sounds wishy-washy with their words—these are all ways in which we explore in the book that help you understand what is actually maybe going on for this person. With that understanding, you can actually perceive them in a new way—which is really the art form behind collaboration.
TS: As I was reading your new book, Collaborative Intelligence, what I noticed was that I kept taking different perspectives—perspectives that I’ve never had before—about how other people might think. It was incredibly mind-opening, actually.
To be honest, I also felt a little—what might the word be? “Ashamed” might be too strong, but sad that I have spent so much of my life not appreciating the differences in how other people are thinking—like kind of being in my own thought bubble, not getting it that this person’s coming from a totally different place.
So, talk a little bit about that—just that experience somebody might have. Like, wow.
And how many different kinds of thinking are people experiencing? Each person’s thinking in their own way—that we can really create different categories or types?
There’s a lot here. I know.
DM: I’m going to begin, though, with a story because stories are the way of the human brain getting the gestalt pull of it. Then I’ll answer you more directly.
When my grandmother would say goodbye to me, she would not pinch my cheeks like other grandmothers did or even hug me. She would pick up every fingertip and look at it very carefully. Then she would kiss it and she would say, “The marks at the end of your fingers are totally unique. Never before in all the history of humankind has there been another such as you—and never will there be.”
So, I grew up—because she loved me so exquisitely—with this understanding that one of the mysteries of life is to understand those fingerprints. In fact, one of my teachers—a man named Milton Erickson, who is an amazing, amazing master of clinical, medical hypnotherapy—he had me memorize my fingerprints. So, to this day, I can draw them.
The message I was getting was: Be with each person in a state of wonder about what [that] uniqueness is at the end of their reach, and what [I can] do to create the conditions that will bring it out so they can use it like an art form.
Now, we understand this in some forms. For instance, we’ve created musical instruments. We understand that a violin is different than a flute, and it plays music in a different way. We understand that someone who is excellent as a shortstop—I can’t believe I’m using baseball metaphors—has particular and unique capacities that someone who is a pitcher doesn’t have.
So, in sports and in the performing arts, we recognize difference. But in educational art, we don’t.
So, what my life quest has been about has been to help people to understand first of all how to recognize the unique ways their brains process information. Should they blow on the instrument or use a bow, or move around? What helps them open their attention? What helps them focus their attention?
And then, strategies for how to use the innate gifts and talents we were given to leave our fingerprints in the world.
So, that is my natural way of very relational, very nonlinear—Angie, why don’t you go ahead and answer it so people have some rational understanding of what I was saying relationally?
AM: [Laughs.] As Dawna and I dug into this topic thoroughly we really sort of concentrated on four different ways in which we can discover about another person that’ll enable us to understand. I love your insight about—you know, some of us do feel a little ashamed. I have felt that often in myself [about] prejudgments I’ve made around people or just looking at things in a close-minded way.
I think we have to have compassion because none of us were taught how to do this. We’re not taught how to actually look at people through a wide range—through a wide perception.
So, we sort of discuss in the book two different ways in which we can do that. One is the software of your mind and the other is the hardware of your mind.
So, Dawna’s life’s work is really around the hardware, which is all about understanding the different states of attention. As she was saying, it’s moving from focused attention—so, for some, moving will help them focus. For others, drawing or writing will help them focus. And yet, still for others, talking. The more they talk, the more energized they are.
Then, for others, the actual state of attention of opening your mind will be different. So, again, for some the more they move, the more receptive they become. For others, the more that they draw, the more receptive and open they become.
So, in meeting rooms, as we sit around tables and we have these very restricted ways in which we actually meet, it doesn’t really allow for this intellectual diversity to take place—because if you open up all the different ways in which we can relate to one another, which is up on our feet [and] using all these different materials—white boards—and allowing for people to have space between their thoughts. The more that we can break these very traditional patterns of how we meet—sit still and listen—it doesn’t necessarily meet actually many of our needs.
So, when we talk about the hardware of your mind, that’s what we’re really encouraging people to notice and pay attention to—is what really helps them pay attention and then shift that attention from a focused state to an open and receptive state. That’s going to be different for each person.
The second area that we talk a lot about is around thinking talents, which [are] the core innate talents that you bring to the world. This is sort of the software of your mind that Dawna was referring to.
Understanding this is really powerful, because without that language—I mean, language shapes our thoughts. So, if Dawna was in a meeting room and she just went on with stories or new ideas, and I perhaps had different thinking talents and was coming at something from a different perspective, I may use derogatory terms in my mind like, “Oh, she’s just a pie-in-the-sky thinker. Oh, she’s off on another story. She never seems to keep on point.” These are all negative ways in which we constantly perceive one another.
So, identifying thinking talents, recognizing them, and actually using them in a way in which it builds your capacity as a team—I mean, Dawna, when she’s telling a story, it can move a whole team forward like nothing else. So, it’s really identifying these different ways and then using them not only to expand how you’re thinking about an issue or a challenge, but also expand how you’re relating to one another.
TS: Now, let’s go into each of these a little bit more—the hardware and the software. Now, I’m interested with this idea of different states of attention. I didn’t quite understand why you call that “hardware.” Why is the way we’re paying attention likened to the hardware of our mind?
DM: Well, because unfortunately—or fortunately—people understand computer technology more than they do the neurological wiring of their own brilliant minds.
So, the hardware means it’s like the difference between an Apple and a different processing program—between an Apple and whatever the other kind is.
TS: Right. OK. I think I’m following with you. So, how we process what’s happening in front of us. Yes.
DM: Information comes in and your brain takes that experience and that information, and it breaks it up into what’s called an “engram.” An engram is a pattern. It stores a little bit here in this part of your brain and a little bit there in that part of your brain, and a little bit in the other part of your brain so [that] in case someone should club you over the head, maybe the wisdom or that experience will not be lost to our collective intelligence. Maybe some of it will be saved. At least that’s my story as to why we split up experience instead of storing the memory of this phone call all in one place when we hang up. Each of the three of us will store it in different places in our brain.
TS: And then this whole area just even of attention and unpacking that a little bit—people talk a lot about attention in one way. They talk about it as focused attention. I hear so many people talk about, “You know, what matters is what you pay attention to. Mindfulness is the art of paying attention.” But, they’re all talking about focusing. What I thought was so interesting in reading Collaborative Intelligence is your emphasis on these three different types of attention: focused attention, sorting attention, and open attention.
So, talk about these three different types of attention.
DM: I’ll do it briefly, and then Angie—if you want to add something.
So, attention is [literally] the way the brain uses its attention to grow new neurological tissue, which is kind of interesting. But also, intelligence is the way we direct, we open, we metabolize the information that comes into us and comes out of us.
So, I’m going to use you as an example—although you may not like this. But anyway: you and Donald Trump both process information using the same engram. You both use words first—
TS: Dawna, I thought we were friends! What’s happening here?
We are friends. OK. Let’s keep going. OK.
DM: —to information, for both of you, helps you really get to details and the point and become—I hate using this word for Donald Trump—articulate. You can articulate. You can talk easily and clearly as long as I’ve known you.
You then both—as your mind begins to open a little bit more—when your brain is very focused, your brain is producing mostly beta waves. Details. As your mind opens a little more or your attention opens a little more, your brains produce primarily alpha waves. Alpha waves kind of feel like you’re here and not here. You’re here, and yet gone.
Kinesthetic information for you—what you feel and sense in your body—is what helps your brain begin to open into this dual state of mind.
I’m not going to even talk about Donald Trump because it makes me throw up.
OK. The third state—when your mind is really open [and] your brain is producing mostly theta waves. In that, there’s big, big spaces between the thoughts. When we meditate, our brains shift into theta waves. In hypnosis, our brains produce more theta waves. Because there’s so many spaces between the thoughts, we can receive ourselves. We can receive guidance. We can receive our imagination. We can receive each other. We become very porous, very permeable.
Donald Trump doesn’t ever do that. He never lets his mind get that wide. He doesn’t produce theta waves.
So, there’s two different people [that are] the same. You could say one violin that’s painted red, white, and blue and playing “Hee-Haw,” and one that’s playing Mozart.
TS: I’m following you. This is working for me. I’m feeling all right about this. Yes.
DM: So, their difference—and the more art you’ve spent, as long as I’ve known you—building this capacity, this muscle, to become more and more permanent, as well as this exquisite auditory focus you have always had—this ability to be so incisive with language and precise with language. And then your mind goes big and wide, and you take it and listen much more deeply than one would expect. Then it goes wider, and you can feel and see the whole of something.
TS: So, you’re talking about one type of hardware configuration—the type of hardware configuration that I share with Donald Trump, being used for different ends. In your work, you identify six different types of possible hardware. One thing I’d love to know is how you came up with this system, Dawna—how you came up with these six different types.
DM: Great question. We go back a long time, to when I was in my twenties. I was working in Harlem with the kids that nobody else could teach. I was also getting a PhD in cognitive psychology and neuroscience—although they didn’t call it [that] then, but that’s what it was.
There was a very tall, skinny, weird guy named E. Roy John at NYU who couldn’t relate to a flea, but he had taken a computer—an electroencephalogram—and created this equipment called the QB Computer. With it, we could hook a person up with electrodes and watch how their brain fired when they were being given different tasks.
So, I would take kids I was working with in Harlem that nobody else could teach that had rat bites all over their faces, and somehow I taught them to read. Then I’d bring them over to E. Roy John’s lab and hook them up, and discover what would happen in their brain as I would give them visual information or phonics—auditory information—or move them around.
So, it was like having a mirror to the mind that I had never seen and we had never used in that way. So, that’s how I first came up with it.
I only in life ever—I can’t sing or throw a ball—but it has been that I can teach pretty much anybody anything. So, I wouldn’t know how I was teaching these kids, but when we hooked them up to the equipment, we began to see why one kid could learn with phonics, but another kid I had to trace it on their hands.
TS: So, you came up with these six different mind patterns. Is it your experience that everybody fits neatly into one of these six patterns?
DM: Yes. I don’t—
TS: That’s a pretty strong claim. That’s a strong claim.
DM: I know. There’s almost nothing definitively—or the same way twice. Because that just seems to be—we only have so many stringed instruments, and only so many wind instruments. There could be—I don’t know. Angie may discover something totally different. You may discover there’s 12 or there’s nuances.
In using the term “kinesthetic,” I’m lumping together taste and smell and movement and experience. Well, somebody may be—my husband is very olfactory. He’s very kinesthetic. But, he has the most brilliant nose.
So, we could make more. But, it seems complex enough as it is for people to understand even that there’s two different ways of learning and communicating, let alone that there’s more than six.
TS: OK. Six different mind patterns. Is it possible to introduce to our listeners these six patterns in a relatively straightforward way?
DM: We will use my collaborator.
AM: So, as Dawna mentioned, the three different states of attention—so, the first one is focus. That’s where you’re paying attention [and] where your mind is handling a lot of organized detail at the same time.
The second state of attention is where your mind is sorting or digesting information. This may feel like confusion.
Then the third state is where you’re very open, you’re very receptive. This is where insight happens, ideas are generated. This is where you solve that problem that you’ve been dying to solve, and it just happened out of the blue. You didn’t even intentionally try to think about that problem.
So, those are the three different states of attention. Then we have the three triggers for the way we take in the world. Kinesthetic, as Dawna said, which is all movement, smell, hands-on experiences. And then auditory—listening, talking. And then visual, which is obviously seeing.
So, when you take the three different triggers and each one of these triggers will put different people into a different state of attention. So, as Dawna was describing you, she was saying that for you first, auditory triggers you into a very focused state of attention.
Then, kinesthetic would help you sort. So, you may find yourself pacing— [it] will actually help you come to a decision quicker.
Last would be visual—that maybe where you see a painting on the wall and then it’ll inspire a new idea in you. Or, if you close your eyes and have an image pop into your mind.
And Dawna would be different. For her, visual information triggers her focused state of attention. Second would be auditory. So, that’s where she moves through confusion.
So, in writing this book together, she talks through every idea [and] every concept with me. It sounds like she’s always weighing two options. “Should we do it this way or should we do it that way?” That’s sort of auditorily working through confusion.
Last would be kinesthetic, which is why she said as a child, gym class was the only class she failed—because for her, kinesthetic is sacred. To be hugged or to be moving—for her, it generates a lot of ideas.
It’s also much more private than it is for someone like myself, where for me, kinesthetic movement actually triggers me into a focused state. So, as a child, I was actually scolded for trying to do my homework hanging upside down on the monkey bars. To me, that made perfect sense. The more I could move, the more alert I was and the more I was able to listen to the teacher.
So, that’s where we get the six different patterns from.
TS: OK. Now, in the book, you offer people various kinds of self-tests and ways that they can recognize which of the six mind patterns are theirs—which belong to them. But, is there a way that you could briefly help people figure out which of these six is [them?] How do I figure that out?
DM: I would hope—and Angie could probably give you a very pithy way—I would hope nobody figures themselves out, because love and healing are evolutionary acts. When people fall in love, they’re in a state of wonder with themself or with another person. They’re constantly discovering something new.
If I could go back in time, I would take away the letters. What I want is people to be in a state of discover with themself—a kind of state of, “Oh! So, that’s why before I go to sleep, I have to have it totally silent.” Or, “Oh, so that’s why it’s painful for me to make direct eye contact. Oh, so that’s why, when I touch my darling, she seems to melt. Oh, so that’s why I touch this person and they cringe.”
So, that’s my own legacy issue—that I want people to constantly be in a state of discovery with themselves and with each other—and not to fall into the letters.
However, Angie? [Laughs.]
AM: Well, I think what becomes important—especially as you’re working with other people, and even within the collaborative unit of the family—is that when you’re stuck in one channel—people often say, “Gosh, he just doesn’t listen to me,” or, “Why does he move all the time?” is that instead of trying things the same way is to shift how you’re doing it. Even going on a walk with someone and having those discussions that you’ve not been able to have sitting down will open up a different state of attention.
So, I think as what Dawna says, being in a constant state of curiosity with yourself is by fact the best test—noticing what really does help you focus. And then instead of attributing stories around it when you can’t focus, shift what you are doing. If you’re on a long conference call and you find yourself spacing out, get up and walk around the room. That may actually wake you up. Or, get to a white board and draw images as you’re talking.
So, it’s all just a grand experiment. We do offer some questions that may evoke people into understanding more about their own minds, and that’s on the website cqthebook.com. It’s just available for anyone to go ahead and take the quiz. So, we have sort of tried to distill it down into some very simple questions for people.
DM: So, here I have a pithy answer: David, my son and Angie’s husband, took my life work and translated it into an app that’s for free [and] that’s available on the iTunes store that’s called Smart Spark. It helps a parent understand both the way their own mind processes information and the way a child’s mind processes information.
But, there’s no one that says you can’t use that app with yourself and a partner, with yourself and a boss. You can use it with anyone. It’s exquisite, and it tells you not only how to understand the letters and how your mind processes, but how to actually use that information with different instruments.
TS: Now, Dawna, when you’re saying “the letters,” you mean whether you’re auditory, visual, or kinesthetic, and how you’ve named these six different mind patterns? Yes. That’s helpful. So, that’s what you mean by that. Yes.
Well, I think I’m glad you mentioned the app, because I noticed—as much as my type might be obvious from the outside to identify, as I was thinking about people in my life—people on the leadership team here at Sounds True and other friends of mine, it wasn’t obvious to me which type they were. I thought, “I’m going to have to really dig in a little bit in order to understand that.”
DM: Yes. One of the things that Angie created for when we would work with leadership teams is—we call it “The Operating Manual.” Each person goes around the table and names—as everybody scribbles rapidly— “If you want to communicate well with me, here’s what you can do. If you want to treat me well, here’s what you can do. If you’re pissed at me, here’s what you can do.”
So, everything they could think—this is what energizes. Everything they could think that they knew about themselves, they would name it, someone else would write it. It would be bound together in a handbook.
This is kind of common sense, right? It’s wonderful and exquisite that you would want to understand other people as much as you do and be as dedicated as you are—as I know you are, to collaboration. But, this is a simple way that anybody can do without anything ornate. And it doesn’t cost anything.
TS: Now, you mentioned, Angie, that there’s two aspects to understanding these [intellectually] diverse differences. There’s the hardware and the software. And we’ve talked a little bit about the different states of attention—the hardware part.
On the software part, you mentioned these four different kinds of thinking. So, tell us a little bit about that—thinking talents.
AM: Right. Well, there’s 34 different thinking talents. What these do is really offer us insight into what energizes your mind. We don’t know if it’s nature or nurture—how these were developed. But, what they do is [they] really [help] you understand where a person is coming from.
So, each of us have about five to eight talents. We’ve organized them into four domains of thinking, which is analytic, procedural, innovative, and relational. So, each of the 34 thinking talents are organized into these four different domains.
So, you have someone like Dawna, who has a lot of innovative and a lot of relational thinking talents. So, if I’m preparing for a meeting with her, just knowing that will enable me to start from where she’s coming from. If I go in with a lot of analytic thinking [and] a lot of logic behind things, she’s probably going to get checked out or a little bit bored.
So, understanding your thinking talents—I mean, we live in an age of burnout. So, the only antidote that we know to burnout is that, by using your thinking talents, you actually energize your mind. So, the more that Dawna—or myself or you—each of us know and have identified our thinking talents, and we can encourage each other to use them and resource one another, the better off we’ll be.
It’s something that’s very counter-intuitive in this culture. We think that we have to be good at everything. But in fact, we can actually create what we call “thinking partnerships” —which is, in essence, what Dawna and I did to write this book.
So, she has a lot of innovative and a lot of relational thinking talents. I have a lot of analytic and innovative thinking talents. So, she can resource me for areas in which she has a blind spot in her thinking—and vice versa for me.
So, the thinking talents just give us a language—a way to recognize one another and the thinking that we actually bring into a team, a system, a book, a creative process—and then use it on behalf of that talent, that project; on behalf of the thinking.
TS: Again, I’m curious about the genesis of the model, because I found this very useful. I thought of people on the leadership team, and how we have some people who are quite procedural—and how I’m high on the innovative side. Sometimes, there can be conflict from high innovation and, “Could we please be process-oriented or procedural,” or dot our I’s, cross our T’s, and just how understanding, “Oh, we have different kinds of thinking talent here that we’re bringing to this problem.” I thought that was so useful. So useful.
So, how did you come up with this model of these four different domains of thinking?
DM: Well, it actually was—I was in Vermont. This was right after I did The Open Mind tape series for you, Tami. I was living in Vermont, and the phone rang. I picked it up—which I almost never do—and there was this man who said, “Hello, my name is Ned Herrmann. I read your book called The Open Mind, and listened to the tape series. I’m fascinated. I’ve learned so much about learning from reading your book.”
Well, it turns out that Ned Herrmann was on the West Coast. He was director of training for GE. At the time, he was in his late seventies, I think. What began was this long conversation that when on and on and on until he died. He had used this same equipment—that QB Computer. But, with that equipment in California—as I was working with it with kids in New York—we were each discovering something very different. He was looking for the software.
What we both recognized was that the human brain is an energy junkie. Just doing your emails drains a huge amount of glucose from your system. So, my question was: there has to be some way that the brain energizes itself. It doesn’t make sense for nature to create a brain and have it just be a drain, so to speak.
So, Ned and I would have long conversations about that. He was convinced that these four different ways of approaching a problem were some key to that. Later on, he then started the Creative Mind Institute and he developed the Brain Dominance Inventory. His daughter did a huge amount of work—which she’s still doing, actually. And the book The Creative Brain is a wonderful, wonderful book.
I went on and then met some people at the Gallup Institute. I was still searching this question. It wouldn’t leave me alone. A man named Marcus Buckingham, who I never met—but Donald Clifton, who was their researcher, talked about “signature strengths.” What they were talking about was there were ways of thinking that literally gave the person energy and they didn’t burn out. It was like, “Bingo.”
So, I took their signature strengths, and we were working with leadership teams all around the world at the time. So, in working with those teams we modified—because we worked with teams that weren’t American; we worked with more women than men.
So, we modified some of what they called signature strengths, and we called them “thinking talents.” Then, when I would hook them up to the QB Computer, what I would see was people lighting up. Lighting up is an indication—if you see someone talk about something and they’re very excited about it, that they could talk about it forever, they literally light up because they’re literally generating energy.
So, that’s the root—the origin—of the work we call thinking talents.
TS: Now, in terms of this idea of preventing burnout—is what you’re saying that, if I’m high innovative—let’s say, for example—and low procedural, that it’s OK for me to spend most of my time innovating and coming up with new ideas and envisioning and things like that? I shouldn’t put myself in a procedural role? I don’t have to worry about it? I don’t have to become balanced and—?
DM: Exactly.
TS: I don’t! I don’t have to develop these skills?
DM: You do not have to. Even if I didn’t adore you, I would tell you you don’t have to. Every finger on the hand is different. The index finger points. The thumb doesn’t have to point—unless you’re a political candidate.
So, we’re made to have these differences so we can support one another. If I don’t have analytic and procedural thinking talents, I don’t have to be able to do everything. I may have skills and I do have skills—I have two PhDs, I have a lot of skills in analytic thinking. But, it drains me every time I think analytically.
But, it’s so much more exquisite when I call Angie and go, “How did you think about that? Why are you so juiced about talking about the structure of the book? That’s the most boring part.”
So, this is why we need each other.
TS: Part of what I think is revolutionary here is getting us out of this idea that—as a leader, especially—you’re supposed to somehow be gifted in all these different kinds of areas instead of just saying, “Wow! I actually need to rope myself to these other people, because I’m only gifted in this one small section.” There’s a humility in that that I think is a pretty big shift.
DM: Absolutely. And the amount of money that corporations use to train people to strengthen their weakness—when I think about how many people could eat or learn or do anything with that amount of money, it doesn’t make any sense because all we do is we practice mediocrity that way.
TS: Now, [Dawna], you mentioned earlier in our conversation how in sports and when it comes to putting an orchestra together, it’s clear that people have different talents. But, in education, we’re trying to educate people all as if we’re the same. So, why is it that education has been so slow to pick up on this idea of intellectual diversity that you’re talking about?
DM: Oh, I love that question so much. I don’t know. I mean—on a deep level, the way that I always hear you, it’s as if I have ears in my heart.
I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I know the pragmatic things I’m told. And I’ve given keynote speeches for superintendents, teachers, parents. What they always say is, “Well, you can’t expect one teacher to teach 32 children in a different way.” And I go, “You can’t? Why not?”
But, the assumption we’ve had is that learning means pouring into an empty vessel. The word is educere, which is supposedly the root of “education,” maybe. And educere means “to train,” as in horses.
So, our educational system is based on that training model of, “I am big. I know stuff. I’m going to put it in the head of this little kid.”
But, educare—which may be the root—means “to lead out that which is within.” I think that there is a shift that is happening, because so much information is available to so many kids in so many different ways—that we are shifting from educere to educare.
But, you have teachers’ unions, you have infrastructure, you have Ritalin—you have Strattera, Concerta. You have so many people that are vested in our attachment to pathology, our studying the hole and not the donut.
I just grieve. I just grieve. I just grieve. I don’t know how to answer your question without grieving.
AM: And what we did is we answered it in a different way. I think, like anything, when the problem is so big and so immense and so systemic, what we did was try to create tools, languages, Dawna’s book How Your Child Is Smart—is offer the parents and enable the kids with a language [and] a way to express that the ways in which they know they’re smart.
So, when they get stuck in school or when they get stuck with a certain coach, they have a way to express what they need in order to learn. So, the whole methodology is empowering the child with that language, with that understanding so every time that they get stuck, they’re not saying, “Oh gosh, I’m stupid,” or, “Oh gosh, I can’t learn,” or, “Oh darn, I have a bad teacher.” That’s just not helpful.
But, what is helpful is to give them that language—that understanding—and build that muscle of how they do learn, and use it in all different domains of life. So, if they’re really good at soccer, help them understand why [they are] good at soccer. What are they doing in soccer where it’s easy for them to learn? Then translate that into an area of school where they’re challenged—in math. So, helping them—Dawna uses this great word, “de-compartmentalize” —from one area of life where they’re successful, and create and use their success formula in an area in which they’re challenged.
So, instead of being overwhelmed by the huge, big problem of education in the world, it’s been our mission and our way of really enabling every child and parent to have that language. I think that’s the best we can do at this moment.
TS: One of the things that I was reflecting on as I was reading Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently was I was thinking about different criticisms that I have about various people and the way they think compared to the fabulous way that I think. So, I was thinking about these criticisms, and I was thinking, “Huh. I could use those criticisms as a gateway to understanding what their different gifts are than mine.‘Oh, they’ve got these different gifts.’” I wonder if you could talk about that, and what some of the common criticisms we might have about others that might help us if we look into it—appreciate how they’re different from us.
DM: Angie, you take this one. I love hearing you do this.
AM: Well, I think it’s just so natural. Anyone who shows up in a different way, we use derogatory terms. It not only happens in teams on the work front, but also on the home front within families. My husband and I are very different. So, if I didn’t know that reliability was a thinking talent of his, I would say he’s over-managing everything. [Laughs.]
So, wherever your triggers are, it’s an opportunity to open your mind and go, “Huh. I wonder who I know in my world that actually may have that as a talent.” When it’s showing up in a negative light, use it as a question—an insight, a way to say, “Huh. I wonder why. I wonder what is going on that that is a trigger for me.”
DM: I study a lot of Jungian everything. I love the concept of the shadow. There used to be a program called The Shadow— “ [The Shadow] knows . . .”
But, people that will not acknowledge that they have any talents in thinking whatsoever—they will say, “Well, it’s true I talk a lot. But what good is that?” Or, one woman from Chrysler Motors who had the most phenomenal sense of humor. She kept it hidden, because she was in the CFO’s department and she was supposed to be serious. She couldn’t imagine—she just could not conceive of the fact that humor was a thinking talent.
Well, my son has humor as a thinking talent. I was always told in school that he was a wiseass. He can make humor out of anything. Humor is medicine. I never would have survived without David’s humor.
So, it becomes completely fascinating to look in our shadow or listen to our shadow, or feel and fumble in our shadow, and find [if it’s] possible that there is a gem there. When I lived in New York, we used to have a safe that you put in the refrigerator. It looked like a moldy cabbage. You would take your jewels and pop open this plastic moldy cabbage, put your jewels inside, then put it in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator—thinking that any burglar that came into your apartment would never even want to touch this moldy cabbage, let alone think to open it up.
Well, to me, the spiritual voyage—if you will—is to find that moldy cabbage and hold it in hands that are tender and curious enough that you’re willing to open it up and find the jewels that are in it.
TS: Now, you both work in a lot of corporations—with high-powered leaders of various kinds. I’m wondering: have you seen a common pattern that you would say is a blind spot in many leaders about a certain type of thinking pattern? Like, “This is the type of thinking pattern that’s often not well respected, but needs to be?”
DM: Well, I’ll answer it first and then Angie can.
To me, it isn’t a type so much as it is gender-related—number one. It is—to quote a man who is a CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, and was my singing partner for quite some time—he thought that asking questions—besides, “What are we having for lunch?” I don’t mean questions like that. I mean opening questions like you asked. He thought that was weakness. He thought that using metaphor—which I’ve used probably eight trillion times since we began talking—was irrelevant [and] that you needed to get to the point.
So, in other words, he honored rational thinking—that analytic and procedural thinking. Most of the senior leaders that I worked with—not all—that was true for them. When they came to someone who was a high collaborative leader and had high relational intelligence—so, they would ask a question, “But what about the people in Cincinnati? How are we going to explain this to them?” there was an eye-rolling, which was a signal that that was an irrelevant question. So, the people that are relational geniuses are usually very low on the totem pole and rarely get to be on boards, rarely get to be at the level of senior leaders.
I would love to say hopefully this is changing. I don’t think it is. I don’t.
There’s 14 percent—because of the work of one woman. There’s 14 percent of women who are high-relational, collaborative thinkers on the boards of corporations in Europe. Fourteen percent!
TS: And your point in bringing that up is?
DM: We are desperately in need of—I mean, we’re not going to survive. We’re desperately in need—whether it’s in our healing our spirituality, or education—of being able to think with each other and not have to kill each other, and make each other into black, dark, the bad guys.
So, when someone asks a question that opens everybody’s mind, that should be taken in reverence.
TS: OK. So, now I’m going to just ask this question in a different way. But, what do you think makes a leader a good collaborator? Or, we could even just say more broadly: what makes someone a good collaborator?
DM: Well, I defer to Angie, because—
AM: Well, I think it’s a lot of what we’ve been talking about in different ways—a real ability to step back from our own assumptions and perceive people from a new way. The word “respect” comes from the root respicere, which means “to see each other [again] as if for the first time.”
I think the leaders that we’ve worked with that have this incredible ability to constantly look at people with respect [and] in a new way, and then encourage that diversity. We’re not talking just even in terms of thinking diversity. We’re also talking across age groups. I think it’s a phenomenal thing that Dawna, at 72, is willing to write a book with someone 23 years her [junior]. Collaboration happens across all different sectors.
So, sort of a willingness to open your mind and to, “Who can I collaborate with?” and, “Who can I learn from?” A sort of questing of that constant desire to want to learn and want to engage with people, and be brave to speak when things are going too much in one way.
We tend to hire people who think just like us. So, a lot of leaders that we’ve worked with that hire people who are very different than them and think through problems in a very different way than them—they’re seeing results that they’ve never been able to see before.
I just recently got an email from a very courageous man, who said, “I came off Wall Street at age 32 and fully retired. I didn’t need people then. But, the next step in my life I actually really do need people.” And he’s being very, very courageous in wanting to really understand, “What does it mean to think relationally?”
So, it’s that type of mind that I think leadership is demanding of all of us, because these problems that we’re seeing—these challenges that we’re all facing—are too complex.
DM: I think I would add one thing. Angie is brilliant at asking different kinds of questions. I think it’s because she grew up in the Mideast. I don’t know the reason. But, all I know is that writing a book with me—who is supposed to be an expert in this field, and who can be a very crotchety old lady, and is sure that know things right—and coming to one of those points where I go, “This is the way it will be.” Angie turns this kind of— “ green velvet” is what I call it—where she will ask me a question. She will ask an innovative question.
She says, “That’s great, Dawna. I think that’s wonderful. Have you thought about the structure we’ve created?” She’ll just go through the innovative questions. She’ll go through the structural questions, the procedural questions, the analytics questions. She’ll take me all the way around the wheel until I’m like putty in her hands.
What she does is she bridges with questions, because she understand different ways of asking questions. Most of us bond with questions, but we don’t know how to bridge with them. So, it’s, “Oh, you like the Red Sox? I like the Red Sox. Isn’t that great. La la la.”
You do the same thing, Tami. As many years as I have observed you and listened to you, you do exactly the same thing. You will ask an analytic question, then you’ll ask a relational question. It behooves each of us to learn how to bridge with our inquiry to one another.
TS: This topic of intellectual diversity—if listeners are interested in exploring it more deeply, I highly recommend the book Collaborative Intelligence: [Thinking with People Who Think Differently], by Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur—and also the audio series with Dawna Markova, called The Open Mind, in which she introduces the letters—the six different types of thinking patterns [and] working with the three different qualities of attention: kinesthetic, visual, and audio learning. [This was] the program that we recorded many years ago, in which I got to know Dawna.
But, here as we end, what I wanted to talk about—which is, if you will, the joy of opening your mind and seeing the world really, truly through another person’s lens—something you’ve never seen before. It’s like, “Oh, I’ve been in my own bubble and there’s something outside the bubble.” I mentioned how there could be this quality of “shame” —like, “Where have I been? I didn’t realize it.” But, there’s also this incredible joy and release of energy and sense of new possibility.
I wanted to end on that note, and really have you each comment on that—and how that plays out in your own life.
DM: Well, I think the most difficult state, actually, for the Western mind—I know about the Western mind—is confusion. If you say, “I’m confused,” people come from out of the cracks of the walls to help you fix and solve your confusion. But, if you allow your attention to widen, confusion becomes curiosity—and curiosity becomes this exquisite state of soul called wonder. Wonder leads us to discovery.
So, for me, to be with one another in this state of wonder—this state of discovery—it’s the deepest and widest power that the human mind can experience.
TS: Beautiful. Angie?
AM: Well, you used the word “hopeful,” and I love that because I feel that. I am so excited about what this book has done for me personally. Also, the reaction that we’re getting from people out in the world—I think people are hungry for this. They really, really do want to learn a new way to think with one another. They want to learn how to invite new ideas in. They want to learn how to speak and understand in a different language—and by “language,” I mean intellectual diversity.
Where I get a lot of hope is—when the book launched and I was going and doing speaking events, out of the blue tons of Millennials came. I love that, because it was this desire to be understood. They were like, “I want to know how to collaborate with this 65-year-old boss that I’m now having issues with.” It was, again, this hunger—this desire—to think in different ways.
So, I’m seeing it in pockets all over. So, to me it’s a really exciting frontier. I think that we’re just really beginning to uncover what it [does] mean. These old structures that I think we’ve all felt the limitations of, and people are disgruntled in the limited ways in which we meet, in which we have organized ourselves within companies.
So, I think there’s a lot of people out there who are going, “Yes, I want to do things differently, and I really want to think with those who think differently than I do. And I really want to understand people on a whole new level.”
So, I talk about the ability to collaborate and collaborative intelligence as actually a new currency—because I think it has so much potential. If you think you can just think with one person now, imagine if we could increase that bandwidth—where you walk into a room or you have 20 different people online that you may have never met before, but you’re engaged in a project. You have a wider bandwidth, and you can go, “My gosh. I’m going to have the mental fortitude and the ability to think with such a wide range of people.”
To me, that’s really exciting.
TS: Angie McArthur and Dawna Markova: thank you. Thank you both so much for being with me on Insights at the Edge. Thank you. Thank you for widening my mind. Thank you.
AM: Thank you.
DM: Thank you for deepening my heart, dear one. My experience with you—it was the same as when we made the tapes. I always have more energy at the end than when I begin. That’s so incredible to me.
TS: Well, and I’ve never been compared to Donald Trump before. So, that’s a moment too.
DM: [Laughs.] I was biting my knuckle. It just pushed itself out.
TS: I love it. Thank you.
SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
