THINKING FOR A LIVING

Some people think for a living. Actually lots of people do. They are knowledge workers. Are you? Depending on how this is defined, it is now predicted that somewhere between 25 to 50% of people think for a living. They are called knowledge workers. From teachers and professors, to leaders and managers, to people in IT, architecture and engineering, scientists, legal, healthcare practitioners, arts, design, entertainment, and the list goes on and on. Even front line people who deal directly with customers cannot leave their brains at home— to be effective they have to think about what they are doing and how they are doing it. The same is true in manufacturing and other industries that once only needed able-bodied workers. All of this is especially true for the cutting-edge companies who have integrated structures for self- actualizing.1

How about you? To what extent do you think for a living? Or conversely, to what extent could you get by—by being “on automatic?” Increasingly as automation is replacing many low-level jobs and even more complex jobs— the jobs that are left are for knowledge workers. Today, knowledge workers are the ones responsible for sparking ongoing innovations as they invent, design, and create new approaches, new strategies, new possibilities. Knowledge workers are also the ones who are able to customize products, services, and information to individual needs.

All of this highlights that we are increasingly moving to a knowledge economy where thinking is of a premium and the context is more and more knowledge-intensive. This is not just a Western or an American trend, it is a world-wide trend. Yet many, if not most, people are not ready for this. After all, thinking for a living is a new challenge and it poses numerous challenges— challenges which for many are not equipped to handle.

In the process of becoming effective as a knowledge worker—as a person who thinks for a living, there are two primary requirements— willingness and ability.

First, is the willingness to think clearly. This requires personal development and maturity so that when you find an error, you rejoice. You do not take it personal, you treat it as something about “thought”— something to adapt and adjust. Second, the ability to think clearly. This requires having developed the back thinking- skills and the ability to avoid the common thinking errors.

For both of these prerequisites for thinking for a living, most people are not ready. For the first, a person needs to learn how to separate person and behavior, distinguish who they are and what they think, and develop a great relationship to not-knowing, to errors, to mistakes, etc. For the second, a person has to learn the many expressions of non-thinking and break out of reactionary thinking, automatic thinking, lazy thinking, agenda thinking, etc. The person also has to learn to identify cognitive distortions, cognitive fallacies, and cognitive biases and be able to detect in

real time and step out from them.2

In both of these, where there is stress, threat, danger, pressure— a person will not be able to think so well. Here’s an occupational hazard of thinking— staying calm and cool while under pressure. Yet what normally happens is that a basic human instinct arises so that instead of thinking, we set out to defend ourselves. And when that happens, clear and accurate thinking goes out of the window. We then fall victim to cognitive fallacies and distortions.

In this new knowledge economy, knowledge management becomes a central competency. This is essential given the information overload that we’re all exposed to. How do we manage all of the information? How do we determine what’s relevant from what is irrelevant? How do we process the information so it becomes knowledge and then comprehension for practical action? How do we make time for reflection so that we can effectively learn? How do we best use our cognitive powers to create common sense? These, and many other questions, will be our focus in this series of posts of thinking for a living.

References

1. See Unleashing Leadership (2009).

2. See Executive Thinking (2018).