A long time ago, an Austrian ex-patent clerk is quoted as saying:
“Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems that we created with our current patterns of thought.” – Albert Einstein
It’s very easy to agree with the above statement. This is because it’s difficult to understand, and it’s very easy to agree with something that’s not understood.
What the hell is a ‘pattern of thought’?
To find out, consider this: you give a small child a new object that that they haven’t seen before. What’s the first thing they do with it?
Easy – they try and take it apart.
This is one of those fundamental things that seems to be hard-wired into the human brain: when presented with a new thing – a problem, something to fix, something to understand – we take it apart and look at the parts. We then try and build up an understanding of the whole from our understanding of the parts.
For example – if you talk to people who work in scientific or technical fields they will often tell you that when they were younger they were forever dismantling old radios or clocks and, significantly, usually failing to put them back together again in working order.
This three-stage process of ‘take the thing apart – understand the parts – try to build an understanding of the whole from the parts’ is called analysis, and forms the basis of most thinking everywhere. If you asked most people to tell you the difference between analysing something and thinking about something, they wouldn’t be able to – both are generally thought of as being the same thing.
Analysis is the current dominant pattern of thought used by man – it informs everything we do. It also forms the basis of almost all the science of the last hundred years or so – for example, think about mankind’s continuing quest to understand the universe by looking at smaller and smaller particles of matter.
Analysis has provided many useful insights and discoveries over the last hundred years or so, so why do we need any other way of thinking about things?
The truth is, relying purely on analysis has huge drawbacks and real-world consequences that are not widely appreciated or understood. And this is what I’ll begin to cover in the next post.
