In the June 2005 issue of Fast Company magazine, Tim Brown, then the CEO and president of the product-design firm IDEO, depicted the ideal “T-shaped” knowledge worker. “They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T,” he wrote. “They’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well.” This range finds expression in the T’s horizontal bar. “They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need.”
Fast forward to our fractious present-day, and the T-shaped working ideal persists but might benefit from an alphabetical complement: the “j-shaped” thinking ideal. Last week I shared my concerns about the proliferation and normalization of euphemism and exaggeration in our emotionally overwrought, media-saturated conversational and (mis)informational discourses. The aligned pinpoint dot of the j signals honesty and precision, an insistence on reality. A j-shaped thinker sees the world not as they or someone else wishes it to be (or misrepresents it to be), but as it is. The dot does not skew.
The Blood of the Lamb, a 1961 novel by Peter De Vries, chronicles the struggles of its protagonist, Don Wanderhope (yes, the book is just a touch allegorical), to find meaning and peace in the face of profound bereavements. After losing—to complications from tuberculosis—a woman with whom he had begun to fall in love, he confronts her physician, a man several decades his senior, with a “yes or no” question:
“Dr. Simpson, do you believe in a God?”
He just perceptibly raised his eyes, as if in entreaty to Heaven to spare him at least this. It took me some years to attain his mood and understand my blunder. He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and the slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization.
Depth-finding j-shaped thinkers are skeptical of “ready answers” and “bland generalizations.” They ponder big questions “a great deal,” do not shy away from “delicately balanced contradictions,” and by virtue of such habits “acquire a wealth of perception.” As for the curve at the base of the j, I would suggest that it represents an openness to adaptation, to reconsideration, to change and evolution. A j-shaped thinker can never be 100% certain.
We are committed to developing T-shaped and j-shaped students alike at MICDS—children and adolescents with ever-increasing capacities for intellectual and emotional breadth, depth, honesty, complexity, and adaptability. Our world needs them more than ever.
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. My best wishes to you for a joyful weekend ahead.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist: Sweetness Follows by R.E.M., the sixth track on their 1992 record Automatic for the People, which is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest albums ever recorded (Apple Music / Spotify)