Aidan: the World Economic Forum declared cognitive flexibility as one of the top skills needed to excel in a 2020 workplace. But what does cognitive flexibility actually mean? And how can we best adopt and nurture it to optimize our learning, lifestyle, and work, and in particular, in an age of AI?
Today’s guest on Inside Learning asks a big question: Is the era of specialization over, and is a field or a discipline dead? It is a great pleasure to welcome the author of The Polymath. Waqas Ahmed, welcome to the show
Waqas: Aidan, thank you so much. It’s been a long time, and I’ve been excited to join you
Aidan: Me and Waqas connected probably six years ago now, man. It’s been a long time. When you just wrote this brilliant book,
Waqas: Yeah.
Aidan: Your work has gone on from strength to strength. It’s become so much more relevant today, particularly in an age of AI, which is something [00:01:00] we’re gonna talk about on today’s show.
But I thought we’d start with that idea of cognitive flexibility. Let’s talk about that concept because as I said in the intro, the WEF talked about it as one of the most important skills.
Yet, we have this paradox. We have people outsourcing to AI, and as a result of outsourcing, they’re actually losing cognitive flexibility
Waqas: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It’s a big irony actually, because today is when we need cognitive flexibility more than ever before. So with the advent of AI, of course there are certain kind of human intelligence, which we’ll talk about in a bit that we need to start trying to nurture so that we have sufficient value.
We’re able to preserve sufficient value to any given thinking situation. But cognitive flexibility itself is– it has kind of two definitions, two-tier definition. The first is basically the brain’s ability to move seamlessly [00:02:00] between different spheres of knowledge and experiences. So the way that you would shift between, for example, engaging in an arts-based creative activity to a more analytical based activity straight afterwards, or if you’re moving culturally between two different cultural domains or linguistic domains that requires something called a cognitive flexibility, which we have an inherent ability to do.
And ability depends on the environment you’re in and whether you’re able to cultivate that or not. Some people are better at it. Some people can get better at it. So that sort of that kind of movement, that, that versatility exhibited by the brain is something that is extremely important in fast-changing times as we live in today. And then there is kind of a higher order cognitive flexibility, which Professor Rand Spiro speaks [00:03:00] about which is a kind of fle– fl-cognitive flexibility that focuses on complexity and the ability of the brain to comprehend ill-structured domains, i.e. complex situations and how it makes sense of that complexity.
And and that-that’s not just a simple shifting of one thing to the next. It is kind of doing so rapidly with-with-within changing circumstances and changing environments. And, And so as I describe this to you today, you can imagine how important such a thing is not just in our daily lives, but more specifically within the workplace. Within the workplace, within management, within leadership, within creativity and innovation within a workplace, within dealing with our peers. All of these things require us to be extremely adaptable and agile, which are obviously common pla- common terms [00:04:00] within the work the world of work.
But when we’re talking about agility and and adaptability, what’s really important, and something I like to focus on more, is this concept of versatility. And versatility is some– is being able to adapt and be agile consistently. Because ultimately change is the only inevitable thing, and it’s only going to get much quicker and much more uncertain as we move forwards.
So if we develop that inherent ability to be versatile to whatever change comes our way, we have a kind of toolkit that we’re able to deploy where we can learn new skills rapidly, where we can adapt to new situations effectively. I think if we’re able to equip ourselves with a sense of versatility that is going to go a long way, especially as you say, within the age of AI.
Aidan: One of the questions that comes to mind is the idea that a [00:05:00] bad system will always beat a good person. And by that I mean that the system of education, the system of work, even the social system suggests that everybody has a specialty. And holding up a copy of your book for those just listening to us, p- Leonardo is on the cover, Leonardo da Vinci, and when people think of somebody like Leonardo, they think that he was a genius.
And yes, he had huge genius, but something you said there, that we can learn this cognitive flexibility. And in a way, society doesn’t allow us to do this. We may have done it as children, we may do it into our maybe teens, but then we’re encouraged to specialize, we’re encouraged to find the thing that is associated to our identity.
And even still, I know you’re a polymath, I, I hope to be, and I certainly practice it. I practice different elements of my field. But in there, people will always go what do you actually [00:06:00] do?” And in that, there’s a little bit of judgment, and when people feel that bit of judgment, they actually go more towards specialty because society judges them differently.
And that’s been a huge shift as we’ve gone through the generations, and I know it’s at the heart of a lot of the work you do. But maybe we’ll talk a bit about how we got to where we are, from specialization to the need to be more polymathic.
Waqas: Yeah, good– very, very good points. I think the important thing here is to remember that the world wasn’t always this way. We didn’t always have this concept of specialization and the creation of silos within education structures, the creation of silos within work structures, the creation of silos within the cultural space. This wasn’t always that way. And if you– one only has to look, well, not only, but if you were to look in a sort of pre-Renaissance period or during or pre-Renaissance, you will find that actually [00:07:00] the general thinking was much more connected, much more holistic. The approaches to problems were much more polymathic, if you will, because of the fact that there was this there was this pursuit of truth, especially within the intellectual space. There was purs- the… And that pursuit of truth didn’t come from just looking at one space, and it was a recognition that truth could not be found just by siloing one particular knowledge area vis-à-vis another. It had to be found at any costs, whether you move into one one dis- what we today call discipline or field or another. And and so when you have that kind of mentality that this is a problem or a line of inquiry we are going to pursue it no matter where it takes us. We are going to try to make connections wherever it’s needed. [00:08:00] When you have that kind of mentality, then you become, , not only multidisciplinary, which is looking at different disciplines, not even interdisciplinary, which is connecting those different disciplines, but actually transdisciplinary, where you’re discipline agnostic.
Doesn’t matter where you’re– where that knowledge is coming from as long as it serves a particular need. And this kind of now catapulting forward to the current paradigm where we have these complex problems with many different moving parts to them that are related to many different areas and fields geographically, intellectually, and so on Then we must look to see how how we are going to solve those problems or tackle those problems regardless of where the knowledge or the skill comes from.
Whether it comes from electrical engineering, whether it comes from the history of art, whether it comes from particle physics, wherever it comes from, if it’s relevant then it should be deployed. And this is [00:09:00] where it comes back to what I discussed earlier on about versatility. If you are able to cultivate this n- this attribute of versatility within you, then you will be able to move between not just different environments, but different intellectual fields, and you’ll be able to move between…
And then if we’re talking in the workspace, you’re able to move between different functions and departments within an organization with relative ease because you’re able to look to see what marketing is saying about this problem, what finance is saying, what logistics is saying, et cetera, et cetera. And then you’re able to have a more holistic understanding of the problem and be better placed to solve it. So I think that which existed in pre-modern or pre-contemporary times becomes even more relevant as an approach today, which to some might be considered ironic, but actually this was something that is at the heart of human intelligence
Aidan: I was thinking this [00:10:00] reading your work, and also your recent articles, that I was working as head of digital transformation for an organization, but I wanted to lecture, and the lecturing was in my own time, so the lecture would’ve been in the evening.
And I just said it out of courtesy to my boss, and she actually said, “I don’t want you to do that.” And I, when I asked why, she said, “Because it will take up your bandwidth.” And this is something that’s recurred time and time, probably tells you why I work for myself, Waqas. So I had it again when I run my podcast, , bosses would say, “I want all that you have to give to the organization.”
And I have to highlight this ’cause people will think, oh, maybe he was doing it during work hours. I wasn’t. I was actually very, very efficient at my job, but I was also carving out time. And in there is the big, big problem because you show a flair for other things. And I know there’s a barista, a coffee shop I go to near my work, [00:11:00] and there’s a barist- the baristas there always say, “Our boss is great because they let us pursue our other interests as well and build side hustles.”
And I was thinking to myself how rare that is, because if you’re an executive in a firm, the firm wants all the energy you can give. They say, “Yeah, take some for your family,” but it’s very, very rare to be given that latitude or the time or the bandwidth to actually explore other interests
Waqas: I would say actually, even during the time when we spoke last where there was a lot more resistance to this idea of, of, of people, employees or colleagues, et cetera, working in different areas or working on other things, I think there is a m- a, a greater openness for this barista that you mentioned, I i- imagine it to be quite recent. Because actually culture is changing. Even during this past five years, five to seven years people are starting to realize the benefits of working within different spaces and [00:12:00] exposing yourself to different areas. And I say that because even let’s go back to the i- the industrial factory setting where this concept of Just imagine you were to go back and say to a factory manager , in the late 1800s that their employees should take an hour of their time do nothing.
As in sitting there with their eyes closed doing nothing, right? They would laugh at you to say, “Look, that’s going to be affecting my productivity. Of course, I’m not going to allow that.” But in today’s day and age, it is encouraged for employees to take up, for example, meditation, which is essentially sitting down with your eyes closed, right? And essentially doing nothing. But you and I both know, and now the research is showing, that it’s not nothing that’s being done during that time. There are a whole range of benefits of [00:13:00] meditation to innovation and creativity, for instance. So you’re able to bring back some of those ideas, that thinking, whether directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously, back into your work in a way that will drive your productivity and creatio- creativity further. So I think there’s an increasing– That’s one example of where people are realizing that actually doing other things could help. Some more progressive organizations around the world, big corporations like Google’s 20% that you may know of, but there are many other examples where employees are encouraged to explore and do other things and create other things. Not only because it im- improves employee engagement, because after all, we’re all multifaceted explorers by nature, and we want to do various things. And yes, we want a sense of belonging, and we have that at its core, but we also want to do other things. We want to explore and express other sides of us. And so if there is an employee or a, an organization [00:14:00] that encourages that that is going to send a strong signal to the employee or the colleague that they’re understood that they’re encouraged, and that will have a positive impact on how they perform during their workplace.
So I think this idea of performance as being the hours that you put in, that in itself is being not nullified, but being questioned at the very least. And then you can take it to different extents. So you could just say, actually you can engage in a variety of things as well as what your job description is or what your scope is, you fulfill that, and often what’s found is that the different creative pursuits or different ideas that you get from doing other things feed into, to what you’re doing at your core.
And and I think there is a realization increasingly, and not to say there’s also a increasing body of research within psychology, within the future of work within productivity studies, et cetera, et cetera that [00:15:00] actually demonstrate that too. So I think you’re absolutely right. For a long time in yours and mine lives, at least for the longest of times, it has…
that paradigm has remained, but I think the ch- thinking is now beginning to change
Aidan: Th- thankfully, thankfully. I, I re- I always ask CEOs, you know, if, imagine one of your team walked into your office and you had your feet up and you were looking out the window, what are they gonna think? They’re gonna think, oh, it’s well for you ’cause you’re the boss. But actually, they all should be doing that.
And if you walked into their office as the leader and you saw them doing it, as long as they’re not doing it all day, obviously, but doing it and giving your brain a bit of a break regularly means more productivity. A- again, pe- people will think this is a trauma session for me, because I remember this. So I worked in an organization, and I used to come in at 7:00 AM, and I’d work from 7:00 till 9:30, when everybody else started coming in, and then I’d go to the gym.
And I’d go to the gym, and I’d do an hour session in the gym, and I’d [00:16:00] come back at 11:00. And they’d only really be getting going at that stage, and I’d have done two good hours or more. And what I found was I got a second wind out of my day. I got a second kind of day out of my day. So it was much more productive, but people used to be looking at me, raising eyebrows, and I’d, I’d have to justify it.
I’d be like, “I’ve been here since 7:00.” You know? And I think that, again, I believe it’s, it’s changing. But there’s another side to this, which is if we’re outsourcing more and more to AI, ’cause you said this about the idea of you should have this time, so the hour r- meditating or the hour taking time to recover mentally.
But if AI gives me more time, what are you doing with that time? Because it doesn’t seem to be that people are going and saying, “Okay, that time is a time to read all those emails I send myself of articles to go, I must read this, that I never do, and then just before holidays, I delete them all.” [00:17:00] We all do that.
But I remember starting to do that at that time, where I was like, “Oh, okay, I’m gonna carve out time, 20 minutes a day, where I read a white paper or something different to actually build the muscle to think differently, but again, it’s frowned upon.
So let’s use that as a segue to talk about AI and wh- ’cause I know you’re doing a lot of work with teams and organizations with AI in the, at the age of the polymath, in the age of AI, because it’s , so relevant and very relevant to our audience
Waqas: Firstly, I should say that the work with organizations is basically to develop two different core competencies of the polymath. Number one, I’ve already spoken about versatility, so the ability to develop a set of skills or a portfolio of skills that could potentially be deployed in any given situation, so, you know, the next change, for example.
So as you know Aidan, ’cause you’ve done a lot of work in this space, in transformation [00:18:00] especially, that , most transformation projects actually fail, and the reason for that is because there’s massive resistance to change. That’s actually a legacy of this specialization and silo culture that we’ve spoken about. Because, ultimately, if you are defined by, exclusively by a particular job a particular scope of work, for example, and that becomes your identity, you become comfortable in that, right? And then if that is ch- challenged, which it will do on a restructure, on a corporate restructure, for example, or a transformation program or a change program then you’re going to be resistant to that.
It’s gonna create anxiety. But if, for example, you cultivated a kind of a tendency to just embrace change, but actually w- want to instigate change because actually you thrive in a change environment. How are you gonna thrive in a change environment? When you are adequately confident that you have a [00:19:00] portfolio of skills and knowledge that can adapt to different scenarios, and that you’ve developed this meta-ability, this meta-learning ability, to be able to learn new skills and new knowledge effectively and efficiently when, as and when the opportunity or the challenge arises. So that’s why the first core competency of the polymath, is versatility bec- and that is what allows them to excel in different fields, what we today call fields, because actually they’re not excelling in different fields, they’re just applying themselves to the new challenge, and that new challenge may happen to be in a completely different field or discipline, right? So that skill of versatility or that meta skill of versatility is something that I help organizations and their teams and their leadership develop The second is integration. So we spoke about silo culture, and we spoke about how that affects [00:20:00] collaboration, creativity, communication within organizations.
But and the more I speak to different organizations and organizational leaders, the more I realize how big a problem silo culture actually is. And yet very little is being done about it. And this silo culture is a legacy of the industrial past, and it just continues. And the same mindset that you just mentioned earlier on about, doing other things, that wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have a silo culture. It exists because we have a si-silo culture. So how does one overcome that is by basically being able to integrate their work integrate different departments and different functions and communicate and work effectively with them to be able to work on common solu– common problems and develop common collective solutions to them. And so, for example there should be no barrier [00:21:00] to you speaking to someone from various functions in order to address your problem and learning from them. So not just you sitting within your space, them sitting within their space. So a lot of how do I say this? A lot of teams pride themselves in being multidisciplinary teams because there are people from different functions within the team, which is a good first step. But actually, it’s not sufficient because you are still guard– jealously guarding your field, your boundaries, and you’re reluctant to trespass into another and likewise, and it happens across the board. So if you if you go in with, yes, have a respect for the fact that various people are trained in different things, have different skills and experiences and knowledge, How can each of those be deployed to to in service of the problem? also then how can we develop a culture of mutual learning whereby we’re not just fixed and, and take what that person’s saying for granted just because they’re a so-called [00:22:00] expert or specialist within that. In-instead, we can ask meaningful questions. So we, we develop sufficient knowledge within their field to be able to have this what what is often called an interactional expertise, where we are actually able to ask meaningful con questions and have a, a substantial enough conversation to be able to work together, right?
So you do it for them, they do it for you. That creates a kind of interdisciplinarity, which is missing in most organizations because we’re still kind of stick, sticking within multidisciplinary teams rather than interdisciplinary teams. And so I think that integration, so the thing that distinguishes the two, the multidisciplinary and the interdisciplinary, is that big word integration.
So how do you integrate two things that are seemingly unrelated to create a novel insight? That is something that I help organizations with too. So those are two core competencies of the polymath, and I think that they are more applicable to the current work [00:23:00] environment than they ever have been, and especially with AI because now there is a lot of soul-searching amongst humans as to what actually, what their value could be. My suggestion is actually, number one the versatility piece is extremely important because we don’t know where A-AI is heading next and what change it will bring about. It’s already brung– a, a transformational change as we know. But as time moves forward change is gonna be the only inevitability given this new technology.
So how do we then adapt and how do we, how do we then work with AI And then the integration piece is e-especially important because AI is, in its current form very bad at integration. And I say that because a, a lot of people might say, “Yeah, it brings about interesting new ideas. It can connect different things if you ask it to,” and all the rest of it. But I can tell you actually, architecturally A– [00:24:00] artificial intelligence, current– the current crop of LLMs are based on a, on a convergence model where, where basically they are not designed to bring about radically new outcomes. Maybe with significant prompt engineering it might come to a stage which is closer, but, but actually if you were just to put something in cold into AI, it– everything moves towards a statistical mean, which means that actually whatever LLM you choose we’ve all experienced this, right?
It all comes about with the same safe outcomes. And actually that is opposed to the capacity for divergent thinking that we have as humans where it happens either subconsciously or subconsciously, where we actually if we’re able to actively Seek out knowledge, insight, solutions from unrelated, seemingly unrelated spaces and we connect them in ways that are– that we can do [00:25:00] consciously.
And the subconscious thing is interesting because there’s a lot of theories about creativity and innovation but one thing that is almost consensus in the literature is that radical innovation from the synthesis of diverse perspectives, right?
So it comes from this wide acknowledgement that actually it is the diverse perspectives that bring about radical breakthrough innovation. I don’t mean iterative innovation. And so if we know that, and if we have a general consensus on that, why are we not building AI systems to encourage that? And in a way that doesn’t provide us with an answer, but then can provoke us with meaningful questions so that we can then develop the muscle, as you said, Aidan. We can not just take what AI, tells us for granted, but actually we are encouraged by the AI system itself to explore and to engage [00:26:00] in that productive struggle that’s needed for br- for radical innovation. And so this is another project that we are working on, which is the Da Vinci AI project is basically looking at architecturally at what how can we develop a polymathic AI, which is, which d- is not based on the convergence model, but there’s a kind of forced divergence but not towards the aim of offering us a solution of to something, but with the aim of provoking us to develop our own ability to think in radically creative ways.
So yeah, these are the kind of three ways in which I usually get involved with organizations.
Aidan: I love that idea of the AI. It’s one of the things I was kind of disappointed with LLMs was that, that it didn’t, it wasn’t able to do that. I thought, like, the world’s knowledge would be connected now, and I think
Waqas: that’s the initial excitement that we all had, right? And I think we’ve come to a stage where a lot of pe- a lot of people, especially within the creative space, are [00:27:00] becoming quite disillusioned by what it has to offer within this specific area. Of course, there are so many really groundbreaking benefits that AI has brought to productivity, for instance.
But in this specific area, I think this is where we really need to dig deep into the human intelligence piece
Aidan: I learn a lot by writing, and I think in metaphor. And one of the metaphors I had to talk to one of the things you said was, I looked at the, a study on what psychoactive compounds, and even psilocybin, so magic mushrooms in common parlance, what it does to the brain. And actually, just like what you do with organizations, it turns off inhibition chemicals.
So the brain is siloed too, and what it does is then you have these connections that happen that you wouldn’t otherwise happen, ’cause the brain works in silos as well, which I thought is exactly the concept of a polymath. But I know you’re under time pressure, Waqas, and I’d love you to share where [00:28:00] people can find you to do talks, to work with organizations, but also to buy a copy of your brilliant book.
Waqas: Thank you so much, Aidan. Thanks for having me on. So you can reach me on davinci-network.com. I’m also on Substack and LinkedIn, so please feel free to reach out. And I’d love to learn more than anything else. I’d love to learn more about how this concept relates to different organizations.
I’m always interested in case studies of where, you know, like effective versatility has been nurtured or where great integration has applied. I love to kind of understand about how this this whole idea operates within the workspace. So even if, even if to share that over a conversation, it would be great to connect
Aidan: Author of The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility, Waqas Ahmed, thank you for joining us
Waqas: Thank you, Aidan
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