To the Reader upon Closing This Book:
Together, we have reviewed the past and brought ourselves up to the present. I hope in the process that we have learned the core interpersonal skills of helping. What about the future? How can you prepare for it? Where might you fit in it?
Think about it for a minute! For almost all of humankind’s 14-million-year history, people have relied almost exclusively upon reflexive conditioned responding. Only the occasional thinker has fashioned “breakthroughs” in science and technology and art which have changed the course of civilization. With the environment evolving ever so slowly, the response to most changes was to apply the conditioned responses with greater intensity and quantity—to “Work Harder!” Neither the farming technologies of the Agrarian Age nor the mechanical technologies of the Indus trial Age altered the emphasis upon conditioned responding.
It was not until about thirty years ago that the Electronics Era and then the Data Age introduced new requirements for human processing. Instead of non-thinking linear conditioning, the complexities of design and technology required multidimensional, discriminative learning: the ability to discriminate multiple dimensions of stimulus inputs, select the appropriate responses, and emit these responses behaviorally. This meant that human processors needed to become a repository of “branching” responses from which they would draw to discriminate stimuli and emit responses. With the environment changing increasingly rapidly, people needed to develop response-sharing strategies that would increase the response repertories of the human processors. This is when interpersonal communication skills came into the picture: they facilitated the consensus and response-building strategies that dominate us today. We labeled our ability to mount responses to known stimuli, “Working Smarter,” and it worked—for a while!
The problem is that, due to accelerating innovation, the environment is changing more rapidly than we can develop and disseminate responses. Indeed, changes are spiraling and time is telescoped! The only course available to us is to develop and empower people in generative processing skills: skills that enable the processor to generate totally new responses to stimuli, responses that the stimuli were not calculated to elicit. Generative processing brings with it a whole new set of requirements for human processors: the humans have to become a repository of thinking skills—individual, interpersonal and interdependent thinking skills. We call our ability to generate entirely new responses, “Thinking Better,” and it will yield whole new Ages of Information and Ideation.
These are the changes and the requirements being imposed upon us—right now! How do you prepare yourself for this? How do you fit in?
Well, think of the interpersonal paradigm that you have just learned: attending, responding, personalizing, initiating. Now think of the intrapersonal processing that these interpersonal skills facilitate: involving, exploring, understanding, acting. These phases of processing yield the basic ingredients of generative processing. When we put the power of generative processing inside of people, then we enable them to generate entirely new responses. To be sure, when we empower people with generative processing skills, we empower them to generate entirely new stimulus environments.
What only random thinkers did throughout the history of humankind, we will all do. What only an occasional relator did, we will all do. What very rare interdependent processors did, we will all do. We will all become generative processors.
That is the future—if there is to be a future for us at all!
That is how you prepare for it—if you entertain becoming whole!
That is how you fit in it—if you can contemplate generating your own destiny and helping others to generate theirs.
Growthfully yours,
Bob Carkhuff