ThinkWorks News
What's the crisis? How do we solve it? 'Thinking,' say Ivy League Profs
July 8th, 2008
Ithaca, NY - In an article published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, faculty of Cornell University identify the world's most pressing
crises and rank them according to importance and the ease with which
they can be solved. As the group generated and ranked their lists of problems, a theme emerged: underlying all of the crises humanity faces, is the need for thinking differently about the crises themselves.
Researchers from Cornell, led by ThinkWorks founder and CEO Derek Cabrera, surveyed university faculty across disciplines about the fate of the planet and the role of academia in solving them. Faculty respondents from all over campus identified interdisciplinary thinking skills as important to facing the most pressing crises; as well as a need for improved scientific thinking.
Faculty listed a variety of global crises, which ultimately were clustered around a few themes using a method called "concept mapping." This enabled the research team to identify commonalities across responses and to rank them in both importance and feasibility. One finding of particular salience is the interdisciplinary nature of crises, which corresponds to a definitive need for interdisciplinary thinking among today's students.
"Look at these problems identified by Cornell faculty: climate change, the threat of war, new infectious diseases, dwindling energy resources" said Cabrera. "These are big, hairy problems that only interdisciplinary thinking can solve. They will be solved by teams at tables, not loners in labs. We think of a physicist or maybe a group of physicists solving some huge problem, but it's also going to take the psychologist, priest, and businessman. All of these people bring their own perspective and way of describing the problem. Their expertise only gets them so far before they have to work and think together."
A pre-print edition of the article is available online.
About Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: The journal is published by the Ecological Society of America. Founded in 1915, the scientific organization promotes ecology within the sciences and ensures that policy makers have access to key environmental research.