Goodbye Knowledge Age, Helllllooooo, Conceptual Age!

We are living in exciting times. It’s been more than 20 years ago that the term “knowledge worker” burst on the scene and captured the public mind. This came in tandem with the convergence of revolutions (and evolutions) of computer communications.

But it is a new day.

Author Daniel Pink, who delivers a wonderful narrative on this in his book, “A Whole New Mind,” identifies this time we are living as the post-knowledge age and, more specifically, the time of the “conceptual worker”.

Whereas the knowledge worker was someone who took the traditional blue collar work concept and moved it to information-specific activities such as software engineering, the conceptual work synthesizes disparate work systems and brings forth new and interesting definitions. The conceptual worker is an innovator.
And interestingly enough, as blue collar work eventually moved overseas to countries with developing economies, so now has knowledge work done the same thing. This is why China and India are ruling the economic dynamics of present time.
And it is also why the U.S. and other developed economies, under the right leadership, will emerge as leaders of conceptual work the essence of which is entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

The truth is—and I am borrowing very loosely from Andy Warhol’s famous line—in the future we are all going to be actors, artists, and designers.

My oldest son, Cornelius Fortune, is an excellent example of a conceptual worker. Corney is the associate managing editor of a newspaper, an accomplished fiction writer, and a musician with a popular local band (where he play a variety of horn and electronic instruments). Similarly, I am a writer, an educator, a preacher, and an entrepreneur. There was a time when someone with this array of skills was labeled affectionately as a “renaissance man.” But there was also the unspoken implication that this person was still trying to figure out what he would be “when he grew up.” Now, though, the synthesizing of skills is the hallmark of conceptual competence and evidence of functioning at the higher order levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Indeed, what an exciting time we are living in.

Bibliography

Bloom’s taxonomy (2009). Retrieved July 29, 2009 from
http://www.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm
Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential learning. Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Pink, D.H. (2008). A whole new mind. NY: Riverhead Books.
Knowles, M.S. (1989). The making of an adult learner. Jose Bass: San Francisco