Businesses have always relied on an array of temperaments to carry out different creative functions—Earlies for more R&D, Middles for manufacturing and management, Lates for finance and marketing. But in times past, these various functions have been kept relatively separate. The more global, fast-paced businesses of the future will need to be dynamically integrated to function effectively. This is something we are seeing.
These changes will require fascinating changes both in how we view our own temperament and how we relate to others. The following excerpt from the future of art section in Hope and the Future describes some of these changes as they apply to Earlies in the workplace:
“Cultural Maturity predicts changes in how we view the artist’s role. With increasing frequency, we should find people of artistic temperament contributing outside the formal bounds of art. If Cultural Maturity’s predictions are accurate, every profession should have a growing need for people who are good at the new—both comfortable with change and facile with the imaginative capacities needed to envision the possible. For example, if business needs to be more creative and entrepreneurial, it needs more people natively skilled at imagining the yet unimagined. (And a few more imaginative types might greatly help the CIA stay ahead of the ingenuity of terrorists.)
Venturing into realms outside the usual bounds of art presents a two-edged challenge for the person of artistic temperament. On one hand there are new opportunities and a new valuing of and potency in the artistic person’s natural strengths. At the same time, the new roles often demand functioning in formal work environments, making schedules, working more directly with people, and accessing left-brain capacities as much as right—things the person of more artistic temperament may not be good at or find, at least as conventionally conceived, satisfying. This meeting of worlds will require stretching all around—both a willingness among people of artistic temperament who wish to make this bridge to rethink aspects of their lives, and a willingness on the part of those who structure work environments to provide options that better support and nurture the artistic personality.”
