Humanities superpower: forging new leadership in technology. 

Humanities Watch had the opportunity to speak with Rishi Jaitly, a humanities entrepeneur who recently launched the Virginia Tech Institute for Leadership in Technology. The Institute welcomes this fall its inaugural class of tech leaders from across the globe.

Humanities Watch: Tell us about the nature of your Institute. What are your expectations for its first year?

Rishi Jaitly: The Virginia Tech Institute for Leadership in Technology was founded with a single guiding question in mind – what’s the superpower of the future? – and a single answer, our answer: the humanities. In a world in which computing and commercial skills are increasingly within reach, we felt, and still do feel, that deeply-felt and rigorously-honed human skills and sensibilities are what prove, and will continue to prove, breakthrough… for people, for products and for public policy: empathy and evangelism, introspection and inspiration, stewardship and storytelling. And so we’ve built an educational experience for rising stars in and around the technology landscape around this theory of change, and our question and answer.  An executive leadership credential rooted in the liberal arts and humanities. the first of its kind in the nation. My hopes for this first year are not only that we deliver a high-impact experience for our inaugural Class of 2024, but that the story we’re telling – one which suggests that human sensibilities ought to be elevated in importance and that humanities education ought to be made more accessible at all stages of life – gains traction in our culture and the wider world.

HW: How do you see the conditions for creative leadership today? What fosters, what hinders it?

RJ: Creative leadership, at its best, is fostered by always-on and lifelong habits: of empathy, of introspection, of intuition, of communication and of vision. These sensibilities, when they’ve been honed and sustained, often lead to creative breakthroughs that endure. Our culture’s emphasis on a short-term, forced and almost transactional kind of creativity hinders, in my mind, a kind of soulful creativity that both serves human flourishing – and ultimately endures long after the first creative burst.

HW: How can the study of the humanities bring about a clearer vision for an organization (profit / non-profit)?

RJ: Last year, I wrote a poem – a six-word poem I’m quite proud of as it represents my creative-writing debut – to illuminate what the humanities are: “Awe and wonder, in the other.” When we, as individuals and institutions, develop habits that enable us to see the human other – but also the ecological, universe-al and “other” others – with awe and wonder, we fuel higher impact for our organizations – and a higher leadership. Whether relating to product design and marketing, policy advocacy or direct sales, all sorts of organizational functions are enhanced when the habits of the humanities – and human-, customer- and market-centric thinking – are front, center and loom large.

HW: If you were to identify two or three aspects of your education that were formative for your success in corporate leadership, what would they be?

RJ: Separate and aside from growing my critical thinking and communication capacities, my undergraduate history degree gave me a reference point for intellectual joy that has permeated my choices and path since. I developed, during my higher education, an appreciation for the importance of sustaining a sense of joy – and, yes, and awe and wonder – in all of one’s pursuits. And that sensibility led me to develop a career in which passion and purpose were and still are at the forefront – both of which, incidentally, are essential to creating, building and leading successfully as an entrepreneur and an executive. I’d also add that living abroad as an expat, twice, fueled a big-question, big-answer orientation in me that has stayed with me. I trace back any big-thinking creativity I have in me to living as an expat in South Asia – where being bold is a prerequisite to breaking through the clutter.

HW: Which features in the current state of technology deepen our appreciation of the humanities; which features diminish this appreciation?

RJ: Technology has an ability to trigger awe and wonder in all of us in much the same way the humanities do. What we feel when we enter a 16th-century cathedral is not dissimilar from what we felt when we got our first smartphones. Both constitute experiences in the big tent of the humanities, as they both entail experiences centered around the possibilities of the human spirit. In this way, I feel strongly that developments in technology ought to be welcomed in, and framed as being a part of, the big family that is the humanities. The particular use cases that develop around technology products, though, can too often trigger a short-term, self-indulgent and self-serving experience of the world and diminish appreciation of the humanities, which teach us to lean into human others. I’m hoping that my own career in technology, and the Institute I’ve founded, can help better bridge these two fields such that there is newfound appreciation for the common ground between them.

HW: How can the humanities help us understand the potential of technology (positive or negative)?

RJ: A greater emphasis on the humanities in our public discourse will, I think, help ensure that the “people in the room where it [technology] happens” act with more clarity and courage in service of human flourishing when faced with big choices and making big decisions. While it is important to consider more energetically regulating consequential technologies, equally important is the culture and capacity we create in and around the technology landscape’s leading protagonists themselves. It is critical we mainstream the “humanist in technology” identity, in much the same way we have become accustomed to the “businessperson in tech” and “engineer in tech.” This is in part what I hope to do with the new Institute I’ve founded and now lead.