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The Intelligence MythBy Harvey Taylor

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innovative onions > september 2012 > harvey taylor > intelligence >

There’s an on-going synthesis of mainstream

and cutting edge theory

and practice in education with

Neuro Linguistic Programming

and with ideas about social

and economic development.

I went to grammar school and have a first class honours degree. I always score highly on tests of verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning (IQ tests) usually coming out above the 90th percentile. A few years ago I was conducting a battery of similar intelligence tests on a group of directors in a highly successful company which employed over 300 people. The Managing Director scored below the 3rd percentile on every single test. According to the tests, 97 per cent of the UK population were smarter than he was.

Here’s the conundrum. Whilst this managing director continued to make millions and gainfully employ hundreds of people, I was struggling to pay my mortgage. I knew then that something was wrong with the traditional notion of intelligence.

Golden Age?

I could cite dozens of similar examples. I have a sister who has a 2.1 Maths Degree from a good university. She sells the Big Issue on the streets of London.

The majority of successful entrepreneurs I meet, to a greater or lesser extent, ‘bombed out’ at school. As I say, something is wrong with our concept of intelligence and not only that, it has been known for decades. Yet for some reason our schools and politicians all too frequently act as if they haven’t noticed. In fact some politicians would have us go back in time to a supposed ‘golden age’ where ‘the intelligent ones’, based on this narrow definition of intelligence, get to govern society and get all the educational and occupational opportunities while the ‘less intelligent ones’ are left untroubled by educational challenge and consigned to service and manual labour.

Research over the past couple of decades, especially in neuroscience but also in educational psychology, is relentlessly challenging all our notions of what it means to be intelligent and, more importantly, what it means to behave intelligently. Meanwhile we continue to expend resources in unsustainable ways, resolve

disputes with ever increasing violence and destruction, and worship materialism, individuality and power to the obvious cost of our communities, well-being and the scope we have for a meaningful and happy existence.

So here is the good news.

Modern research suggests that intelligence is not fixed; it is dynamic. We can become more intelligent. The brain is more malleable than we ever imagined. There is no ceiling to our potential. Genetic variation counts for less than 1% of what makes one person behave more intelligently than another. Nurture, rather than nature, accounts for a far greater proportion of practical intelligence (i.e. intelligent behaviour with practical and positive consequence).

Intelligence is not a ‘thing’. It’s something we do. You cannot put intelligence in a bucket. In NLP terminology, we need to ‘de-nominalise’ intelligence and turn it back into its constituent set of

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innovative onions > september 2012 > harvey taylor > intelligence >

learning which are Resilience, Resourcefulness, Reflectiveness and Reciprocity. He also outlines an alternative model of composite and expandable intelligences as follows:

Practical, Intuitive, Distributed, Social, Strategic, Ethical

Without going into a lot of detail at this stage I would just like to put a marker down for a further discussion that I want to initiate about Ethical Intelligence and its relationship with the Growth Conundrum. The Growth Conundrum is how do the UK and the rest of the world for that matter get out of the economic slump whilst building a model of sustainable, ethical and meaningful economic development?

What is fascinating is the UK’s coalition government’s dallying over whether to renege on a coalition promise not to build a third runway at Heathrow. It seems that we are so bereft of ideas about how to engender meaningful and sustainable economic growth

that our moral leaders are seriously contemplating (a) breaking a promise with all the consequences this implies for our children in terms of adult modelling of ethical intelligence and (b) doing something which clearly risks massive social and environmental destruction. There are other options, which don’t involve such moral, social and environmental devastation.

What is especially disturbing is that leaders do not seem to be able to think of anything more positive to do. For all their expensive education, their own habits of mind seem woefully inadequate to meet the economic and social challenges of our age.

Harvey Taylor People Positive www.peoplepositiveassociates.com

processes and strategies, all of which are learnable. Intelligence is a set of habits of mind – habitual patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

Intelligence is not the narrow, one dimensional affair that is still perpetrated, for example, through grammar school entrance tests based on pure numerical and verbal reasoning; it is not exclusively ‘academic’. Intelligence is multi-faceted. This goes beyond Howard Gardener’s model of Multiple Intelligences in which he describes several separate types of intelligence – linguistic, logical/mathematical, musical, bodily-kinaesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, spiritual, existential. In my view, these are merely contexts in which we can choose to develop and to adopt intelligent habits of mind, rather than being separate versions of something called ‘intelligence’.

The four Rs

There are several models of the habits of mind approach. Guy Claxton refers to the four R’s of