Other Types Of Intelligence
Society today sieves people in their late teens. The clever ones go on to further studies and qualifications, the rest are left to fend for themselves. We only use one sieve, that of intellectual achievement as measured by examinations. People are interviewed, it is true, by some universities and colleges but you only get to be interviewed if you have passed through that first intellectual sieve.
Upside-down thinking regards this as nonsense. We need more talents than the intellect, important though that is. Talent, we know, has many faces. So does intelligence. Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard School of Education took the trouble to classify seven different types of intelligence which, he claims, we can actually measure. Based on his analysis, but stretching it a little, we can in a commonsense way recognize some distinct sorts of intelligence or talent in people, even at a young age.
1. Analytical intelligence – the sort we measure in I.Q. tests and in most examinations.
2. Pattern intelligence – the ability to see patterns in things and to create patterns. Mathematicians, artists, computer programmers often have this intelligence to a high degree. (It is important to realize that the talents are not connected or correlated. It is possible to be very intelligent in a pattern sense and to fail all conventional exams.)
3. Musical intelligence – some musicians, pop stars, for example, are analytically clever but many are not. Musically intelligent they undoubtedly are.
4. Physical intelligence – swimmers, footballers, sports stars of all sorts have this talent in abundance – it is no guarantee of the other talents.
5. Practical intelligence – the sort of intelligence that can take a television to bits, put it together again without instructions, but might not be able to spell the names of the parts.
6. Intra-personal intelligence – the person, often the quiet one, who is in tune with feelings, their own and others, the poets and the counsellors.
7. Inter-personal intelligence – the ability to get on with other people, to get things done with and through others. It is the skill that managers have to have, in addition to one or other of the first two types.
All these intelligences, or talents, we can recognize as having their place in life. If we look around in middle age at the people who are happy and successful we see it is because they have found what they are good at and are doing it. By that stage the first of the intelligences is by no means the most important.
Ironically, all these intelligences are also recognized in British schools but, apart from the first, analytical intelligence, they are collectively grouped under the heading ‘out of school activities’, and in too many schools there are now no out of school activities.
All the seven intelligences, and there may be more, will be needed even more in the portfolio world towards which we are inching our way. It is crazy, therefore, to use only the first of the intelligences as the criterion for further investment in any individual by society.
The system of universal educational credits would avoid this blinkered approach. The upside-down school with study as work would also find that it needed to recognize the other intelligences inside school hours. Indeed, the upside-down school might usefully make it a point of principle that every student should leave school demonstratably successful, in at least one of the intelligences.
There are some signs of change in every country. Learning is increasingly accepted as meaning something more than acquiring knowledge. Capability, competence and social skills are rewarded and recorded in many schools. In Britain many schools use individual Records of Achievements to recognize different forms of success and different types of intelligence. In America, in similar vein, young people are encouraged to see their schooldays as an opportunity to start compiling their ‘bios’, their lists of accomplishments both inside and outside the classroom. In France they intend that 75 per cent of young people should get their baccalaureat but there will be different baccalauréats for different talents.
Education needs, however, to move further and faster if it is going to catch up the future. A system which has in the past allowed more than a third of its members to leave without even one acceptable mark of achievement has to be more de-skilling, particularly for a portfolio world. In that world, self-confidence, a saleable skill or talent and an ability to cope with life and to communicate are critical. Success, of some sort, needs to be part of everyone’s early experience. That is why a wider and more formal acceptance of the other types of intelligence is so crucial.
Educational Credits
Education has to be a huge priority for everyone in the world of work that is emerging. It will not be enough to turn a few schools into shamrocks. We have got to do some more fundamental re-framing.
Upside-down thinking suggests that society should think of funding the individual rather than the institution wherever possible, as a way of releasing the motivation to learn in more people and to get the wheel of learning moving universally. If potential undergraduates, for instance, were each given an educational credit voucher to be cashed in at any university or college that would accept them, the institutions would be free to set their own fees, expand or contract as they pleased without reference to university funding councils or whoever. New institutions might be created to cash in on the new markets, whereas before only government could add to the supply. This way the state funds the customer and the supply creates itself.
Upside-down thinking goes on to wonder why it is that everyone has to rush off to college at 18 when so much of what one needs to learn only becomes apparent at a much later age. Furthermore, what logic is it which says that 18 is the age at which to decide that more formal education is appropriate? Indeed, if the numbers in Chapter 2 are even approximately correct we shall need to educate twice as many of each age group up to degree standard, but not necessarily all at once.
One answer would be to give everyone three years’ worth of educational credits, to be cashed in at any time in their lives, as long as they could find a licensed college to accept them. The credits would cover the fees, not the grants, so not everyone would be able or want to cash them in, but more would study part-time later in life, more would be supported by firms or by their own savings, more institutions would arise to take advantage of the bigger market. It would be a cheap way for government to increase the supply of graduates, tapping into the ones that were missed in the bulge years of the early 1980s. All they would have to do to maintain quality would be to monitor the standards of institutions through a licensing system, which is already in existence in Britain.
Educational credits have long been a suggestion put forward by the European Community office in Brussels. They need now to be taken more seriously by individual governments. One way to reduce the cost would be to make a one year credit part of any redundancy notice, thus getting organizations to fund some of the scheme.
Upside-down thinking goes on to suggest that three or four consecutive years in one institution is not the only or even the best way to spend a precious three years’ worth of credits. It should be possible to spread them out over a longer period or even over different institutions. Transferable course credits, as they have in West Germany, need to become part of our educational tradition if people are going to be able to build up a portfolio of learning, spread over time and over subjects. The Open University in Britain, with its open entry requirements, its credit accumulation scheme and its modular appeal is halfway there. When its approach is followed more widely and its course credits are more widely accepted in other institutions we shall be getting closer to the flexi-education we need for our flexi-lives.
The credit transfer does not have to be confined to formal colleges or universities. The great bulk of study is now taking place inside organizations. Provided this education is up to standard there is no good reason why it should not earn credits for its participants. We may soon expect to see business organizations seeking validation for their executive courses
from business schools. The so-called ‘consortium MBAs’ recently pioneered in Britain, where a group of companies collaborated with a business school to mount a degree programme for their executives, is a move in this direction. It is another way for the upside-down state to get its further education done properly for nothing. Organizations in Britain like the BBC and Hewlett-Packard are taking clever arts graduates and training them, in one year, to be electronics experts. They do it because they have to, but in one sense, why should they not have to? Why should we not expect the world of work to educate its own people? The older professions have always done this, others will surely follow.
The Learning Organization
‘The Learning Organization’ is a term currently in vogue. It is, however, less than obvious what it means, except that clearly it is a good thing to strive to be. The model of learning on which this chapter is based gives us some clues.
The learning organization can mean two things, it can mean an organization which learns and/or an organization which encourages learning in its people. It should mean both. As an organization which learns, and which wants its people to learn, it needs to follow the precepts of the theory explained in Chapter 3 of the wheel and its necessary lubricants. In particular:
Asking questions and testing theories
A learning organization needs to have a formal way of asking questions, seeking out theories, testing them and reflecting upon them. Too many organizations are like Action Men or Pragmatists, reacting to events and adapting creatively and opportunistically.
The incoming Director of the Tate Gallery in London in 1988 deliberately set up a series of one-day think-ins with his new staff to answer a whole series of questions ranging from the role of the gallery to how do we fund it and staff it. He used his opportunity as a newcomer to lift the questions, and the possible answers, out of the everyday and to give them a special attention. Other organizations formally review their competitor’s work and progress and use the review as a way to start the questions in some off-site top-level gathering. The Japanese are particularly fond of sending senior executives on study visits to competitors in other countries, raising questions and gathering ideas.
More typically, an organization does it in a corporate classroom, inviting a faculty from the world outside to raise issues and pose solutions. This can be an excuse to get stuck in the second stage of the wheel, listening to great theories in response to questions which nobody feels the organization has. These sort of seminars can too easily become corporate comfort pills, ‘Thank God, we don’t have to take any notice of that stuff since we don’t have the illness it is intended for.’ More accurately, someone on the staff has the questions and wants to use the experts to sell some answers, but unless all those present have the same questions and the same need to deal with them, nothing at all will happen.
Nor is it any use, of course, delegating the questions and the theories to some groups of scenario planners, corporate planners or even outside consultants. If the key executives feel no ownership of the questions and the theories they will not want to take the risk of testing them. The wheel will have got stuck. The top executives themselves have to be the ones who ask the questions, seek out the ideas, and test the best of them and then, deliberately, take time out to reflect on the results. It is no accident that the most successful corporate leaders give so much time to looking outside the organization, or that a leader’s job requires so much time spent in other people’s worlds if he or she is to avoid the dangers of ‘group-think’, the group that does not ask the uncomfortable questions or look at the uncomfortable ideas.
The wheel of learning cannot be left to chance or to the Chairman thinking in the bathtub. It has to be organized if the organization is to learn. John Harvey-Jones describes, in his book Making it Happen, how much time and attention he gave to creating the space for his top people to question, think and learn in his first years as Chairman of ICI.
A proper selfishness
The learning organization is properly selfish, it is clear about its role, its future, has goals and is determined to reach them. That sounds trite and obvious, but it is not that easy in practice. ‘To make profits’ or ‘the bottom line’ is not, by itself, a useful way of describing the purpose behind an organization. It does not begin to tell you what to do or what to be. It is akin to an individual saying that he or she wants to be happy. Of course, happiness and profitability is a state devoutly to be wished for but it is not a purpose. If anything, profits are a means and not an end. Without them, purposes are difficult to achieve.
Effective organizations know this now. Japanese corporations have always known it, which has been part of their strength. Their sources of finance know it, too, which sadly is not always the case in Britain and the USA. As in the case of an individual, the questions behind a proper selfishness in an organization are clear:
What are the organization’s strengths and talents?
Its weaknesses?
What sort of organization does it want to be?
What does it want to be known for?
How will its success be measured, by whom and when?
How does it plan to achieve it?
The answers, for most organizations, must start with the customer or the client – who are they, what do they need, what do they want, how can we know? Without customers, after all, no organization has the right to exist. The story of the hospital administrator, congratulated on his efficient hospital, who replied, ‘Thank you, but you should have seen it before we let the patients in, it was really beautiful then’, may be apocryphal but it is all too reminiscent of organizations who seem to exist only for themselves. ‘Involutus per se’, to be ‘turned in on oneself’ said St Augustine, was the worst of sins – improper selfishness.
A way of re-framing
The learning organization is constantly re-framing the world and its part in it. Leaders, I have argued earlier, need good conceptual skills. Even when these come with the genes they still need development and exercise. Every organization as it moves towards federalism and large do’nuts needs more leaders everywhere, more re-framing everywhere, not just at the top. Good do’nut definition is all about re-framing, just as the ‘what business are we in this year’ is also re-framing.
The quality circles in manufacturing organizations are, at their best, examples of re-framing at the shop-floor or office-floor level. They are, actually, the wheel of learning in action, with problems to be raised, ideas suggested, tested and reviewed. They will always work best, however, when the problem can be re-framed.
Quality circles are one example of how some organizations have incorporated re-framing and the learning cycle into their formal organization. Others create temporary think-tanks for their leaders in seminars in resort hotels, others hire consultants (with the attendant dangers of loss of ownership of the result). Once again, it cannot be left to chance.
Re-framing often needs some outside stimulus. Re-framers need to walk in other people’s worlds from time to time. It is here that outside conferences, courses and seminars really have their uses, but those attending them should not look for neat answers but only for a stimulus to re-framing. The other worlds of books, of theatre and art and travel, are also good aids to re-framing. They need to be cultivated by a learning organization, not frowned upon as indulgences.
One of the problems of life in the high-pressure core of the shamrock organization is that there is too little time now for walking in other people’s worlds. Even holidays can be interrupted, work can be done at home as easily or better than in the office, breakfast and dinners used as an opportunity for meetings, even visits to the opera turned into organization business. The learning organization must therefore make it an organizational responsibility to push people into those other worlds lest it be afflicted with a severe case of endemic group-think.
Negative capability
The learning organization must cultivate its negative capability. Disappointment and mistakes
are part of change and essential to learning. ‘How big a mistake can you now make without them stopping you first?’ I asked a young friend who was boasting of his new promotion. I was suggesting that real responsibility entailed the risk of big mistakes. Learning organizations start by giving space, large do’nuts in my language. Large do’nuts mean discretionary space, space which will sometimes be misused. A learning organization will try to turn those mistakes into learning opportunities, not by using them as sticks to beat with but as case-studies for discussion.
Incidental Learning, Alan Mumford calls it, the learning that can be built around incidents in everyone’s life and career. To be done without blame, however, and with implied forgiveness, the learning needs to be facilitated not by a boss or supervisor but by a neutral mentor or coach from inside, or, often, from outside the organization. Incidental Learning, properly done, uses the incident to raise the questions which start the wheel of learning. The mentor role will become increasingly important as do’nuts get larger. Properly selfish individuals will, if they are wise, look for their own mentors. Organizations could make this easier by maintaining a list of approved, and paid for, mentors, inside and outside. They will not always be people in great authority, those mentors, and will seldom be one’s immediate superior. Mentoring is a skill on its own. Quiet people have it more than loud people; for mentors are able to live vicariously, getting pleasure from the success of others; they are interpreters not theorists, nor action men, best perhaps in the reflective stage of learning, people who are attracted by influence not power.
A list of mentors is one outward symbol of an organization’s negative capability and of its endorsement of learning. More of these outward symbols are necessary if learning is going to be seen to be respectable, where time for reflection should be legitimate time. People could have individual educational budgets (in time or money) for their own discretionary self-development. Formal appraisal schemes could be re-formulated as self-development contracts, the language being the important symbol here because ‘appraisal’ sounds like judgement not help, looking backwards not forwards, smacking of authority not partnership.
The Age Of Unreason Page 17
