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Practical
Intelligence |
London, October 2001: This year, record numbers of students obtained top A-level grades, yet employers complain that young people still lack the basic skills to succeed at work. The only explanation offered is that exams must be getting easier. But the real answer could lie in a study* just published by Professor Robert Sternberg, an eminent psychologist at Yale University in the US and the world's leading expert on intelligence. His research reveals the existence of a totally new variety: practical intelligence.
Prof Sternberg's astonishing finding is that practical intelligence, which predicts success in real life, has an inverse relationship with academic intelligence. In other words, the more practically intelligent you are, the less likely you are to succeed at school or university. Similarly, the more paper qualifications you hold and the higher your grades, the less able you are to cope with problems of everyday life and the lower your score in practical intelligence.
Many people who are clearly successful in their place of work do badly in standard IQ tests. Entrepreneurs and those who have built large businesses from scratch are frequently discovered to be high-school or college drop-outs.
IQ as a concept is more than 100 years old. It was supposed to explain why some people excelled at a wide variety of intellectual tasks. But IQ ran into trouble when it became apparent that some high scorers failed to achieve in real life what was predicted by their tests.
Emotional intelligence (EQ), which emerged a decade ago, was supposed to explain this deficit. It suggested that to succeed in real life, people needed both emotional as well as intellectual skills.
EQ includes the abilities to motivate yourself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulses and delay gratification; to regulate moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; and to understand and empathize with others.
While social or emotional intelligence was a useful concept in explaining many of the real-world deficiencies of the brainy, it did not account for much more success in real life. Again, some of the most successful people in the business world, such as Bill Gates, were obviously lacking in social charm.
Not all the real-life difficulties we face are solvable with just good social skills - and good social acumen in one situation may not translate to another.
The crucial problem with academic and emotional intelligence scores is that they are both poor predictors of success in real life. For example, research has shown that IQ tests predict only between 4 per cent and 25 per cent of success in life, such as job performance.
Prof Sternberg's group at Yale began from a very different position to traditional researchers into intelligence. Instead of asking what intelligence was and investigating whether it predicted success in life, Prof Sternberg asked what distinguished people who were thriving.
Instead of measuring this form of intelligence with mathematical or verbal tests, practical intelligence is scored by answers to real-life dilemmas such as: "If you were travelling by car and got stranded on a motorway during a blizzard, what would you do?"
An important contrast between these questions is that in academic tests there is usually only one answer, whereas in practical intelligence tests - as in real life - there is often more than one right answer.
The Yale group found that most of the really useful knowledge successful people have acquired is gained during everyday activities - but typically without conscious awareness. Although successful people's behavior reflects the fact that they have this knowledge, the flourishing are often unable to articulate what they know. This partly explains why practical intelligence has been so difficult to identify.
The notion that people acquire knowledge without awareness of what is being learnt is reflected in the language of the workplace as people speak of "learning by doing" in reference to knowledge that psychologists now refer to as "tacit". Professional "intuition" and "professional instinct" further imply that the knowledge associated with successful performance is tacit. The point about tacit knowledge is that no one formally teaches it, in spite of how vital it is to success. Usually you have to learn it for yourself.
Another essential difference between practical intelligence and others is that while academic knowledge is about knowing facts, practical intelligence is about knowing "how". Often the unsuccessful are doing exactly the same as successful people - they are just not doing it in the same way.
For example, two people may ask for a pay rise at work but how the rise is asked for will determine who gets paid more, not the mere fact of asking for it.
Prof Sternberg found that the best way to reach practical intelligence is to ask successful people to relate examples of crucial incidents at work where they solved problems demonstrating skills they had learnt while doing their jobs.
It would appear that one of the best ways of improving your practical intelligence is to observe master practitioners at work and, in particular, to focus on the skills they have acquired while doing the job.
Oddly enough, this is the basis of traditional apprentice training. Historically, the junior doctor learnt by observing the consultant surgeon at work and the junior lawyer by assisting the senior barrister.
Another area where practical intelligence appears to resolve a previously unexplained paradox is that performance in academic tests usually declines after formal education ends. Yet most older adults contend that their ability to solve practical problems increases over the years.
The key implication for organizations and companies is to understand that where practical intelligence is located may not be detectable by conventional auditing and performance measuring procedures. Inducting new or less capable employees into becoming more practically intelligent will involve learning from the genuinely practically intelligent rather than from training manuals or courses.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is in recruitment, as these new studies strongly suggest that paper qualifications are unlikely to be helpful in predicting who will be best at solving your company's problems.
Prof Sternberg's research suggests that we should start looking at companies in a completely different way - and see them as places where a huge number of problems are being solved all the time but where it may take new eyes to see the practical intelligence in action.
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited, London, England.
Born in England of a Guyanese economist Dr. Bishnoodat Persaud and Trinidadian author, Dr. Laxhmie Persaud, the author is considered to be Britain's leading psychiatrist. He has been written about and has written for all the leading British publications and many other prestigious publications abroad. He has his own regular TV program and is a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital in south London among other things.