Part One: Fragmented & Dramatic Intelligences
By Richard Claydon, Co-Founder & Chief Cognitive Officer, EQ Lab
"The future of work is not the science of business administration. It lies in complexity science and a deep and broad understanding of what it means to be human."
Being Human: types of intelligence
There are many intense arguments about the nature of intelligence. One camp, underpinned by Howard Gardner, argues for nine types of intelligence:
- Naturalist (nature smart)
- Musical (sound smart)
- Logical-mathematical (number/reasoning smart)
- Existential (life smart)
- Interpersonal (people smart)
- Bodily-kinesthetic (body smart)
- Linguistic (word smart)
- Intra-personal (self smart)
- Spatial (picture smart)
Another camp, promoted by the public intellectual Jordan Peterson, argues that there is only one type of intelligence (IQ) and that any challenge to it invalidates the usefulness of trait psychology, as IQ is, by far, the trait that most predicts a person's future life and performance. In short, getting rid of IQ as a single testable construct makes psychometric tests meaningless.
Thirdly, within high-tech, there is the fetishisation of fluid intelligence over crystallised intelligence.
- Fluid intelligence involves being able to think and reason abstractly and solve problems. This ability is considered independent of learning, experience, and education.
- Crystallised intelligence is based upon facts and rooted in experiences. As we age and accumulate new knowledge and understanding, crystallised intelligence becomes stronger.
For many years, scientists believed fluid intelligence peaked before the age of 30—although that is being revised, with recent research suggesting some aspects of fluid intelligence may peak as late as 40. In contrast, crystallised intelligence may not peak until your 70s.
With their focus on developing innovative technologies, high-tech leaders believe their employees need high levels of fluid intelligence. Firstly, because of the novel problem-solving aspect of high-tech innovation and, secondly, because they believe crystallised patterns of thinking "get in the way" of such work. As such, if you are over 40 in such industries, you are at extreme risk of obsolescence.
Conditions of Intelligence in Organisations
Now the technicalities are out of the way; we can examine how intelligence gets applied in an organisational sense and how organisational conditions impact that application. This is a two-way street. No matter how you define intelligence, if you cannot apply it to the best of your ability because of organisational conditions, testing for it is irrelevant.
We also take seriously the Kenneth Blanchard observation that "none of us are as smart as all of us." For us, the highest echelons of intelligent work occur when groups of diverse people work together to explore complex situations in transdisciplinary ways.
At this applied level, we believe there are five different conditions of intelligence in contemporary organisations.
- Extended Intelligence (EQ)
- Collective Intelligence (CQ)
- Individual Intelligence (IQ)
- Dramatic Intelligence (DQ)
- Fragmented Intelligence (FQ)
Each also has an energy component. If you are in conditions requiring constant application of dramatic intelligence, or are finding your intelligence to be fragmenting, then it can take all your energy to keep your head above water. When applying individual intelligence to tasks, you will oscillate between the energy-enhancing state of flow and frustrated states that drain energy. Conditions of collective and extended intelligence are always energy-enhancing.
Starting at the bottom, let's explore further.
Fragmented Intelligence (FQ)
Fragmented intelligence occurs in toxic, chaotic or intense organisational conditions that impact the possibility of focusing or collaborating in extended and meaningful ways. In such conditions, the professional self can start to fragment. You might notice that you are beginning to communicate in ways that don't sound or feel like you, with emails becoming terse and error-strewn or conversations littered with expletives or interjections of frustration. You might find you are unable to relax. Sleep might be a problem. Your diet and exercise regimes might suffer. You might be feeling irritable, apathetic or cynical, prone to presenteeism and lapses of concentration. In essence, you are not feeling yourself. These are indicative of fadeout, a precursor to burnout. Much of your energy will be spent on the cognitive and emotional effort of maintaining a semblance of your professional self. The chance of doing any good work becomes increasingly remote.
If things worsen and burnout follows, the idea of fragmented intelligence will no longer be a case of just not feeling yourself but a genuine struggle with the maintenance of a coherent and stable self. Many of those who have experienced burnout talk of the experience of no longer being in control of their minds or their emotions, feeling that whom they believed they were had fragmented into something different. Their professional self dissolved into something entirely different—dark, scary and painful—over which they had little control. Escape attempts might follow, ranging from addiction to death.
While wide-scale digital transformation and the impact of COVID are increasing psychological and physiological pressures, we don't think these conditions are massively common - yet. However, for some, they are already very real, and they present a possible future for many more if we focus attention on the wrong things, which takes us to...
Dramatic Intelligence
Dramatic intelligence manifests in the vast majority of contemporary organisations in conditions in which targets and objectives mix and clash with the necessity to digitally transform and be innovative in an arena beset with status, power and politics.
Dramatic intelligence involves the performance of multiple roles within such conditions. Most people play up to seven roles:
- Role One: Performing to the expectations of the shareholders and deliver the bottom-line results they demand
- Role Two: Performing to the necessities of the market and contributing to the digital transformation of work
- Role Three: Performing to the expectation of the team and being a collaborative, positive, team-player
- Role Four: Performing to the expectations of management and being an assertive, confident and influential individual worthy of promotion
- Role Five: Performing to the expectations of self and being a competent, intelligent and innovative individual doing meaningful and purposeful work
- Role Six: Performing to the powerful political reality of the organisation and covering one's back by being visible or invisible at the requisite times and places
- Role Seven: Performing to colleagues having similar interpretations of the organisational reality as yours, who can be relied on to provide camaraderie and psychic relief
On top are organisationally-specific behavioural demands, usually wrapped up in value-statements, to which you must also fit and comply. This can feel like having many jobs in eternal conflict, with the performance demands of one role contrasting with those of another. Some people can shift between these demands with fluidity, feeling relatively unstressed and possibly energised by the different role performances. Others struggle with the role-acting and can be sucked towards the whirlpool of fragmented intelligence. However, everyone spends great degrees of time on the performance of the requisite role to the requisite audiences, impacting the level to which they can be genuinely productive or innovative.
The COVID effect
For many, COVID has done a couple of things.
Firstly, it has pushed these roles closer together in time and space. Before every meeting being a Zoom meeting, there were spaces between the various role performances to discard the mask of one role and put on the mask of another. These spaces could be as little as a walk from one meeting room to another or as much as an international flight. Today, as meetings bleed into one another, with only a few seconds between clicks, such space has disappeared. The stress of hopping between different audience expectations has intensified.
Secondly, we have experienced the impact of a further audience - a meta-audience - that observed you performing all these roles - your family watching you working from home. That audience has seen many sides of you that it perhaps hadn't seen before. Those sides have bled into the family roles you play at home. Boundaries between work and home haven't just blurred. They have dissolved. What that might look like over time, who knows?
In conditions in which Dramatic Intelligence most fully manifests, the impression of working becomes more important than the effectiveness of the work actually being done. During the pandemic, this has accentuated as people are not fully visible to political power due to the remote or hybrid nature of post-COVID work. This can lead to frantic attempts to display that one is working, usually by logging into the system for longer and longer hours, and becoming visible on email chains and Zoom calls, especially if downsizing feels imminent.
The next instalment from Dr Claydon takes a deep dive into individual, collective and extended intelligences.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
