If we work in an organisation that aspires to include people in our Focus Group, and particularly if we are committed to not being dominated or overwhelmed by the Pillars it is interesting to consider processing speed in the context of leadership.
When I was a young man, I was not that good at team sports. I always felt that I’d have been brilliant if everyone else on the field stood still on the rare occasion when I got the ball. This would have been a big ask for my teammates not to mention the opposition. But it would have been very helpful to me!
Crucially, it would have given me time to process what was going on around me and deliver a fantastic pass to a teammate and I’d have been loudly praised rather than, as was the norm, shouted at for making a mistake as my hit-and-hope pass drifted harmlessly into empty space, or worse, went to an opponent – (Hail Mary passes, as they were called for some reason).
I had no idea why I was bad at team sports until I came across, later in life, research that claimed we possessed different kinds of intelligences, and that some are more dominant than others.
The research suggested that these different intelligences – described very simply in this link – have an influence on our path in life, our career, our choices of activities/hobbies/interests, our happiness in doing what we do, whether or not we are in the wrong box etc.
According to this theory which is often criticised (usually for being too simplistic) there are eight different intelligences. But criticisms or not I like the theory because it makes a kind of sense to me, and fits in with my experience of life and in particular my experience of learning.
The speed, within the particular intelligence, that the individual has at making connections separates out our abilities within the boundaries of the intelligence.
For example, I have a reasonably high musical intelligence but I know other friends and acquaintances that have far more musical intelligence than I – i.e. their brains make connections a lot faster than mine in the area of music. A casual observer would probably recognise that they are better at music than I.
And sometimes we have talent in one context but it’s not really transportable into another context. There are people who have great compassion, people who are highly academically intelligent, and people who can see something inauthentic immediately.
It can cause us a lot of distress in life if we are forced by circumstance, parental pressure, peer pressure etc. to try and excel at something that we are not naturally gifted in.
Many years after I first read about multiple intelligences, I came across the quotation attributed to Albert Einstein (him again) about how pointless it was to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree which kind of fitted in nicely with the concept.
High in the cognitive-logical intelligence – Albert!