Financial Times

IQ to EQ to SQ: a journey we ought to take
By Lalith Weeratunga
Ever since the concept of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) was introduced to the world, individuals and organizations alike became accustomed to it using it as a measure of one's intelligence and a predictor of one's success. IQ was thought to measure our intellectual or rational intelligence to solve logical or strategic problems. Many tests were designed to measure IQ of persons.

Alfred Binet, a Frenchman was the chief worker in this area of work. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Binet with his colleague Theodore Simon devised the first tests of intelligence in order to sift out retarded children and to place other children at their appropriate grade level.

Later, the tasks and tests in the area of IQ were available to be used on a very widespread scale. In fact, in the years to come, i.e. the middle of the twentieth century, it became almost a mania, for evaluating people, for specific purposes such as evaluating children in schools, recruiting personnel for the military, recruiting managerial level workers into industrial organizations and interestingly, for social companionship as well. It had become psychology's greatest achievement up to that time.

No wonder the high scores at IQ tests placed people in the cream of intelligentsia portraying to the world that those who score high in the IQ tests, such as the ones that Binet and Simon designed, were the real successes in life. Who wouldn't want to recruit the most intelligent and successful people into their organizations? After all, everybody was looking out for some kind of predictor of success. This led to the wide applications of IQ tests in work, academic and personal life.

This notion, however, could not hold on for long as there were many people with myriad talents, but who 'failed' in the IQ test. They were perceived to be people successful in life.

A psychologist at the Harvard School of Education, Dr. Howard Gardner, launched a project titled "Project Spectrum" to broaden our notion of the spectrum of talents people possess. He says, "The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead, we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor.

And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there."

It is Gardner who points out in his influential book, Frames of Mind (1983), that the glory days of the IQ tests began during World War I, when two million American men were sorted out through the first mass paper-and-pencil form of the IQ test, freshly developed by Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford. This led to what Gardner calls the "IQ way of thinking": "that people are either smart or not, are born that way, that there's nothing much you can do about it, and that tests can tell you if you are one of the smart ones or not. The SAT test for college admission is based on the same notion of a single kind of aptitude that determines your future. This way of thinking permeates society."

Gardner's influential book, Frames of Mind (1983) was a manifesto refuting the IQ view; it proposed that there was not just one, monolithic kind of intelligence that was crucial for life's success, but rather a wide spectrum of intelligences, with seven key varieties. The work of Howard Gardner discovered that we each have at least seven different types of intelligences:

Linguistic
Logical-mathematical
Visual-spatial
Musical
Kinesthetic
Intrapersonal
Interpersonal

The operative word in this view of intelligence is multiple. Gardner acknowledges that seven is an arbitrary number for the variety of intelligences; there is no magic number to the multiplicity of human talents. This multifaceted view of intelligence offers a richer picture of a child's ability and potential for success than the standard IQ. Gardener's conclusion was that "the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale did not predict successful performance across or on a consistent subset of spectrum activities." Gardner's thinking about the multiplicity of intelligence continues to evolve. Some ten years after he first published his theory, Gardner gave these nutshell summaries of the personal intelligences.

Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them. Successful salespeople, politicians, teachers, clinicians, and religious leaders are all likely to be individuals with high degrees of interpersonal intelligence. Intrapersonal intelligence….. is a correlative ability, turned inward. It is a capacity to form an accurate, veridical model of oneself and to be able to use that model to operate effectively in life.

In another rendering, Gardner noted that the core of interpersonal intelligence includes the "capacities to discern and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations, and desires of other people." In intrapersonal intelligence, the key to self-knowledge, he included "access to one's own feelings and the ability to discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide behaviour."
Gardner's Theory of multiple intelligences has paved the way for us to think beyond IQ. Obviously, IQ has failed to predict life's success.

There were many who scored high in IQ tests but who were wrecks in life. In the mid-1990s, Daniel Goleman through his best-selling book Emotional Intelligence popularized research from many neuroscientists and psychologists showing that emotional intelligence (EQ) is of equal, if not, more importance.

EQ, according to Goleman, gives us awareness of our own feelings and that of others. It gives us empathy, compassion, motivation and the ability to respond appropriately to pain or pleasure. According to Gardner, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences give us the EQ we require to 'stay afloat' in life amidst untold hardships and numerous obstacles. Those who handle these difficult situations without succumbing are those who will be successful in life.

Goleman points out, "The workplace has changed significantly over the last few decades. Understanding work and how it is changing is essential to all decision makers. The rules for work are also changing. We're being judged by a new yardstick: not just by how smart we are, or by our training and expertise, but also by how well we handle each other and ourselves.

This yardstick is increasingly applied in choosing who will be hired and who will not, who will be allowed to go and who retained, who passed over and who promoted."
Since Goleman popularized the concept of EQ, it has swept board rooms and homes alike. Organizations and individuals have explored ways and means of fine-tuning their EQ through training workshops, seminars, coaching and mentoring. Various instruments are being developed to let people measure their EQ and make their lives successful by 'learning the EQ competencies.' Unlike IQ, which cannot be improved after early teens, EQ can be learnt and practiced. That was the good news that made people sit up and take notice of this novel concept of "making it through life successfully."

As Gardner pointed out the human intelligence is multiple. It's just not limited to seven. There may be more realms of human intelligence that we will learn as scientific research unravels many mysteries in the human brain. At the end of the twenty first century, another 'Q', the third so far, seems to be haunting us.

This is the Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) we possess. If with EQ, we handled life's difficult situations through intelligent management of emotions, with SQ we would address and solve problems of meaning and value, place our actions and our lives in a wider, richer, meaning giving context. With SQ we will also assess that one-life path is more meaningful than another. As Danah Zohar, co-author of the book, Connecting with our Spiritual Intelligence, states, "SQ is the necessary foundation for the effective functioning of both IQ and EQ. It is our ultimate intelligence."

What exactly is SQ? Is it something to do with one's religion or beliefs? SQ is not about being religious. SQ allows human beings to be creative, to change the rules and to alter situations. SQ gives us our ability to discriminate. It gives us our moral sense, an ability to temper rigid rules with understanding and compassion and an equal ability to see when compassion and understanding have their limits. In simpler terms, SQ allows us to wrestle with questions of good and evil and to envision unrealized possibilities.

Neither IQ nor EQ, separately or in combination, is enough to explain the full complexity of human intelligence. Also, they will not be able to explain the vast richness of the human soul and imagination. As Stephen Covey, the famed author of the best selling business book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, says, people have to exercise the four human endowments before responding to a stimulus, if the response is to be extraordinarily effective. The four human endowments Covey wrote about are: self-awareness, imagination, conscience and independent will.

Self-awareness is a dimension of EQ, but the other three could be explained better using SQ concepts. In short, SQ makes us the fully intellectual, emotional and spiritual creatures we are. Can we learn SQ? As much as EQ can be learnt and improved (quite unlike IQ), it is possible to enhance our SQ. Danah Zohar, who popularized the concept of SQ, through co-authoring the books, Connecting with our Spiritual Intelligence, and The Quantum Self, with her husband, Ian Marshall, says that our levels of SQ can be raised by raising our tertiary process - our tendency to ask why, to look for the connections between things, to bring to the surface the assumptions we have been making about the meaning behind and within things, to become more reflective, to reach beyond ourselves a little, to take responsibility to become more self-aware, to be more honest with ourselves and be more courageous.

The author is a Senior Consultant at the Postgraduate Institute of Management of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and a former senior officer in the Sri Lanka Administrative Service. He has held a number of senior appointments in the public service as Acting Secretary to the Prime Minister, Additional Secretary, Prime Minister's Office, and Additional Secretary, Ministry of Education & Higher Education.

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