Strategic Fund Development: Building Profitable Relationships That Last, Third Edition

Leadership and Intelligences

The word intelligence comes from the Latin verb intelligere, “to understand” and “to choose between.” That old standard, the intelligence quotient (IQ), measured how smart you were, with a focus on mental capabilities such as reasoning, planning, problem solving, understanding complex ideas, and learning from experience.

In the olden days, people pretty much focused on one intelligence only. But back in 1983, Howard Gardner27 proposed multiple intelligences. Thus started the field of multiple intelligences (MI).

As I use it, the term intelligence refers to a set of human computational capacities. As humans, we have the ability to “compute” language, number, social relations, special relations, etc. We cannot directly see the intelligences. We observe them at work by observing individuals carrying out various kinds of behaviors and tasks.

From Howard Gardner, FAQ at www.howardgardner.com

Here’s Gardner’s explanation of intelligence:

Fundamentally, an intelligence refers to a biopsychological potential of our species to process certain kinds of information in certain kinds of ways. As such, it clearly involves processes that are carried out by dedicated neural networks. No doubt each of the intelligences has its characteristic neural processes, with most of them quite similar across human beings. Some of the processes might prove to be more customized to an individual. …  From an evolutionary point of view, it seems probable that each intelligence evolved ...