Smart Beyond IQ, Four More Factors That Influence Your Thinking

Imagine you’ve just walked out of a really challenging job interview. After you leave the room, an employee from the company walks in and asks the woman who interviewed you, “They seemed nice, but are they smart enough?”

We’ve been obsessed with this question and the topic of “smarts” or “intelligence” for centuries, and our everyday language and behavior reflect this obsession. We label ourselves and others constantly with all sorts of terms that signify intelligence—quick, sharp, brilliant, brains — and we attach extreme significance to the most commonly referenced metric for intelligence, the intelligence quotient (IQ).

But within that last sentence, we find the key problem — while intelligence is important, the metric of IQ is terribly inadequate.

IQ is Amazingly Incomplete at Measuring the Quality of Your Thinking

As a quick refresh, IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient and is the most common measure of general intelligence (known as g) that currently exists. The average IQ is always 100 — it’s re-calibrated to make this happen — and there are many different tests you can take, by many different names, to get your IQ score.¹

IQ tests are generally effective at measuring two particular characteristics. First is fluid intelligence, which covers abstract thinking, problem-solving, and attention control. Second is crystallized intelligence, which relates to verbal comprehension, arithmetic, and more general knowledge.

*The two components of general intelligence measured by IQ.*

But that’s it, that’s all that IQ tests measure. Granted these characteristics are quite important — there’s a mountain of data that links these to achievement and performance — but there’s also much left out. What about:

Social awareness?
Being able to follow through on our goals?
Rationality?
Managing our emotions?

Let’s showcase this with an example — I think it’s safe to say that we all know someone in our lives that we would describe something like this:

“Paul is incredibly book smart, but man oh man, he really doesn’t seem capable of making the most of it.”

This highlights a simple and incredibly important point — IQ doesn’t measure all of the things that we commonly associate with having the high intelligence and effective thought processes that lead to achievement. But what else is out there that is worth looking at? Thankfully, decades of high-quality, peer-reviewed research provide us with a starting point to understand other factors that are important to consider.

Four “New” Factors to Consider

There’s a fascinating array of other ways to measure our brains and thought processes that is emerging thanks to advances in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, biology, and a host of other fields. Today, we’ll cover four of these factors that touch on everything from rationality to personality (each of these factors is also supported by a robust, peer-reviewed body of scientific research).²

*Four key cognitive characteristics, beyond IQ, worth learning about.*

Rationality Quotient

If you’ve ever heard of behavioral economics or read Thinking Fast and Slow, you’ll understand that the patterns of thought in human brains are more complex than rational rules would dictate (aka, we’re not rational). In an overly simplistic definition, Rationality Quotient (RQ) seeks to answer the question, “how rational is your thinking?”

Recent advances in measuring RQ have led to the creation of a test called the CART that tries to holistically measure the many elements of rational thinking.³ There’s a really strong research foundation behind RQ, and higher RQ is an asset to effective thinking. There’s also a great term — dysrationalia — for someone who has a really high IQ, but can’t seem to make effective decisions or think rationally.

Bottom-line here: it’s hard to apply the intelligence you have if you are consistently acting in tremendously irrational ways.

Mental Complexity

Thanks to decades of research by Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan on mental complexity, we have the ability to measure a factor that I like to think of as intellectual maturity. Mental complexity refers to the “variety of perspectives, concepts, and vocabulary we have to make sense of the world.”⁴

High levels of mental complexity enable you to more effectively navigate ambiguous and uncertain situations, to not get bogged down by your attachment to the current views you hold, and to more effectively create stories and narratives that resonate with others.

Mental complexity can be particularly powerful for leaders in VUCA environments — VUCA meaning volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous — as they’re more able to handle the immense challenges that come with making decisions in extreme unknowns. The highest level of mental complexity is known as “self-transforming,” and according to two large-scale studies, less than 1% of the population is at this level.⁵

Emotional Intelligence

As the most publicly discussed factor on this list, you’ve probably heard of emotional intelligence before. Emotional intelligence consists of four underlying skills related to emotions — self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

As you can imagine, higher levels of emotional intelligence are associated with improved workplace performance. This is particularly applicable to professions or environments that require a high amount of social interaction and collaboration (if you’re part of an Agile team, this is likely you).

Many of us can easily come up with examples of friends or colleagues who fit squarely into the bucket of highly intelligent, but lacking in emotional skills. The good news is that emotional intelligence can be developed with deliberate focus and effort, so improvement is absolutely possible, which is also the case for RQ and mental complexity.

Big Five Personality

A quick online search for personality tests will inundate you with all sorts of crazy advertisements and offerings to take the latest and greatest assessment. Thankfully, you can save yourself a lot of time by starting with Big Five.

Big Five is the gold standard in personality science, and is the most accurate and well-researched personality model that exists (be wary of anyone who sells personality tests that doesn’t tell you this). It’s also referred to as OCEAN or the Five-Factor Model, and it consists of (you guessed it) five dimensions of personality: openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. There’s strong evidence linking elements of the Big Five to academic and workplace performance, particularly with conscientiousness (high is good) and neuroticism (high is bad).

Two important notes wrap up our discussion of Big Five and personality. First, the Big Five is scored on a spectrum that avoids assigning personality types — personalities simply don't come in “types.” And second, although personality is quite static, it’s not as fixed as we often assume, and changes will occur as a result of your environment and personal experiences over the course of your life.

Thinking Beyond IQ

IQ is no doubt an important part of the cognitive factors that influence our intelligence and thought processes, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture. Rationality, complexity, emotional intelligence, and personality are important factors that we would be wise to incorporate into our views of what makes people smart, effective, and productive.⁶

So next time you’re commenting on the quality of an interviewee, selecting the next manager or high potential employee in your company, or taking stock of your own personal capabilities, take a moment to think beyond IQ, it’ll make you smarter.

— — —

Learn more about Protocol65’s latest thinking on employee performance at the Performance Protocol.