This Is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for the Globe and Mail. I am sitting down in Vancouver with Sheen Levine, from the University of Texas at Dallas and Columbia University.
So Sheen, this Strategic IQ sounds very important - how do we develop it as individuals?
LEVINE - So, this is the million dollar question. How do we develop Strategic IQ as individuals? Well, most of what we do - if you think about our education system, most of what we do is we develop cognitive skills.
We develop the ability to solve math problems, to answer questions such as, What is the capitol of Montana? What is the square root of 104? How do you say wine in Spanish?
These are questions that have a concrete and specific answer. Strategic IQ is more about understanding how other people are going to behave. This is a skill that is hardly developed in formal education, which would cause some people to believe that this is a born skill.
I don't think it is a born skill. I think like many other skills people are born with certain levels of it, or acquire it naturally through their course of life, but it's something that can be developed. We are simply not paying attention to it.
So the first step in our research was to prove that Strategic IQ exists, two was to prove that Strategic IQ is different from general intelligence and that is very important.
We are able to say with confidence that being intelligent does not mean that you have Strategic IQ, and Strategic IQ does not necessitate that you are an intelligent person - the two are completely separate.
Now, if you are both intelligent and high on Strategic IQ, you have an extra large advantage, but you can be high on one and not on the other. The next question would be to develop exercises in which we could see that people move up and increase in their Strategic IQ. We intend to be able to measure it quantitatively.