I’m a PhD working on my thesis on how different types of intelligence can be used in the workplace to leverage performance. First of all, thank you for all the great info you provide on your site! I recall seeing something on the same topic on your site so I thought you might like this infographic: (infographic below.) Maybe you can somehow use it for your work. I would appreciate any take you have on it.
signed,
Doctor Smart
Dear Doctor,
I’m glad to hear I’ve been useful to you in your studies. It must be very interesting and fulfilling work to bring out the best in people and organizations.
It’s some of my favourite work to do —going into a company with an unmanaged culture and then helping them to find and make the most beneficial use of the natural skills and talents and dispositions of their people? That never gets tired. Good for you.
I often marvel at how companies can think they have a problem when really they have good people doing things that don’t suit how they work. Right from the hiring process, how someone sees the world should be recognized and taken into account.
If every athletic activity the person engages in is a solo sport, then they’re not likely to be the outgoing gregarious type and they’ll probably do better working quietly away on something in their own corner where they’re not bothered. Likewise the people who are Captains of the teams they’re on, will naturally display leadership qualities based on that life experience.
It’s funny that you wrote when you did because someone just recently asked me if there were groups of patterns that people fell into. Now of course any definitions are ego-based judgments and where those lines are is entirely arbitrary and up to the desires of the border-placer, but I understood her point. She wondered if we deal on a daily basis with tribes of people who think similarly enough that it’s worthwhile to recognize what sort of person you’re dealing with and then respond accordingly —and as I’m sure you know, the answer is yes.
I guessed at about nine ‘thought approach tribes‘ —I see this infographic comes up with eight. I’m not big on counting or ordering things, but it doesn’t matter how many I see. You don’t want where my borders are, you want your own understanding. You want to see these people clearly.
It’s not hard. You simply have to quiet yourself and what remains is the truth. Without your personal judgments people are simply as they are. So then it’s like being on a river. We don’t use the same paddling strategy in the rapids that we use on the flats. Not because one is wrong and the other is right, it’s because one is appropriate and one is not.
People would do well to better-appreciate the ways in which others can successfully Be. Everyone can make contributions to our lives. We have to stop wanting people to do what we would do and we have to become open and learn from the way we wouldn’t do it —because the only way we can grow is to take in information that we don’t already have.
Discover your own wonders. And seek them in others too. Everyone should stop looking for what they don’t like, or agree with, and instead, start looking for what we don’t understand and then try to understand it. Because no matter who we are, or who they are, the best way to work with anyone is to understand them.
Thanks for the question, and for the graphic. I hope the readers find it helpful.
peace. s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.