A Review of "Personal Best"

"Personal Best" is an employee training program copyrighted by Mr. Timothy Kight, apparently a business consultant and motivational speaker. Participants receive a notebook containing Mr. Kight's writings. The substance is a simple ten-point strategy to "Personal Excellence" that is similar to school-to-work transition programs and life skills curricula (such as these in Alabama and Utah), with an added indoctrination in Jungian personality typing. The 82 page work contains common sense advice, benign platitudes, opinions presented as facts, clip art, and entertaining contradictions, such as warning of the "Tyranny of either / or" thinking, followed a few pages later with: "Emotions . . . are either our master or our servant."

And I am amused by this precise quantification of the "Three Styles of Learning:"

• Visual, 29%
• Auditory, 34%
• Kinesthetic, 37%

Mr. Kight's "Recommended Reading List" consists largely of popular press self-help books and the Bible. Although he uses the phrases "research has shown" and "in a well-known study," there are no references to scholarly publications.

Then there is Mr. Kight's attitude toward intelligence. As author of A Glossary of Gifted Education, I found the following statement distressing and emailed Mr. Kight for elaboration, noting I that intend to publish his response on my Web page:

Beware of the intelligence trap. It's not how smart you are that counts, it's how you are smart that matters. Don't confuse thinking with IQ -- they are not the same thing. We don't have to be intellectual giants to be successful thinkers. We simply need to master the basics of effective thinking. In fact, at times intelligence can be an impediment to effective thinking. Intelligent people can construct a rational, well-argued case for almost any point of view. The mental quickness of the intelligent mind can actually shut down the thinking process.

Steven:

Thanks for your inquiry. Effective thinking is certainly an important part of life at work, at home, at school, and in the community. It is a deep and rich area of study!

A couple of questions: Where did you come across the Personal Best material? And what prompted you to ask about my comments regarding the intelliegence trap?

Here is a brief response to your question: First, the quote in your e-mail is slightly incorrect. You quoted me as writing, "Intelligent people can construct a rational, well-argued impediment to effective thinking." What I have written in the PB workbook is. "In fact, at times intelligence can be an impediment to effective thinking. Intelligent people can construct a rational, well-argued case for almost any point of view. The mental quickness of the intelligent mind can actually shut down the thinking process."

The point here is that there are "thinking traps" that we fall into and which impair our ability to see reality clearly, process information effectively, or make wise decisions. Intelligence can be one of those traps (as can ignorance). In its simplest form, thinking has three components: perceiving, processing, and deciding. Sometimes, highly intelligent people can put too much trust in their existing assumptions and/or knowledge and rush through the three thinking components without recognizing that their assumptions or perceptions are askew. They can be tempted to jump to conclusions without getting all the information. They will then tend to use their prodigious processing skills (usually with attendant verbal skills) to vigorously defend their assumptions and conclusions. This can lead to unwise decisions. This is the mental quickness of the intelligent mind being too quick!!

The research of Chris Argyris at Harvard has confirmed this phenomenon. He has observed that intelligent, successful professionals tend to make good decisions. They don't often make mistakes. As a consequence, they don't have much experience with being wrong. Thus on the occassions when they are wrong, they don't see it and tend to become very defensive. He calls this response "defensive routines," and can be a form of the intelligence trap (though certainly not found only among intelligent people). See his Harvard Business Review article, Teaching Smart People How to Learn.

Edward deBono, the international thinking expert, has observed and commented on the intelligence trap. Indeed, I adopted the phrase from deBono.

Also, high intelligence can influence us to focus on facts and rationality to the detriment of intuition, insight, and emotion. The research and recent writings on Emotional Intelligence have demonstrated the critical role that emotion plays in the thinking process. We are "smartest" when our whole brain is at work ... the "rational brain" in the neo-cortex integrated with the "emotional brain" in the limbic system. See the work of Salovey and Meyer, David McClelland, Dan Goleman, and Antonio Damasio.

I have discovered is that the most effective people are not simply intelligent ... they are also wise. And there is a difference. There is an old adage that says, The smart person knows what to say. The wise person knows whether or not to say it. High intelligence does not automatically produce great wisdom. Hitler was highly intelligent. Churchill was highly intelligent and very wise. Thus it is not how smart we are that matters, it is how we are smart that counts.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Tim Kight

My reactions:

• First, I am sorry I misquoted Mr. Kight when emailing him. I mangled two sentences into one while looking back and forth from the page to my keyboard.
• The little I have seen of Edward de Bono's work lacks scientific rigor, and he seems more interested in marketing himself than expanding knowledge. He appears to have insight into creative thinking, but his stereotypes of Highly Intelligent People are simplistic and contrary to the characteristics of the gifted widely accepted in education and psychology. On the whole, deBono and Kight show no evidence of familiarity with the academic field of giftedness and intelligence studies.
• Thinking is the use of intelligence. One cannot think without intelligence. Therefore, one cannot get into "thinking traps" without intelligence. So to say that intelligence itself is a thinking trap is not helpful. Intelligence is necessary both to get into thinking traps and to avoid them.
• Acting on assumptions, rushing to judgement, jumping to conclusions, and defensiveness, those are the real traps Mr. Kight identifies. By collectively labeling these the "intelligence trap," Mr. Kight is suggesting a correlation between level of intelligence and falling into these errors. The evidence is anecdotal and contrary to the scholarly literature on giftedness and intelligence, which shows level of intelligence to be positively correlated with ability to learn and modify one's thinking and behavior.
• A study of "intelligent, successful professionals" is hardly generalizable to the entire population even if the researcher had used control groups, could somehow accurately measure everyone's intelligence, could identify and measure the frequency, intensity, and latency of thinking traps, and could establish some sort of correlation. Argyris work more readily supports a "success trap" than an "intelligence trap," and while success and intelligence show a correlation, they are not interchangeable.
• Constructing a rational, well-argued case demonstrates both effective thinking and its underlying intelligence. I see no evidence that highly intelligent people construct arguments for purposes contrary to their goals. Their goals may be not be apparent, or may be unwise, but then the problem is not "too much intelligence," it is "too little wisdom."
• Of the things in short supply in our world, a focus on facts and rationality is not among them. This is evidenced by the popularity of Jerry Springer, astrology, the Myers-Briggs type indicators, religious cults, and Internet company stock prices in 1999, while schools go begging for well-trained (or better yet, educated) teachers, and adequate programs for the gifted are missing from most communities.
• Finally, a section titled "Thinking Traps" that begins with a paragraph warning of the dangers of intelligence while giving just a one or two line treatment to each of the legitimate thinking traps listed below it strikes me as supremely anti-intellectual. Would it not be better to encourage, develop, and utilize the thinking skills of intelligent employees rather than denigrate their abilities and cast suspicion on them?

If you'd care to comment, email me.

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