An opening statement from Robert J. Sternberg in response to a question from Scientific American (2017):

Scientific American: In your talk, you said that IQ tests and college entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools” – people who have a certain kind of intelligence but not the kind that can help our society make progress against our biggest challenges. What are these tests getting wrong?

Sternberg: “Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE-what I call the alphabet tests-are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests, and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to a minor extent-but they are very limited. What I suggested in my talk today is that they may actually be hurting us. …. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills, but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place”.

And in a more recent article(2021), he explained things further:
“As Sandel (2020) has pointed out, the problem is that advances in education and, I would add, the corresponding increases in IQ, do not seem to buy good governance. What instead this alleged meritocracy buys us is a largely hereditary aristocracy of the highly educated, much as we have had with people who are of a particular race, sex, caste, or religion, many of whom have argued for the merit of the particular group to which they happen to belong.

Perhaps those aspects of intelligence as measured by IQ fare better in predicting success in domains other than leadership. However, rather than asking this question, we might ask the question James Flynn posed, which is essentially one of whether we should not pay more attention to how intelligence is deployed rather than to how much intelligence, measured by IQ or anything else, people have.”

Culminating in another 2021 article which explains the missing ‘make a difference’ attribute is: wisdom. The concluding paragraphs of this article set the scene:
“We believe that wisdom always has been important but today is perhaps at least as important as, or more important than ever because problems that once were local have become global. For example, a disease that once might have been localized to one area, COVID-19, now has spread around the world as a result of globalization. Similarly, problems of climate change and pollution, which once might have been localized, have become so large in magnitude that they too have become global. Governmental leaders around the world are, in many cases, failing to meet satisfactorily even the basic challenges one would expect from wise leaders … Those who need wisdom most often seem least interested in acquiring it …

This is huge and completely at odds with the “settled science” so many psychologists promote to organizations about how IQ is the ‘golden’ key to performance and organizational success e.g. the article by Nathan Kuncel and Sarah Hezlett in 2010, entitled: “Fact and fiction in cognitive ability testing for admissions and hiring decisions”.

Problem is that the “settled science” is not looking so settled after all in a re-analysis of IQ x Job Performance datasets provided in a 2015 article, authored by Ken Richardson and Sarah Norgate entitled: “Does IQ Really Predict Job Performance?”. As the concluding sentences of the abstract indicate:
“Correlations of around 0.5 have been regularly cited as evidence of test validity, and as justification for the use of the tests in developmental studies, in educational and occupational selection and in research programs on sources of individual differences. Here, those correlations are examined together with the quality of the original data and the many corrections needed to arrive at them. It is concluded that considerable caution needs to be exercised in citing such correlations for test validation purposes.”

Metacognition Assessing IQ or GMA is no longer sufficient if you are looking to hire people who possess more than IQ test-taking abilities i.e., you need them to be able to think, to ‘stand-back’ from a problem and see all the issues in play, to come up with solutions to messy real-world issues rather than only solve knowledge-constrained technical problems.

It seems metacognition is the key, as proposed more formally in a recent 2019 article from Elisabeth Norman and colleagues:
“Most researchers therefore agree that metacognition has at least two functions. One function is to monitor the current state of whatever cognitive activity we are engaged in (Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009). For instance, how well do we understand the text we are currently reading? Or, in the case where we are trying to remember something, to what extent do we think we will be able to succeed? The other function is to control our own cognition—to try harder or less hard to remember something, or to shift to a different strategy when we are stuck in attempting to solve a puzzle. Monitoring and control are closely intertwined.”

This importance of this construct is explained more briefly in a (May, 2021) New Scientist article from Stephen Fleming, summarising his team’s research in this are: entitled: “How to boost your self-awareness and make better decisions”. The really important bit is this sentence at the end of the article:
“Strikingly, it also seems that metacognition is independent of IQ and general cognitive ability: your metacognition can still be in good form as long as you recognise you are performing badly at a task.”

And, if you are still thinking: “this can’t be right!”, the stellar results from the now famous Deloittes’s Persistence Project concluded that enduring (spanning 20 years) organizational success resembled a random walk. As the authors state in their subtitle to this research:
“researchers who think they are studying successful companies are usually studying the winners of a random walk. What does this mean for the soundness of some of the most popular and influential management research? The bottom line: you can’t trust it.”

This was not the usual trivial research you see from most organizational scholars: “we looked at the performance of a broad sample of companies (287) traded on U.S. exchanges from 1966 to 2006—more than 230,000 company years’ worth of data.”

Many if not most of these large US corporates would likely have been using psychometric assessment of employee abilities and personality. Let the implications of that along with the phrase “random walk’ sink in. Whether or not organizations used psychometric assessment of employees made no discernible difference to the enduring organizational success or otherwise of any company.

As the authors concluded in a follow-up article entitled: “Three Rules for making a company really great”:
“The rules don’t dictate specific behaviors; nor are they even general strategies. They’re foundational concepts on which companies have built greatness over many years. How did these organizations’ leaders come to adopt them? We have no idea—nor do we know whether the executives even followed them consciously. Nevertheless, the rules can be used to help today’s and tomorrow’s leaders increase the chances that their companies, too, will deliver decades of exceptional performance.”
1. Better before cheaper—in other words, compete on differentiators other than price.
2. Revenue before cost—that is, prioritize increasing revenue over reducing costs.
3. There are no other rules—so change anything you must to follow Rules 1 and 2.”

So, I hope some decision-makers skimming this blog are beginning to realize that IQ/GMA may not be such a big deal as might have been relayed to them previously. For some substantive, high-autonomy job-roles, you need people who are capable of thinking beyond ‘specific-knowledge-constrained’ problems

Many organizations have suddenly seen their leaders floundering in this current COVID pandemic situation. For example, KPMG and their former chairman and senior partner, Bill Michael. As Michael Hill in a February, 2021 FT article entitled: “’Authentic’ leaders who lack skill are doomed to fail” asked of Bill Michael: “why would anyone want to be led by you?” KPMG’s chairman resigned in February after the Financial Times reported he had told consultants to “stop moaning” during an online ZOOM discussion about the pandemic’s impact

For many years now at Cognadev, we’ve been quietly helping companies hire ‘high-stakes’ employees who possess the values and metacognitive capabilities enabling them to form more intelligent, good judgements about complex and multifaceted issues; not using selfreport questionnaire or IQ-test items but by carefully acquiring holistic/integrated information using an in-depth performance-based assessment of an individual’s reasoning, emotional, and metacognitive intellectual functioning: the Cognadev Process Profile (CPP) and the Value Orientations (VO) assessment.

These two assessments, the CPP and VO, reveal the way in which a person thinks, the HOW, their metacognitive awareness in particular, as well as the WHY, their level of awareness, consciousness, valuing systems, worldview and cultural memes. Together these two highly unique instruments, the CPP and the VO, thus predict a person’s perceptions, their levels of awareness and decision-making frameworks – all of which are critical for leadership identification and development.