Acknowledging my work on multiple intelligences, Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, and Robert Sternberg’s work on practical intelligence, authors Ian Stewart and Myles Runham propose an intelligence that they deem important for leaders and learning officers in the future.
They dub it “DI”—for “Digital Intelligence.”
Stewart and Runham, both associated the Kaplan Performance Academy, are not the first to propose this form of cognition. They themselves acknowledge Digital Intelligent Quotient and the World Economic Forum’s Skills for the future. And quite a few years ago, my colleagues, Antonio Battro and Percy Denham, issued a small book on La Educacion Digital.
Stewart and Runham identify three components of digital intelligence:
Analytical (critical thinking, dealing with data, complex problem solving and synthesizing)
Collaborative (leadership, followership, participative decision making, digital presence and community, creativity and innovation, experimenting and testing)
Practical (fluent communication skills, self-regulation, commercial awareness, evidence -based decision making. digital fluency)
What I like about this scheme is that it recognizes a wide swathe of those capacities that are most useful for our era— in many ways a digital age. One by one, these capacities are worth identifying and nurturing.
But I do not find persuasive that the three buckets—Analytical, Collaborative, and Practical, are by any means mutually exclusive.
Nor do I find a rationale for the subcategorization. Creativity and innovation can be found anywhere, as can leadership and followership. Same for complex problem solving or evidence-based decision making.
Moreover, most of the scheme would be equally applicable to a non-digital time. We need a clearer delineation of what is rendered specifically to our contemporary world.
When I developed “MI theory” many years ago, I sought to identify capacities that were distinct from one another—and each of the “intelligences” had its specific sub-categories. If Stewart and Runham’s taxonomy is to be persuasive, it needs to provide a rationale for positing of the three separate buckets; the placement within them of the more specific capacities and practices; and a demonstration of what is characteristic of the world of 2021, as opposed to the world of earlier times.
Reference
Runham, M. and Stewart, I., 2021. After EI, DI?. [online] Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media. Available at: <https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2021/06/29/after-ei-di/> [Accessed 23 July 2021].
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