Jude Antonyappan, Ph.D. & Tojo Thatchenkery, Ph.D.

The continuing relevance of “emotional intelligence“, “social intelligence” and “appreciative intelligence” indicate the need for widening the understanding of factors that make individuals to successfully self actualize at the optimal level of his/her ability to be a productive and well adjusted individual. Each of the different types of intelligence identified so far is concerned with a specific dimension of intelligence that is helpful for the human being at one or other level of self actualization. However, a review of life histories of successful leaders, innovators, change agents and remarkable individuals who optimize their potentials in ways that accentuate human progress - indicate that their success depends on their capacity to integrate the different aspects of the human intelligence at the social, economic, emotional, interactional, ethical and spiritual levels.

The purpose of this site is to present the Integrative Intelligence characteristics, discuss the role of integrative intelligence in successful self actualization as manifested in the lives of successful individuals of the last five centuries, illustrate the need for including Integrative Intelligence as part of training and educational curriculum, and present the scale developed by the authors for measuring Integrative Intelligence and present the components of a curriculum for integrative intelligence.

Main themes

· The nature of a newly identified intelligence, integrative intelligence

· The characteristics of integrative intelligence as identified in specific leaders and their organizations (through real-life stories)

· Integrative intelligence as one of the foundations for innovation, productivity, and success

· Tool for the development of integrative intelligence

Gardener’s limited discussion of integrative intelligence was narrowly referred to as the capacity of the individual to dissect the whole into its parts and configure the whole from its components. He conceived it as a process where pieces of information are integrated into a central idea crucial to purposeful action. We define Integrative Intelligence as the capacity to engage all aspects (social, economic, psychological, cultural and spiritual) of one’s being simultaneously to work collaboratively with one’s environmental domains for personally empowering and sustainable solutions. The book’s central premise rests on the thesis that purposeful and satisfyingly successful self actualization that benefits the self and the society is possible only in the integration of the different kinds of intelligence in their unique dimensions.

Integrative intelligence is different from other types of intelligences and concepts such as Gestalt, wholistic thinking, and systems thinking. The different types of intelligences identified by Gardener and others focus on compartmentalized aspects of one’s personality constructs and capacities. Integrative intelligence is the unifying capacity of the individual to rise above one’s personality constraints of the different personal domains. It is neither a moral nor a spiritual activity although the moral and spiritual aspects are integrated into everyday action within each of the individual domains. Rather than eliciting the meaning of the everyday events and problems in one’s life in a compartmentalized manner, Integrative Intelligence is focused on condensing the purpose of the events for optimization of one’s own personal and societal well being and sustainability. It was this quality of Integration that made it possible for leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John Adams, and Nelson Mandela (four of the 62 cases studied for this book) to live exemplary lives while making remarkable changes in the lives of their fellowmen and the general society.

Gestalt methods focus on the wholeness/ unification of oneself whereas Integrative Intelligence is utilizing this unified self so that all our intentions, struggles and captivations are unified to be part of everything in a practically operational way. It is an integration of all types of intelligences with the group/ collective intelligence of the environment/society/universe. It is a personal unification of everything with everything in one’s own environment to arrive at the most harmonious and sustainable personal and societal solutions.

What is the source of such intelligence? It is the individual and not the individual’s knowledge. According to Rowley and O’Connell (2004) knowledge is the product of learning, where learning is the continuous interpretation of meaning in people, objects and events and knowledge then supports and informs decisions, behavior and actions. Integrative Intelligence is not a product but a state of living in a certain core frame of mind. Tools of Integrative Intelligence help the individual to know and cultivate that state of mind that is within the individual itself. Integrative Intelligence training focuses on cultivating that frame of mind.

From a systems perspective, Integrative Intelligence is the integration of personal systems into the external systems with a shared purpose. This non-linear process is more than a relationship that the individual has with the society; it is rather an internal resource for the individual and through the individual for the society and the environment. Integrative Intelligence is the acknowledgement that the human being is the greatest source of energy giving principles for individual and collective well being as long as these energy giving principles are unified through integrative intelligence. Integrative Intelligence is the capacity for active engagement of the self to unify and balance our systems internally and externally.

The fundamental errors of the modern world can be attributed to the current system of passing on information to help individuals function in their respective fields in a limited capacity and thus paving the way for personally and collectively non sustainable solutions that can destroy the human race itself. In fact the current methods of learning and the resulting intelligence negates the capacity of the individual for integration by pushing this capacity into further and further beyond the accessibility of the individual so that the individual can limit himself/herself to utilizing the partial trade/skill based knowledge transmitted to them into an operational livelihood earning economic activity. This faulty system forces individuals to trade in creativity and joyful living for boring and often unethical means of living that offer temporary notions of limited security.

Integrative Intelligence is moving back to identifying the purposeful intention behind the concepts and actions of our lives in the context of the well being of the individual and the society in a way that balances all the systems harmoniously with the well being of the world. Hence seeing the intention behind each and every event in our lives for identifying our own individual and collective purpose of life on earth becomes a natural process when Integrative Intelligence is cultivated. Viewed from such a perspective Integrative Intelligence sheds dogmas and precepts that limit and constrain the individual from optimum self actualization. Integrative Intelligence loosens hardened identities and helps humans to be intentional beings with the central purpose to life and all of one’s actions integrated with this central purpose of the self and the world.

Please take the survey at integrativeintelligence.limequery.com to identify Integrative Intelligence scale. Please read the informed consent form regarding the participation. Sample questions are shown below-

Integrative Intelligence Scale

Jude M. Antonyappan & Tojo Thatchenkery

1. My sense of duty to my family is consistent.