My Great British Intelligence
It's the new year, and for many people that means it's time to sit on the sofa, rest a laptop gently upon that new rotund mound of jollity that's appeared under your christmas sweater, and find out how intelligent you are via a vaguely official-seeming intelligence quota test.
This year, it's being promoted by the BBC so it must be legit, right? and it probably means the creme de la creme get a discrete invitation to join an MI6 think tank. I'm already ironing a shirt in readiness for the call.
I thought I'd post my results up. Obviously this means I'm not rated as a total dunce because you'd have to be an idiot to out yourself as a total dunce on LinkedIn.
I'm posting my results up so that anybody thinking about working with me can see one thing perfectly clearly and ratified by a vaguely plausible sounding intelligence survey group, promoted by the BBC. That one thing is that I'm good with some things, and not with others. To whit... I'm a strategist, not a planner.
There is a difference. The world might be re-writing everything to make differences less significant by sporkifying specialisms to get lower quality results more swiftly and economically, but I will go down on a ship called strategy, tied to the mast, shouting some self righteous twaddle about strategy not being the same as planning.
If you want to work with me, here's an approximation of what you will get via the results overview spider chart...
Higher than the national average (see the more feint octagon in the middle, which is the national average, though I do not know how they actually work out an 'average' that provides such a perfect shape).
My lowest score is 'Verbal Reasoning' which does grate somewhat given that verbal reasoning is my greatest skill. What happened here was that I had misunderstood what was being asked of me and I squandered the first five or six questions figuring out how I was actually meant to respond. So I failed six questions I knew the answers to. I'm not going to blame bad test designing for that, I'll just hint at it as a likely cause and you are free draw your own conclusions, as long as they are congruent with my own.
That snafu aside it's clear I'm more about words, emotional acuity and the more abstract side of thinking and rationalising. Not so much the numbers. Not so much the stuff that was traditionally the role of a planner.
On Blocks, I scored in the top 10%. So if you want to work with me, I'm good at moving blocks. More importantly I'm good at anticipating the outcome of moving blocks. This is something I often find a little bit frustrating when working freelance - which I sometimes do - because there's always that border between the freelancer's way of working and the host agency/company's way of working. I'm not the kind of bolshy arrogant person who will demand their own way, so I will negotiate through some of those situations trying to find the best compromise between what I foresee as the best way forwards, and what my host/client wishes to do. The frustration is that in an agency what the agency wishes to do is often merely 'what we always do, because we're familiar and comfortable with our own repeated process, so that works for us'.
I can find myself trying to be persuasive about doing things differently because I can see how the blocks will move and where we'll end up. But unless I can clearly illustrate my thought process to you, you will always be more comfortable doing it the way you know, and people are so busy these days that it's often very difficult to get people to listen to a persuasive argument for changing the process to better match the specifics of the task, because changing tack is less efficient than simply repeating a familiar process.
Planning, I'm in the top 50%. This is a little frustrating because I also misunderstood what was asked of me here and squandered a few questions before I figured out what the task demanded of me. But, being philosophical about it, it is an intelligence test and if I lacked the intelligence to understand what I was meant to do then that's arguably a valid factor in my result. I do feel I could have scored higher however as once I'd slapped my forehead upon realisation of the task's demands, I passed each challenge in this section consistently.
Nevertheless, this test is called 'planning' and I'm only top 50%. So... I'm not a planner. Proof, if ever you needed it. If you want to craft a sensible and ambitious strategy for a product, service, organisation or brand... whether new or under refurbishment... talk to me.
If you need a marketing tactical plan created that promises agreed percentiles of ROI across various social media platforms by utilising various tactics as pertinent to finely sliced niches of segmented demographic sub-groups... talk to a planner. Please.
Top 20% in the task of tapping in sequences of numbers presented to me. Again I have an excuse here as my wife asked me if I wanted a cup of tea midway, and then proceeded to give me instructions about taking the Christmas tree outside and putting the baubles back in the loft. So actually I did amazingly at this because I still hit 20% despite saying "yes dear" and "okay dear" and losing a few sequences as a result.
But retaining sequential, erm, sequences... I can do this. Sequential sequences and staying on track through a process. Retaining early information as highly relevant to later stages in a project, when often I notice people forget about what was vitally important in week one by week eight when it's time to draw lots of little 'social media tactics' boxes on the 'marketing tactical plan' to appease the end-client. Sequential sequences. Yes.
Spatial span got me 40%. This is a less colourful version of the early electronic game Simon?, whereby you are presented with a sequential pattern and then have to repeat it on the grid.
In my world this relates to positioning and the ability to think about a problem as a flat plan of significant interrelating factors rather than merely a check list of individual things. I have a preference for triangulating factors on a project, working out the gravitational pull of a factor upon other factors that may not be directly connected or related. I find that mapping out factors, problems, challenges and opportunities as a 2D or even a 3D map really helps to understand where the heart of the task lies and where the answer, solution or future lies.
In a busy agency environment these things are often dealt with as individual issues that need to be addressed in order to proceed. Sometimes 'problems' are parcelled up and launched across open-plan desks as somebody else's concern, just for that fleeting joyful feeling of cutting down the To Do list by making something somebody else's problem for a few hours. I prefer to see factors not as individual issues but aspects of the whole, to be dealt with as a whole.
So frustrating. Given the chance to do this again I am certain I would be top 5%. This is absolutely where my strengths lie and yet here it is, and here I am, in the bottom 50%. The indignity of it. I have nothing more to say here. Move on please. Don't linger over this like vultures on a cadaver. It's unseemly.
Target detection is top 20%. This is the ability to identify what is relevant in a sea of similar seeming data and to pick it out. I'm good at this. rather than being overwhelmed by the simple presence of far too much data, and paying data specialists to tell you what's important about the mass of random data that's just buried you, why not just pick out the few things that are important to you and utilise those instead?
There's a lot of chatter and promotional activity at the moment about massive parasitic lumps of data that follow us around, which we are incapable of comprehending. There are many ways to spend your budget on specialist services that promise to make sense of that data for you, but if you're not Amazon or One World Airlines, it's arguably the data equivalent of insulation foam. It just expands to fill cavities and is of no practical use beyond that simple act.
The truth is there is often little of any value in those massive lumps of data that you don't already know intuitively already. It's merely more evidence of what is already known, but jumbled up and unreadable. The rapidly burgeoning industry of data comprehension plays on your anxieties about data and in doing so it promises an end to that anxiety. But often the answers these data analysis services provide are merely pre-determined answers set up by the data analysts, and rarely will you find a game-changing insight. They have to have a sorting system with finite possibilities.
It's rather like paying for your fortune to be read, based on the astrological zodiac. You can only expect one of 12 answer sets because that's all that's available. That doesn't mean the answer you get is pertinent. It's like somebody telling you you are surrounded by vast quantities of air and it's essential to your survival. They can tell you what the air is comprised of using advanced science, so you pay them to run analysis and then you find out its oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, some industrial particulates, some pollen, a few farts, half a kilo of halitosis and armpits... and you walk away feeling like you probably could have worked that out for yourselves.
Pick out the information that is useful. Disregard the rest. I'll help.
Emotional discrimination. Top 20%
I'm good at reading people. I'm good at understanding the underlying reasons for people's emotional responses. I don't just consider what is said I consider how it is said, how that fits into the broader landscape, and how it links back to what was said previously (and what will be said subsequently). I have high emotional intelligence and I can easily tell the difference between a fake smile and a genuine grimace. I can gauge the importance of a 'but...', and calculate the gravity of a mid-sentence pause. I can anticipate how feelings will change as a project is woven together across a timeline. I can spot untruths, misdirection and vapid puffery like they're trombones in a library.
It's important stuff for a project, and it cannot be found in the slides of a 90 page powerpoint presentation.
Verbal comprehension.. top 10%.
Words are the building blocks and the DNA of ideas, and ideas are the core of progress, and progress is the blood of strategy. You can use words and not quite be sure that everyone will understand the words you use as you intended them to be understood. Crafting the words that will communicate important ideas to a room full of delegates from many different countries (or even slightly different regions) is important. Cultural awareness ensures the words you use are effective and translatable without losing the intended meaning. I can do that.
Mental rotation. Top 5%. TOP FIVE PERCENT!
When I started this section I assumed I would fail miserably as this didn't seem to be a core strength of mine. But it is. I walked it. Pattern recognition. Identifying the same elements in different circumstances. In culture this would be about commonalities across diverse cultural landscapes. In strategy development it would be about triangulating factors and identifying where insights might be found in unrelated but similar situations.
So, in conclusion, if you want to work with me, this is more or less what you will get. Although bear in mind this is merely data and data can never render an accurate facsimile of a person with all of their strengths and weaknesses. The best it can tell you is I GOT TOP 5% IN AN INTELLIGENCE TEST! TOP 5%! REMEMBER THAT KEY TAKE AWAY!
Key take away: I'm top 5% in terms of wot my inteligernce is.
To take the test...
If that link doesn't work, there's a link in this BBC article...