Whole Intelligence - A Conversation with Malcolm Parlett

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We are at a crunch point and we have to adapt the actual way in which human beings operate on the planet. If we don't do that, we just blunder on doing the same things that we've done in the past, it will lead to the destruction of our species.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to the Future Learning Design Podcast. This week, it's my pleasure to bring you a conversation with Malcolm Parlett, who's had a hugely active and distinguished career in educational research, training, and Gestalt therapy. After an early academic career in experimental psychology at Cambridge University, Malcolm shifted to pursue applied studies in education. He worked in the Education Research Center at MIT as an Associate Professor of Teaching and Learning Analysis before being appointed as Lecturer lecturer in educational sciences at the University of Edinburgh. At MIT, he developed his innovative qualitative research method, Illuminative Evaluation, to investigate students' experiences of education. He also conducted a major study for Wellesley College and became a colleague and friend of Professor Donald Schoen. After working extensively in educational consultancy, Malcolm went on to train in Gestalt philosophy and methods and then worked all over the world as a distinguished Gestalt therapist, consultant, and speaker. As well as many papers and chapters, Malcolm published Introduction to Illuminative Evaluation, co-edited Beyond the Numbers Game: A Reader in Educational Evaluation, and was the founding editor of the British Gestalt Journal. In 2015, Malcolm published his ideas of whole intelligence in his book Future Sense: 5 Explorations of Whole Intelligence for a World That's Waking Up. Malcolm was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020 by the Gestalt Organization and System Development Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

Hi Malcolm.

Hi.

Hi, nice to see you.

And you?

How are you?

I'm very well, thank you.

Great. So if we could start just with this wonderful concept of whole intelligence and just thinking about firstly, what was it that prompted you to develop that? I've heard you speak about expanding our conception of human competence and providing a new language to talk about that. So what was— what were the original inceptions of the idea?

I had been working for a long while, writing for getting on for 20 years about what I used to call the 5 abilities, which are almost identical to what I'm now calling the 5 explorations. Now we'll come on to that, why the name change. And I started that work through observing the kind of changes that took place as people underwent their Gestalt training. So here was I, a trainer, and I noticed that there were these 5 ways in which people manifestly developed. That's what started the work. And then I suppose what the emergence of Whole Intelligence was in the course of drawing all the work together, probably in the book Future Sense, which I realized that these 5 different ways all converged and interacted and were interdependent. And I realized it more and more. And I thought of it as holistic competence. I thought of all sorts of words. But then I came up with whole intelligence, which seemed to capture something that I wanted to say. And it made me then, in a sense, look at how the word intelligence has been used, how psychologists have tried to define it and so on. And realized that actually it was a bit of a black hole. It was the American Psychological Association did a great study of intelligence, and they came up with the idea that actually it wasn't a terribly useful concept because it covered such a limited range of human activities and human competencies. So it's a variety of different things that came together.

No, it's very nice. And you've obviously chosen to continue with the language of intelligence as a concept, obviously with the adjective of whole. What was it that led you to retain that? Where did you see the value in keeping hold of that?

Well, because I think that intelligence has such a high value in our culture, you know, but it's unexamined. Yeah, it really is not. Thought through. And I think people, even the most ardent intelligence test advocates, unwilling to say that the IQ represents a meaningful criterion of success or wisdom or sagacity or whatever. But I wanted to draw on the good associations of the word intelligence. And it's a necessary, you know, we need intelligent actions. And I think the notion is that we can identify much better what intelligent actions are— acting in a way that's rational, sensible, achievable. We need that.

Yeah, no, I mean, we certainly need it now more than ever, I would say. But it's also interesting that, again, I've heard you speak about the fact that prior to this kind of shift towards a much narrower conception of intelligence, there was a much broader understanding of what it actually meant, and it was perhaps more aligned with the idea of of wisdom or practical wisdom.

You have to go back in time before, in a sense, mental testing came in, which was in the first decades of the 20th century. It was very much associated with the whole move towards industrialization and wanting measures of performance and so on. It became a kind of obsession to measure and to channel the masses of factory workers and so on into different slots. And it was all part of a much bigger movement.

Yeah, interesting. And so perhaps, you know, it'd be worth just spending a little bit of time on the specifics of the 5 explorations, as you call them, you know, just so that listeners have a bit of context for whole intelligence.

Yes. Well, I like to always present them in a slightly different order because I don't want them to be kind of hierarchical. They are all important. So what comes to me in the moment is probably is to start with Embodied, because this is in a way the most radically different from people's understandings about intelligence in a cognitive sense. It is really emphasizing that we are live animal parts of the biosphere. And we have a great range of ways of orienting ourselves in life and in practical situations that come from internal sensing and our feeling states, whether we call them hunches or I just felt this was the right thing to do, or I got a gut sense that this is wrong, or my heart is not in it. It's like we are completely embodied in our total reaction to the world and to our ongoing life. And this has been because of the Cartesian tradition in philosophy and so on. This has been separated off so that even though people, you know, may have a brilliant idea, part of the brilliant idea is that they're excited about it. And but somehow we've separated the excitement from the brilliant idea. And that's not how actually we function as human beings. So that's embodying. And I think it's pivotal importance, but they all are. So the second one that comes to mind is I call responding to the situation. And this is really our extreme context sensitivity. And that's absolutely an appropriate human reaction, being competent, being effective in the world, is to notice what's the context for what's happening. And really good leaders and wise groups, committees and so on, who are functioning well, are always conscious of what the context is, what needs to happen in this particular set of circumstances. So it's no good coming up, say, in the middle of a pandemic with proposals that are not appropriate for the time, because everything needs to be focused on the pandemic in government and so on. So this sensitivity to the individuality of circumstances and conditions is the opposite of one-size-fits-all thinking. Yeah. And just blundering on because it's what we've always done, so let's do it again. It's not attuning to the individual situations that arise. So that's the second one. And I want to emphasize throughout that these work together. So part of the way that we know that something is right for this situation is that we feel it in our body.

Yeah, sure.

This is timely. This needs to be acknowledged. It's here. So the third one is interrelating. Which just underlines the fact that absolutely critical. We are a social species. We live in communities and we're all carrying individual histories and we have to get along together and we need to be able to be competent in working with other people and collaborating, being sensitive to how other people are as well as how we are. And that this is the absolute bedrock really for so many different activities. Teamwork, mutual understanding, it's to do with peacemaking, and it's avoiding kind of breakdown into destructive conflict, which can easily take over, as we can so easily see. I was born in the Second World War, and my very, very early years were entirely war dominated in a sense, because the whole field in which I existed was saturated with everything to do with the war, as nowadays everything is being connected with the pandemic. Wartime was like that. And then out of war, I mean, I think I wanted to work towards peace. I think it's been a dominant theme. So in a sense, peacemaking or peacebuilding is a very important part of it. And it comes down to the quality of relationships between people. Yeah, it can either be peaceful and fruitful and mutually beneficial and productive, or they can be snarled up, ridden with misapprehension, misunderstanding, hate. So that's the third one, interrelating. And the fourth one that comes to me today is self-recognizing. Which is the fact that we have evolved language and consciousness, and that we, we are able to, in a sense, reflect on our own lives and situations and tell stories. We build communal understandings. We need to be able, if we are going to be effective leaders and run good committees and so on, we need to be able to be reflexive, to look at what we're doing how we're doing it and whether there are ways we can do it better. And what have we learned and how are we doing and what's going on here right under our nose? And let's face it and deal with it. So it's a sort of sense of good grounded common sense view of really looking at what's actually happening.

And getting feedback from the environment, I suppose, as well.

Feedback and not kidding ourselves.

Yeah.

Yeah, listening. And being open to what, if you like, the environment is telling us. So, and then the final one is experimenting, which is the fact that we are also creative, hugely creative creatures. And we have a fascination with novelty and discovery of the unknown, of penetrating the unfamiliar realm and holding a sense of adventure and discovery at the heart of how we are, at the same time as needing the equivalent of, if you like, in mountaineering, not just going for the summit, but also maintaining a base camp. We need supports and the familiarity and the reliability and constancy of base conditions, of things that really support our creativity. And what supports our creativity are things that are predictable. So we need both. It's discerning the balance between novelty and familiarity that is at the heart of this experimenting.

Brilliant. Thank you.

And one of the things I love about them is that it's, I mean, they're so deeply human, for one, in the sense that they articulate all those aspects that, as we see, you know, with artificial intelligence and machine learning and all of this automation coming, we recognize we have to see what's the uniquely human aspects of ourselves and our contribution to the economy and to industry in the future. And in order to do that, we have to identify, you know, what's the value added that humans bring to that exchange that isn't leaving us just being replaced by robots, but also that they're very active. The way you've expressed them is, is as verbs. They are things that we do. We're in the process of. I think that's also a really interesting way of framing it as well.

Yes, absolutely.

And coming back to that idea of then of exploration. So you decided to call them explorations. Obviously that has its own meaning. What was your thinking there?

Well, I was originally, I called them 5 abilities. And there's still that aspect to them. I sometimes, in more recent times, talk about capabilities or fundamental competencies. I prefer not to get stuck with one idea because the thing is that these are very, as you said, complex and rich and lively concepts. So I don't want to become too sterile in my making definitions. But nevertheless, there were certain associations of abilities which I kind of felt more and more uncomfortable with. And I used actually in something I wrote, talking about ability as a sort of possession. Oh, you've got the ability to, as if it's a thing. And what I wanted to do was to open it up because it could be that, for instance, in interrelating, that somebody might have all sorts of problems in that realm, psychologically and emotionally and so on, but they could still understand aspects of it. So that it's like, it's possible for people to study whole intelligence or to be involved with whole intelligence without necessarily having the ability to. I wanted to make it something that people entered into to discover the full meanings of these terms for themselves.

Yeah, it also perhaps indicates, for me anyway, a starting point that, you know, because everyone has their own starting point for their exploration into this aspect, rather than again that one-size-fits-all thinking of an ability somehow seems to have, even if it's inside a black box, it seems to have this secret metric of high ability or low ability. And actually Everything needs to be contextualized and specific to the person and the individual to some extent.

Yeah, you've expressed it much better than I have. Thank you.

No, not at all.

It's my pleasure. I mean, there's such interesting and important ideas within the context of the conversations going on in education and, you know, what that means within the economy and all of these things, and with the pandemic as well. And in, in that context, you've talked about whole intelligence being a healthy virus spreading at any distance, which was a nice way of describing it. But what for you are the next steps in terms of supporting the spread of this?

Well, I think it's got to be an idea that catches on. So it is a contagion. It's got to be something that people get and get excited about. And yes, it is taking off in a way now, but I'm using podcasts and there's a— the book is still available. As an ebook, and there's a steady take-up. So I do sense that things are spreading, and there are a lot of people like yourself who are key, you know, seeing the relevance of this. And it rests on there being more people like you, sort of super spreaders, if we stay with the contagion model. More super spreaders.

Yeah. And as I've seen, they are not just, you know, For me, it's obviously within education and learning and development work, but there's also people in industry and in business where they're taking up more of these ideas of regenerative leadership and regenerative business in relation to, of course, the climate emergency. And this is something that has resonance not just for individuals, but for systems where we need to just be more responsive to the planet and the issues with the ecosystem.

It was, in a sense, when I was writing the book Future Sense, I really had in mind ecologists and environmentalists as my chief area, although towards the end I did get more and more interested in, in educational implications.

No, good.

And that's a nice connection because your, let's say, previous career, as you've described it to me before, was, was in education as an advisor, consultant, and leader within educational spheres. And I wonder if perhaps as a lead-in to that, you could just describe what your work was. And I know you worked at MIT a few decades ago and the type of role that you took on then and the type of things that MIT were exploring in the 1970s.

'70s, really, yes. I studied psychology at Nottingham and became very excited. I wanted to carry on in psychology and I went to Cambridge and that was working in the psychological laboratory on the Downing Street site in Cambridge. And it was there that I realized that I was not wanting to be an experimental psychologist for the rest of my life. And the education was almost by chance because I got friendly with a man called Liam Hudson who wrote a book called Contrary Imaginations, which made a bit of a splash back in the 1960s. And he invited me to join his research unit on intellectual development that he had in Cambridge, and I did. And then that led to his getting me to go to the States. Anybody at that time— this was late '60s— would need to go to the States. That was where it was all happening. And he had this contact at MIT who was a psychiatrist running the student health service and mental health service for students and faculty. And so I went to work with them and they were very interested at that point in getting away from personality tests and into what was happening in classrooms at the coalface, if you like, what was really going on in seminars and laboratory teaching and so on. So I became a kind of participant observer and interviewer. And then out of that, because there wasn't much social science going on at MIT at that time, physical scientists and mathematicians. So I was given a free hand and I just got on with it and made up the procedures and methods and discovered what it was like to do this kind of ethnographic style work and developed out of that illuminative evaluation. So that's how I began. And then that developed into educational consulting, working for universities and colleges and schools as a Programme evaluator.

Brilliant.

Yeah, and it's that particularly that I was also really interested in, which I think again has, even though this is now a few decades ago we're talking, but it has real resonance now in terms of the way that we acknowledge and evaluate and evidence innovation and the impact of change programmes within the educational space.

So I think again, you are years ahead of your time, but you know, The pendulum swings so that at the time when I was doing this work and my most sort of influential paper came out in 1972, at that time there was a real strong reaction against what I called the agricultural botany paradigm, that, you know, that we were looking at plant growth by comparing a test group with a control group and pretending that somehow that degree of scientific modeling procedures could apply to education. And it was completely wrong, and people really lapped up the idea of what I was calling the social anthropology paradigm instead of the agricultural botany one. There was huge enthusiasm. And then of course, for about nearly a decade, that it maintained a kind of dominance, and lots of things grew out of that. But then there was a big reaction. With the political developments and the whole Reagan-Thatcher switch became much more kind of results, bottom line, and the pendulum really swung away from what was seen as kind of a waste of time to look at all this soft stuff.

Interesting. So the neoliberal swing towards results and quantitative measures.

Yes. So now it's— now the pendulum's swinging back.

It is.

Yeah. Yeah.

Very good. I mean, it definitely is swinging back in that direction. And for me, it's always a really important thing to acknowledge the history of these ideas, because I think there is a tendency sometimes to imagine that, you know, these are new ideas and we're just coming up with these things, these thoughts and these insights for the first time. But actually, Clearly, brilliant minds like yours have been working on these for decades and decades, and that's really important to acknowledge so that we can learn. And that's, that's for me the richness of it. We can learn a lot from the experiments and the research and the thinking that people like you have done over that time to then think, you know, now in this current moment where we are questioning quantitative measures much more and the standardized one-size-fits-all paradigm, which you were talking about with whole intelligence. How do we justify these investments in certain innovative programs? And there was a lot of work going on around what are the tools that we use in order to evidence the impact of these types of programs. And that's a really, I think, a really resonant aspect right now. And maybe you could say a little bit more specifically about what is it, illuminative evaluation, you know, what was the specific difference or the key aspects of the way that that worked as a tool?

I suppose, I mean, one of the things was that people have, as you've just been saying, they want numbers because they think somehow numbers give a truer picture or that they're the kind of hard evidence sort of thing. And actually, of course, that is such an illusion because it's the meaning that's ascribed to these numbers and how the numbers were collected. And what were the tests, how the tests were constructed, all of which are humanly vulnerable to subjective interpretations and values and so on. So it's like, I think that what I was doing back then was really trying to legitimize a whole intelligence, actually, funnily enough, long before I thought of the term. But it was like a good grounded common sense approach So that, for instance, if there was an educational program, and I would not exclude using test results, but I would want to put the onus on what was the test trying to do and how to interpret the results and what were the things that were affecting the performance. Because actually, examples like a new program that had lots of new money pumped into it and lots of keen teachers and so on, that compared to something else where the teachers weren't involved and the school had had a major scandal recently, or, you know, there's all sorts of idiosyncratic factors that come in and you can't use statistics to iron these out and pretend that they are not having an effect. They do. That sort of thing. You have to look at case by case. It doesn't mean to say you're not rigorous. It's a different kind of rigor. Yeah. It's about saying what's actually going on here and what led to this slump in test results or this highlight, you know, what was it? And often comes down to particular teachers in particular schools that they get results which are completely different from anything else that's going on. So it's about, again, in acknowledging the variability and the idiosyncrasy of things and singular nature of them and justifying that. And historians, I mean, I made the comparison with history and psychiatry. Historians are constantly evaluating evidence. They don't use statistics, but they will use quantitative information as part of a total picture. That was what I was trying to do with education. I was trying to say, let's be disciplined in the way that historians are. You look at— you get these data, you get these opinions, you get the background factors, the documents that have been produced, the test results that might be generated, and you have to see what the patterns are here and how they connect together. And it's interpretive work, hermeneutic work.

It is, yeah. Interesting. I think perhaps some of the motivation for laboring under this illusion of the numbers, as you say, is perhaps the desire for scalable solutions in inverted commas. I think we, you know, we often like to imagine that there is a, there's a Holy Grail of the best way to do education that we're striving for. And so we try to package those ideas up into, and of course then justify them and support them with quantitative evidence to say this is what works, this is what doesn't work in that kind of evidence-based paradigm. So it's certainly a challenge because the reality is more messy, right?

Reality is incredibly messy. And I'm not against those kind of efforts that you're talking about. And a lot of my consulting work was, you know, a college would invite me in and want me to help them on a major policy question or whatever, and I would have to sift through the evidence and look at things and talk to people and invite them to offer their best judgments.

But as you say, in a way that brings us back to where we started with whole intelligence, particularly the idea of responding, because you are responding to the specific context in which that college or that particular educational work is being done because it has a unique set of circumstances that you need to fully understand and respond to rather than plug and play a packaged up version of what education could be that doesn't fit the context.

Yes.

Yeah. And then just thinking about where it goes next, perhaps coming back to whole intelligence, it would be nice to see that there was a way to bring these ideas more fully into education And I'd encourage listeners to read Future Sense, Malcolm's book, really an important thing, but also think about how we can bring these ideas into learning and development and education work more fully.

Well, what's necessary in the world, desperately necessary at every level of system and every kind of activity, we need some guidelines or sort of directions, because I think that in some ways humanity as a whole is sort of floundering around. I mean, tons of wonderful things being done, but what they look to me as being is, is fragmented, centrifugal, like it's more and more specialisms and projects and things. So it's spreading out. And I want to do something which is more centripetal in the sense of bringing together how things fit. And this goes back to when I lived in Bristol, and I was very interested in the Buddhists, and I was very interested in the socialist group, and I was very interested in Christian religion, and I was interested in the policies of the town council and so on. And ecologically, I was environmentally involved. But it was like there were sort of a number of these different constituents. They were all talking about a better world, but none of them were talking to each other. This is a very early example for me of not being able to stand back and see the bigger patterns of how things are advancing and so on. I think I would say that we need more common ideas that can apply across the board. And I think the way that the whole intelligence argument and thinking is developing is providing a framework that can be inspirational, hopefully, for a great number of different people in different specialisms so that they begin to see big patterns connecting.

Yeah, no, that's brilliant. Really important synergistic work, isn't it? Trying to, you know, allow people to see the connections between what they do, and rather than seeing their own divisions. And I mean, in a way, it comes back to your idea about peacemaking and interrelating. Because that if we don't see those connections between each other and the work that we're doing, and having a framework sometimes helps to orient people, then of course we end up with our own silos and our own boundaries between each other. And that's—

yeah, we all have to be cross-disciplinary and globally cooperative and collaborative, otherwise we're not going— we will not survive, I think, as a species.

Yeah, that's the bottom line, isn't it?

Scary as it sounds, but It's scary and it underlines that we are at a stage in the evolution of the planet and in the history of humanity, which is short-lived in biological evolutionary terms, but that we are at a crunch point and we have to adapt the actual way in which human beings operate on the planet. If we don't do that, we just blunder on doing the same things that we've done in the past, it will lead to the destruction of rare species and many other species.

Yeah, sadly, that's— yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, that's a powerful way to finish, but thank you, Malcolm Murray. There's such a— such an important piece of work there to help people orient themselves around a more expansive vision of intelligence, as you say, you know, maybe reconnect with some of the history of practical wisdom that we can use to bring people together and integrate in order to respond to this critical moment rather than just keep on blundering and dividing. So thank you for your time, really a pleasure to be able to talk to you.

Thank you for inviting me, it was very enjoyable.

Brilliant, good.

Thank you, Malcolm.

Good luck, bye-bye.

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