Profoundly Gifted

There are those who believe that intelligence can be measured, allowing us to compare and rank each other's capacity for thinking and creating. This belief has a relatively short history, reaching back only 150 years, back to Sir Francis Galton who used newly developed statistical tools to measure the potential for Creative Genius.

This measurement was important to justify class structures and colonialism – for the first time the British elite could use science to justify their control of the destinies of others, believing that intelligence was genetically inherited.

Today we still use IQ tests to identify students who are said to be 'gifted and talented' in our schools, implying that those who do not perform well on these tests are not gifted, are not talented.

A score of 100 is said to be average, over 132 qualifies one to join the elite group of Mensa. A score of 180 or above identifies a true rarity, one who is 'profoundly gifted'.

Alan Kay believed that a "point of view is worth 80 IQ points" , implying that one could be immediately propelled from 'normal' intelligence to one who is seen by others as 'profoundly gifted'. Here he speaks of an experience of seeing a Allen Newell struggle with a programming challenge during his days at PARC: >Watching a famous guy much smarter than I struggle for more than 30 minutes to not quite solve the problem his way (there was a bug) made quite an impression. It brought home to me once again that "point of view is worth 80 IQ points." I wasn't smarter but I had a much better internal thinking tool to amplify my abilities. This incident and others like it made paramount that any tool for children should have great thinking patterns and deep beauty "built-in." source

We sense that this insight lies at the core of the brilliance of Agile as it is based on developing an empathetic understanding of the perspectives and needs of others, requiring the cultivation of Unbounded Consciousness – the gateway to our human superpowers.

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