The Originality of Systems Intelligence

In their groundbreaking essay ”Emotional Intelligence” (1990), Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer define their new concept “as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.” (Salovey and Mayer 1990, italics in the original). The theory of emotional intelligence advances the work of Howard Gardner (1983) in his theory of multiple intelligences and that of Robert Sternberg (1985) in his theory of “triartic” (three part) intelligence. All these approaches draw attention to factors in human performance not captured by previous proposals and, in particular, in traditional IQ tests (Gerrid and Zimbardo 2010). We have proposed that the work on emotional, social and multiple intelligence has missed a key form of human intelligence that we have called “systems intelligence.” By “systems intelligence” we mean “intelligent behaviour in the context of complex systems involving interaction and feedback. A subject acting with Systems Intelligence engages successfully and productively with the holistic feedback mechanisms of her environment. She perceives herself as part of the whole, the influence of the whole upon herself as well as her own influence upon the whole. By observing her own interdependence in the feedback intensive environment, she is able to act intelligently” (Saarinen and Hämäläinen 2004, p. 3; see also Hämäläinen and Saarinen 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008). As the phrase suggests, systems intelligence relates to systems. As is customary in systems approaches, systems for us are complex wholes, the functioning of which depends on its parts and the interaction between those parts (Jackson 2003). Like Salovey and Mayer, we focus upon intelligence as something that “guides one’s thinking and action”. Key features of the “systems” of systems intelligence include the following aspects, familiar from the systems literature (Senge 1990, Jervis 1998, Jackson 2003, Ramage and Shipp2009):