I teach people strategic skills: how to think and plan for the future, see connections, patterns, and systems, and link daily choices to long-term goals. If I use plain language and practical examples, almost everyone is capable of grasping these concepts....But not everyone.
There's a limitation to this work that I rarely admit in a workshop: strategic thinking requires a certain intelligence. If you can't think about your thinking, or zoom out to see the bigger picture, you're in trouble.
Does that mean some people are too dumb to be strategic? Let's find out.
In 1916, Lewis Terman popularised a definition of intelligence measured by capacity for abstraction. He created the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, which tested for higher-order cognitive functions - logic, pattern recognition, and symbol manipulation.
At the time, this was a revolutionary idea. In an education system designed for memorisation and knowledge accumulation, testing for a thinking process was a new angle, and seen as a much fairer evaluation.
But history and subsequent research have not been so kind to Terman's way of thinking. For one, Lewis Terman wasn't just into psychometrics. He was also a committed eugenicist who weaponised IQ scores to argue for a biological ranking of race and class, and he pushed for compulsory sterilisation of the "feebleminded." Yuck.
Also, it turns out "abstraction" wasn't the fixed idea Terman thought it was. James Flynn's work on rising IQ scores across the 20th century (the "Flynn effect") showed that our abstract reasoning ability was getting better with each generation. It's not that our brains changed or improved - we still had the same equipment. Instead, modern life was demanding more higher-order and hypothetical thinking than it used to, and people rose to the challenge.
This upturned a lot of prior assumptions about intelligence. If we could see such huge shifts simply by changes in the environment, intelligence looks less like an innate capacity and more like a learned, adaptive skill.
Flynn's work joined a flood of new ideas that cast doubt on the IQ model. Thinkers like Robert Sternberg argued for the division of "practical" intelligence (the kind that reads context, anticipates consequences, and adapts to environments) from the analytical stuff captured in a test. That distinction matters immensely to the kind of work I do, because strategy is practical intelligence. It's not scribbling on Post-It notes in a boardroom. We need thinkers and leaders who can get a grip on a messy situation and find a way through that aligns with big-picture goals. IQ tests can't measure that.
In the 2010s, Mullainathan and Shafir's research into the impacts of scarcity refined these ideas further (in a way that would have old mate Terman rolling in his grave.) They discovered that cognitive performance drops significantly under financial stress, time pressure, and instability - even in people who test normally otherwise. If life is drowning you in stress, and you're lurching from one crisis to another, your energy is chewed up by surviving. Even minor tasks like planning how to organise a car repair can seem too hard when you're busy and broke.
The work of K. Anders Ericsson put another nail in the Terman coffin. In his work, he proved that pattern recognition - one of Terman's "higher-order functions" - is mostly built through domain exposure and deliberate practice. A chess grandmaster's "genius" is as much about thousands of hours of practice as it is raw talent. Natural aptitude is a thing, but it's not the end of the story. What you focus on grows.
Humans are fundamentally strategic animals - no other animal can mentally time travel, connect the dots between things they can't see, or channel empathy to imagine how things might feel or appear to others. Fish aren't planning their future swim routes, simulating change, or plotting to recruit other fish to their mission. They're just swimming. Meanwhile, we're all up in our heads, ruminating on the past or wondering what the future holds.
But not everyone's had the chance to find out how strategic they can be. Some people have spent their life and work stuck in the same lane or swamped by stress, and now they're stubborn-minded pains in the ass.
It would be easy to assume these people are stupid - and it certainly feels like it sometimes. But the truth is more complicated, and far more hopeful.
In short: if you're worried you're too dumb to be a strategist, don't be. Strategic thinking does correlate with a certain intelligence - but it's not the fixed, abstraction-only sort our racist buddy Terman once thought. These are learned skills that are remarkably responsive to exposure, environments, and practice - and super sensitive to stress. It's hard to be smart when you're stuck in survival mode.
Strategy is for everyone. If they have the chance.
Til next week,
AM
If you're interested in hearing me talk more about these ideas - how strategy works, what it needs, what gets in the way, and how we can get better at this kind of thinking - check out my appearance on the Thriving Leaders podcast. It's a good chat that covers a lot of ground.
Alicia McKay