Our foray into exploring the four “holistic intelligences” began to open up several interesting connections and models that perhaps coincidentally shared some similar characteristics. What follows are brief introductions to some of the models we found most compelling and resonant to our thinking.
The first model to give the intelligences some symbolic structure and set them in a visually understandable symbolic construct was the medicine wheel as described above (Cowan, 2005). Once that model became known, we started noticing similar patterns where perhaps they had not been noted before. Our first connection was prompted by a chance phone call with Dr. James O’Toole. Rick, who has been very interested in the intersection of leadership with the liberal arts, also had wanted to explore the contribution of the Aspen Institute Executive Seminar. Aspen Institute itself was founded on the ideal of integrating body, mind and spirit (Hyman, 1975; O’Toole, 2004) and the Aspen Institute played an important role in this idea. Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, originally from the University of Chicago and key founding members of the Institute “believed the goal of the humanities was not to make business leaders into better administrators, but to make them better human beings by broadening and sensitizing them to questions of purpose, ideas, and values” (O’Toole, 2004, p. 4). The Executive Seminar, through readings and discussion, introduces four basic ideas: liberty, equality, efficiency and community as “the polar forces tugging at all modern polities” (p. 13). The goal is to examine and discover where, within these competing forces and often conflicting values of democracy, lays the “good society.”
It is the interplay between each of the four poles that makes the subsequent discussions and the number and scale of the options interesting to explore. O’Toole does a good job setting the stage and explaining the process in his book The Executive’s Compass (1993). That discussion is beyond the scope of this paper. However, what is interesting is exploring the four poles of the good society as they relate to the medicine wheel and the holistic intelligences. We found striking similarities and connections—and not just with the intelligences but with our quadruple bottom line. Efficiency has a direct connection to economic profitability. Equality equates well to the idea of social justice. In community we found a good match to the concept of environmental sustainability—on a grand scale. And liberty represented for us spiritual fulfillment. We also felt resonance between the four poles of the good society and development of the holistic intelligences. For example, Liberty related to SQ, Equality to EQ, Community and environmental sustainability to PQ, and Efficiency to IQ.
Paul R. Scheele and Rick Warm
