Multiple Intelligences
Gardner's Multiple Intelligences names eight distinct ways people are capable, from linguistic to bodily-kinesthetic, challenging the idea that one narrow measure of 'smart' captures anyone's real strength.
Eight cards sit in a row, each naming its own distinct way of being capable rather than ranking them.
Reach for this when…
- A capable team member keeps being underrated because they're not verbally quick in meetings.
- You're building a team and want it to cover more than one kind of strength.
- Someone believes they're 'just not smart' because school measured one thing well.
How to run it
- Have participants complete a multiple-intelligences-based questionnaire (there's no official Gardner test - use a validated third-party version such as MIDAS).
- Score the eight areas: Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Musical, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Naturalist.
- Debrief which intelligences are strongest and how they actually show up at work.
- Map the team's spread and where it is lopsided.
- Challenge the narrow 'smart' story directly, using their own results as evidence.
A worked example
Situation. Pham Thi Huong ran Anh Duong, a community NGO in Da Nang, Vietnam, and had quietly written off one field coordinator as 'not strategic' because he struggled in planning meetings.
Applied. The assessment showed him high in Spatial and Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence, low in the Linguistic fluency the meetings rewarded; Huong moved his contribution from the whiteboard discussion to a physical site walk-through, where he mapped logistics nobody else had spotted.
Result. The next distribution route he designed cut delivery time by a third. Huong stopped running strategy only through talking.
The catch
The eight-way split is a useful provocation more than settled science; the research base for treating these as separate measurable faculties is thinner than the assessment's neat scores suggest. A low score can read as a verdict if the debrief isn't handled carefully. It says nothing about how a strength gets applied day to day.
A high score in an intelligence nobody in the room uses is not a development need, it's an unused asset.
Origin: Howard Gardner