Positive Intelligence pt.I

In a previous article, I wondered why we overengineer calming down so much:

I’m often struck by just how much of the pop-psych/neuroscience advice one sees for the average working person boils down to little more than “just cool the fuck out, and you’ll be better at stuff”. I guess, more to the point, I’m often left wondering why we feel the need to over-engineer this kind of thing so egregiously, particularly when most of these theories seem to produce as much bad advice as good advice.

It’s a wide-ranging article, that explores a bunch of pop-psych theories which bother me. In the process I mentioned one that was introduced to me by a start-up founder friend of mine: Positive Intelligence. They’d come across it during their executive coaching sessions, and were keen enough to walk me through it. In the course of investigating, I thought it was a good example of needlessly complicating simple advice, and spent a short paragraph teasing it.

This was a mistake.

It invited a number of emails from defenders of the company. I cannot emphasise enough how unlikely it is that your email is going to convince me to take some consumer-facing faux-brain science seriously. One day, I will play a different tune. One day, I will have my own consumer-facing brand of faux-brain science. But until then, no.

However, one of these emailers offered to pay me to evaluate it, and this admittedly does have an attention-grabbing quality. I offered a discount to publish the results as an article, and so here we are. Positive Intelligence, the review.

As usual, I overestimate how much content fits in a weekly blog, so I’m going to split this into (at least) two. First up, we won’t look at the content of Positive Intelligence. We’ll just look at the context.

We’ll do this because, actually, this context is the same as many of the pop-neuroscience things you’ll find out in the wild, so it’s quite nice to have it here.

But also, we’ll do this because, frankly, after reading it, you might not even feel inclined to read about the content.

¶A telling timeline

It’s usually very telling to trace the history of any given psychological concept. You’ll find there’s very little new under the sun. More than that, you’ll often that the roots of a psychological idea are more articulate and thoughtful than the publication-driven churn that characterises modern science of mind.¹ And sometimes, like the last time I did something like this, you find out that the whole thing is the deranged advice of a grifter.

I almost didn’t do this for Positive Intelligence, because it appears to be an entire enterprise built around the idea of inner critics, that they call “saboteurs”, which fight with a more sensible inner creature called a ‘sage’.

The idea of an inner critic or saboteur is so embedded in our cultural psyche that it’s hardly worth tracing. Anything we have platitudes about isn’t going to produce a sensible historiography. You know, you can be “in two minds” about something. Or, like R.Kelly your mind might be tellin’ you no but your body… your body might be tellin’ you yes. We can have angels and devils on our shoulders. We might say “I couldn’t live with myself if…”, which always raises the question who ‘I’ might be when it isn’t living with ‘myself’. You get it.

It might be insightful to point directly at this little meme of ours occasionally, but it hasn’t been a new idea for a very long time.

But I did have a look at the history of Positive Intelligence, and I’m glad I did, because the timeline might be the only thing unique about it:

• 1984: the movie Gremlins comes out, the conceit of which is that this cute little creature turns into a destructive monster if you feed it wrong, and it wreaks havoc.
• 1984: Richard Carson publishes the first edition of his book Taming Your Gremlin, which over time develops into ‘A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way’, and then a coaching institute.
• 1990: Richard Schwartz publishes his method, Internal Family Systems, which “focuses on the relationships between parts [exiles, managers, and firefighters] and the core Self”, which is hugely successful, particularly in the Bay-Area coaching circuit. IFS eventually becomes an institute.
• The 90’s: You see a general resurgence of coaching material speaking about other variations on “parts work”, from the somewhat more evidence-based Schema Therapy and Transactional Analysis to the somewhat more ad-hoc Voice Dialogue to NLP Parts Integration,² some of which have been around for a couple decades by this point. Many of these become or inspire coaching institutes.
• 1992: The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) is founded by Laura Whitworth and Henry Kimsey-House. It’s based in the Bay-Area. There are traces of earlier company attempts and coaching material indicating this too was a method that became an institute.³
• 1995: Goleman’s book popularising ‘Emotional Intelligence’ comes out, and the idea of EQ (Emotional intelligence Quotient, a riff off IQ) completely dominates the business world until the end of time, making keynote speaking a repetitive nightmare for the rest of us.
• 1998: The CTI people publish a book documenting their process of “Co-Active Coaching”. On page 9 (of the 1998 edition), they write “The coach is also listening for resistance, fear, backtracking, and the voice of that internal saboteur — the Gremlin”, which footnotes to “There are many names for this internal saboteur. We gratefully acknowledge Richard Carson and his book… for the image we use throughout the book”.⁴
• 1998: Martin Seligman launches a new wave of wellbeing research into human flourishing under the “Positive Psychology” banner, named after the theme he chose during his 1998 tenure as president of the American Psychological Association. This is marketed as a divergence from ‘problem-focused’ psychology, and comes with all new lingo, absorbing the concept of ‘Flow’ and other ‘peak performance’ literature. Uptake of these ideas is high in Silicone Valley, who are enthusiastic about ‘peak performance’, and this contributes non-trivially to the appearance of ping-pong tables and stuff like that in tech firms.
• 2002: Chamine (the guy who kicks off Positive Intelligence) becomes CEO of CTI.⁵
• 2008: He leaves, and a couple years later, publishes his book Positive Intelligence. The book basically says that your Positive Intelligence Quotient, or PQ, is a ratio of saboteurs to sages, and you need to make it higher (in favour of sages) to flourish.

You won’t be surprised, I hope, to learn that Positive Intelligence is now an institute. But, to give it full credit, it has innovated. Positive Intelligence is also now a SaaS-style app business which licenses itself out to coaches worldwide for about $1000 a user. We’re not in the 90’s anymore.

What is clearly not true is the claim that “Positive Intelligence is based on the latest research in positive psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and performance science”.⁶ It’s actually based on an ageless meme. Specifically, it’s based on CTI’s upgrade of Carson’s 1984 iteration of an ageless meme as part of the 90’s Bay-Area self-help boom centred on this ageless meme. And then, with all the furore over Goleman’s EQ and the corporate appetite for ‘Positive Psychology’, a pivot towards science-washing.

So let’s have a look at the science washing.

¶Why ‘science-washing’ and not science?

There’s a very clear trend towards science-washing commercial coaching stuff that begins around the year 2000. It’s hard not to see this as the result, as I point out earlier, of the success of Goleman’s book on EQ and the ‘Positive Psychology’ movement Seligman launched. We see these concepts flooding publications like the HBR and Forbes and whatnot.

But equally, the 2000’s mark a true boom in the field of neuro- and cognitive neuroscience. It’s fundamentally the beginning of my discipline. We’d just started to get the hang of using MRI to scan brains, rather than the hugely expensive PET scanning we used to do, so the literature starts to really flow. The more industrious researchers started to turn all this literature into pop-neuroscience books, like Norman Doidge’s “Brain that Changes Itself”. You can see it happen—the Google n-gram for ‘neuroscience’ tracks an enormous surge almost precisely at 2000, peaking just a couple years ago.

You can see aspiring coaches worrying about this new wave of interest in scientific concepts as early as 2005 (pdf):

In the short time we have been trained as Co-Active coaches and opened our practice, we have been intrigued by and curious about the seemingly prompt and meaningful health- related behaviour changes that have transpired within our clients. Our curiosity has led us to the literature, where we found that in fact, research studies have confirmed that coaching has been associated with a positive impact on some modifiable risk factors (Vale et al., 2001, 2002). Lacking both the client base to support an adequate quantitative assessment of behavioural indicators pre- and post-coaching, and a suitable familiarity with validated measurement tools appropriate to evaluate the impact of coaching, we chose to delve deeper into our successful coaching observations in a different manner. As trained health behaviourists, we set out to explore why and how a model of coaching (the Co-Active coaching model) may work to facilitate health promotion from a theoretical perspective.

By the mid-2010’s, “evidence-based practice” has become such a watchword for coaching firms that academics are trying to work out what’s going on:

there has been considerable interest in the development of evidence-based approaches to coaching, and many coaching practitioners have incorporated the phrase into their terms of reference for their practice. However, these is still a lack of clarity about what constitutes evidence based coaching, and there have been few, if any, published guidelines about how to determine the relevance of different bodies of research to coaching practice

It’s not clear to me why this is—whether it was driven by procurement team demand or supply-side attempts by the coaching vendors to differentiate themselves. However, it’s notable that pictures of brains are incredibly persuasive, regardless of whether they’re relevant or not.

What is clear, if only from the two examples I’ve quoted above, is that Positive Intelligence cannot be based on the latest research because its core principle dates back a good 20 years prior to the 2005 article desperately searching for evidence to support Positive Intelligence’s predecessor, “Co-Active Coaching”. And that 2005 article itself is now 20 years old.

¶Outro

So there you have it. Positive Intelligence isn’t a breakthrough, it’s a 40-year-old gremlin in a badly-fitting lab-coat. The only genuinely novel thing on offer is the monthly licence fee.

Without even touching the content, you can tell that this is the quintessential neuroscience confidence trick—using random brain jargon to conceal fairly mundane advice. And it is mundane. Take it from someone who’s studied and worked with the mind for 15-odd years. And even if I got the introduction to the idea for free, as part of my studies, it doesn’t feel like it should be worth money to introduce people who haven’t had that opportunity. And even if it is worth money to be introduced to the idea, it doesn’t feel like it’s worth a grand.

It’s a rather shocking cash grab, though not the most egregious one. Going to see Tony Robbins talk about the “inner voice” and “limiting beliefs” can cost ~$3000 a seat, and I don’t know that it comes with an app. The Hoffman Process is a week-long residential program that costs almost £4000, and you’ll get this sold to you as ‘pattern tracing’. The Voice Dialogue stuff I mentioned at the start costs almost €3000 for you to learn how to interview your “inner selves”. And Internal Family Systems is around $5000 for the official 90-hour intake.

So, since I’d like everyone to be able to get after this (and because I’m being paid to find alternatives), there are cheaper ways to do this. I mean the Positive Intelligence book is book-priced, but I found Peters’ Chimp Paradox for cheaper, and it’s basically the same except he demonises your inner parts less. Depends how masochistic you are, I suppose. Carson’s “Taming Your Gremlins” is cheaper still. All of them would be free at the library. Byron Katie’s “The Work” comes with free worksheets and video tutorials about the ‘bullying mind’. Neff and Germer’s “Self-Compassion” workbook has downloadable excerpts that’ll help you with the “inner judge”. The Insight Timer app has a huge catalogue of free “inner critic” meditations (search the tag), and is probably the closest in spirit. And Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy has a legitimately well-researched eight week program that you can get the full curricula and audio for courtesy of various universities.

And so on and so forth.

Now, I’m still going to dig into Positive Intelligence next week—partly because someone’s paying me, partly because I actually quite enjoy these autopsies. But if you’re already thinking “inner critic, sure I get it”, then you probably won’t need to read it. The only thing I haven’t really talked about is how you improve your Positive Intelligence Quotient, and the answer is ‘literally any internalising/contentrative meditation practice’.

Congratulations, you can now spend the hour you just saved doing literally anything else that reduces stress.