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My View of the Elephant

The Third Tributary — The Director — Management Functions

Our third tributary encompasses all the characteristics, skills, and habits that will allow your child to coordinate, plan, and direct his actions so that he can use his cognitive abilities and our many intelligences to meet his goals in the world. We’ve been calling these Management Functions the Director.

I introduced each of the intelligences to you with an imaginary quote. For the Director, the imaginary quote gets a bit unwieldy: “Golly gee whiz, she’s really well-organized and pays attention and reasons well and never forgets her homework and gathers data and information with tremendous precision and maintains a good sense of time and....” So forget it, no quote this time!

The Director represents not only our personal inventory of tools, strategies, and characteristics but also how well we actually use that inventory — both how well we remember to use our skills at the moment we need them and how well we reason, think, plan, and carry out a sequence of planned steps. It’s the imaginary executive that “puts it all together” for us. It’s all the stuff that lets us show our stuff. It’s the essential link between our potential and our realization of that potential. The better our Management Functions, the more we can express our full potential in the real world.

You may want to go back and look over the detailed list of management functions in the chapter on the Director. Those functions will be important to us as we think about developing your child’s Intelligence River. You may remember that they include not only tools like calendars, but also brain-based “tools” like the ability to define and solve problems well; manage time and sequences of action in time; control motivation, energy level, attention, and concentration; communicate effectively; and generally act as a good executive manager of our actions. The idea of the Director encompasses not only the tools, but also their effective use. It includes:

• The range of Director skills your child has — his “tool box”
• Her ability to know when a particular tool is needed
• How skillfully he uses each tool.

Logically, these management skills are the most recently evolved, most rapidly developing aspect of human intelligence. Maybe that’s why they’re so hard for many of us! Fortunately, these skills are also among the most influenceable aspects of the Intelligence River — and helping your child develop them will make a big difference in how she does in the real world.

Mapping the Director

The Director is about control and management. How do we imagine it in our map of the Intelligence River? I’ve already said that I live near the Cache la Poudre, one of the great free-running rivers still left in the American West. If I had the superhuman strength and endurance to go straight up a few fairly fierce waterfalls, I could set a kayak in it a few minutes from here and paddle to its origin, high in the Rockies, without encountering a single dam that would stop me. But wait a second, that’s only half true: There are some control structures along the way. They aren't dams, but they do partly control the flow of the water. Well, now that I think about it, high up, there are mountain lakes which can be opened or closed to keep a steady flow in the river. Oh, yes, and there’s that tunnel, bringing water over from the Laramie River. And, of course, a lot of the water is drawn off for irrigation eventually. The funny thing is that for all that control, the river is beautiful, and its flow seems natural. Maybe we've found an adequate balance between freedom and management.

We’ll model the Director not as a tributary at all, but as all the controls that allow the Intelligence River to flow with greatest efficiency, getting the most from its potential.