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Which of these intelligences does your organisation invest in?
June 30, 2026 
People who live in Arctic regions have dozens of words for snow. Not because they’re more poetic. Because their entire world is snow. Survival depends on distinguishing between them. Language followed necessity.
For most of human history, we’ve had remarkably few words for intelligence. Smart. Bright. Gifted. Maybe analytical. Perhaps creative. That was fine, because intelligence was scarce. One kind dominated.
But we are now entering a world saturated with intelligence. Cognitive intelligence, the kind that processes information, solves equations, drafts proposals, is being commoditised at breathtaking speed. It represents perhaps 10 to 15% of what humans actually bring to their work each day. Which leaves 85 to 90% largely unnamed.
What we cannot name, we cannot value. What we cannot value, we cannot develop.
Let me give you an example of why developing proper language around intelligence matters.
Take the difference between knowing and understanding.
AI knows everything. Instantly. At scale. It knows the symptoms of burnout, the frameworks for strategic decision-making, the psychological stages of grief, the principles of great leadership. It can cite sources, generate reports, pass exams. But knowing is not understanding. A doctor who has never lost someone doesn’t understand grief. They know it. A leader who has never navigated genuine uncertainty doesn’t understand fear in their team. They know it.
Understanding is knowledge that has passed through lived experience. Through the body. Through failure. Through relationship. That is something AI cannot do. So if cognitive intelligence is being absorbed by machines, what remains? What is the 85 to 90% we have never properly named?
The intelligences we never named
🧠 Embodied intelligence. The wisdom held in the nervous system, in gut instinct, in the physical experience of being present in a room.
🤝 Relational intelligence. The ability to sense what’s unspoken, to hold space, to repair rupture, to build genuine trust over time.
⚖️ Moral intelligence. The capacity to navigate ambiguity not with rules but with values. To ask not just can we but should we.
❤️ Emotional intelligence. Not as a soft skill, but as a navigational system. The ability to feel accurately and act wisely.
💡 Creative intelligence. Not just generating ideas, but making meaning. Connecting what has never been connected before.
🧭 Contextual intelligence. Knowing when the framework doesn’t apply. Reading the room that no dataset has ever seen.
📖 Narrative intelligence. The ability to make sense of chaos and give people a story they can live inside.
These are not soft alternatives to real intelligence.
They are intelligence, the kind that has always driven the most important human outcomes. We just never needed to say so out loud. We are standing at a threshold moment. As organisations scramble to implement AI and ask what humans are still for, the answer is hiding in plain sight. In all the intelligences we never bothered to name.
The companies that will lead the next decade won’t just be the ones that deploy AI most effectively. They’ll be the ones that develop a richer language for human capability and build cultures that actually grow it. It’s time we expanded our vocabulary.
Over to you.
Which of these intelligences does your organisation invest in, and which ones are you leaving unnamed?
Christian Kromme writes The Human Spark – Beyond AI, a newsletter about what it means to be human in a world being reshaped by technology.