Can you tell the intelligence/iq of a person by the way the approach a new task?

Most kitchen tasks are quite simple in complexity but can be complicated in how it can be organized. For example, there are many ways for a person to make a recipe from how they gather their mise en place to how they organize the order of their tasks. If that person has to make more than one recipe the process becomes even more complicated. Being able to figure out how to most efficiently do the work requires not only experience to understand each step but also the ability to hold a lot of information in the head and process that information quickly. A person who can work quickly can think multiple steps ahead.

It isn’t so hard if the work is routine, but doing a new task or even a different combination of old task can make this challenging. I feel like between someone extremely intelligent and someone not very smart there has to be big difference. Has anyone noticed any difference in intelligence from the way people work?