In 2017, I ran a company experiment with approximately 25 participants. The participants were divided into groups based on their primary thinking preferences. So, there were approximately six people in each group representing a conceptual, logical, systematic, and people-orientated bias.
A problem was introduced to the collective.
“You are living in the 1700’s; you are the governor of a town, and you have 100 troops and 1000 civilians, of which 100 are sick. You are running low on food. What do you do?”
The only instructions were for each group to go away for 20 minutes, debate the topic, and return with their answer.
The results were astounding. It's like it was staged because it was so polarising.
People-oriented Group
- They would get everyone together and have a reconciliation event.
- All titles were stripped, and everyone would open up about what crimes they had previously committed and their hardships.
- They would ration the food evenly across everyone.
- They would find what skills different people have and how we can use them to solve our food shortage issue.
- They could find other people, form peace treaties with them, and learn from them how to live off the land.
Systematic Group
- They decided they needed to prioritise and rank everyone based on the order in which they were most/least needed.
- They would rank people based on utility, skills and different attributes.
- They would ration how much food was left and prioritise by rank to manage the food shortage.
Conceptual Group
- They could not agree on a course of action and were still debating options at the time of presenting. They had found a myriad of different solutions.
- One idea was to build a ship and sail back to where they came from.
- They could rank people and figure out who would be prioritised.
- They could find other people to learn from.
- They could research how to farm better.
Logical Group
- They decided they would create a middle management layer with the convicts.
- Find the ones with the skills required and enlist them to be middle management; they get rewarded with land.
- They would then form teams to search for other inhabitants they could trade with and reward middle management and soldiers with plots of land.
All the answers are valid; they are just from different perspectives, which have strengths and weaknesses.
Building teams where everybody understands themself and those around them so these strengths can be harnessed is massive for collaboration.
Reference:
Ploomo - Brain profiling
Roger Wolcott Sperry, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology in 1981, discovered that our brain's two hemispheres, left and right, specialize in controlling different functions. The left hemisphere is responsible for verbal, logical, linear, and organized functions, while the right hemisphere is responsible for visual, imaginative, lateral, conceptual, and emotional functions.
Roger Wolcott Sperry - NobelPrize.org
Kobus Neethling later identified these preferences can be further split across four categories or quadrants for brain profiling: Structured (L1), Detailed (L2), Creative (R1), and People-orientated (R2), each with their own characteristics and traits.
