Finding your problem-solving superpowers
How do you prefer to approach a challenge?
Are you the sort of person who likes to collect and clarify all the details before making a plan? Or do you prefer to put all the ideas out on the table first, no matter how wild, and narrow it down from there?
Do you like to dig in to the process and develop your ideas fully before taking action? Or do you like to get started implementing those solutions with whatever resources are on hand and figure out the next steps later?
The FourSight assessment tool focuses on the questions above to help you understand how your strongest preference can influence your decision making and team dynamics—often without your conscious awareness. Most of us have a strong bias towards one of the four types: Clarifier, Ideator, Developer, and Implementer. ATG’s Sydney Morris is a certified FourSight facilitator, and she guided our team through a group assessment where we learned about our own and each other’s preferences. It was painless and even fun to do, and we gained a lot of insight into how we work together, both when things go well, and when we get stuck.
Sydney and Jet LeBlanc recently chatted about the experience. Here are some highlights of their conversation.
Jet: How does FourSight differ from other similar assessments that corporations typically use?
Sydney: Well, for example, Myers-Briggs (MBTI) measures personality traits and DISC measures behavior. With a different focus entirely, FourSight measures your preferences within the creative problem solving process. There are absolutely some connections with FourSight and other assessments (Like Ideators commonly have highly intuitive personalities), but FourSight is unique in what it assesses. It focuses on where you gain or lose energy within the problem-solving process and is not about your ability within those preferences.
Jet: Is it for use only with teams? Or is it something you could use individually?
Sydney: You can do both, for your own personal growth and to give you a little more insight into how you think critically when you’re trying to solve a problem. You can also use it in a team setting where you want to identify who really lights up in what part of the process when you are solving problems or thinking critically, and that just helps you work better as a team. Not only in the way that each person learns where they light up, but when everybody knows that and you’re trying to work on a project, it really gives you that bigger view of where do each of us want to focus? What’s going to be the best use of our time and energy?
Jet: One of the things that fascinated me was that even in this group of skeptical, analytical people, we all sort of took this in and saw the truth in it, and I think it improved the way we think about our team dynamic a little bit.
Sydney: And how we have moved through projects. As a team full of Ideators, it was like “Oh, this is why some of our meetings get taken off into left field.” It really shed a light on where we’ve gotten stuck, and why. And not the why of pointing fingers or blaming, but a broader perspective of “this is how we work.” This is our team’s natural preference and how can we accommodate, not who can we say is causing a problem. It gives you more information so you can make better choices.
There are many ways to design and adapt a team so that the members bring complementary skill sets. For research teams, you need both the different kinds of expertise and a clearer understanding of how the individuals work.