The Insights Discovery tool

Insights Discovery is a widely used psychometric test. It is usually sold as part of a package intended to be used by whole teams.

As I cannot justify buying this for myself and my current employers show no interest in it, my current learning about it will be somewhat indirect and limited. 

For example, I cannot assess the structure and mechanism of the 20-minute online 'multiple choice' test that is used to generate all the outputs. I would be interested to compare it with the two-option forced choice structure of the Enneagram

But I am lucky in that a few years ago a colleague gave me a copy of his own generated report, illustrations from which I am reproducing below. In addition, I can still remember a conversation at the time with the senior manager who commissioned the Insights Discovery exercise for this whole team, at no little expense. Both these colleagues seemed to enjoy the experience and both reflected to me that it had given them new insight. But I could not, and did not over the subsequent years, see any sign of what any of the participants really did with these insights and what, if anything, changed as a result of using it.

The context in which this Insight Discovery exercise was carried out was organisational change. In essence two previously separate and largely autonomous technical teams had been brought together. There was a lot of resistance to change. People whose 'expert power' had previously insulated them from challenge by their wider organisations were lined up against similar colleagues who did things differently. To make things worse, neither of the two heads of the precursor organisations had been appointed to be overall in charge, but they were kept on in the new structure. The grape pH reading was well below 7. So the new head of this service was making valiant efforts at team-building and  unification in the face of some typical public sector bad behaviour.

So, in this situation, it probably did not matter whether or not the Insight Discovery had any actual validity, the exercise had immediate benefits in getting people away from their day to day work and talking about themselves and talking to each other.

The output from the Insights Discovery 20 minute test is a personalised report with a lot of information in it. Production of this must be entirely automated, using elaborate algorithms. The output I have available to study is several years old. So it may be that the processes have been modified subsequently.

Edgar Bolton. 

31/03/2021

Any views expressed above are purely mine and should not be mistaken for those of any organisations or individuals I have been associated with