What kind of thinker are you

When you know your thinking style, you know what naturally energizes you, why certain types of problems are challenging or boring, and what you can do to improve in areas that are important to reaching your goals. Once you know your style, it helps to share it with others, and have others share theirs with you. In this way, your thinking style becomes a useful tool — a kind of social currency — for the team. Imagine you put together a team to work on a new initiative. Who likes to work on the details of the execution?

And who is energized by managing the team dynamics? As a real-world demonstration, one company had their entire leadership team identify their thinking styles as managers and leaders. Looking at a heat map of the results, they realized they had a lot of big-picture Explorer thinking and a lot of Action thinking Energizer and Producer , but very little Process thinking Planner and Optimizer.

The team was strong at coming up with big ideas and mobilizing everyone into action, but weak at working out the details and making things run efficiently. With this new information in hand, they started giving more voice to those whose detailed thinking often seemed like a buzz kill to the big picture explorers and energizers.

They also shifted the culture and recruiting strategies to create a more balanced and diverse thinking style.

At an individual level, one specific leader had always operated in idea-rich environments like consulting and marketing. But by identifying her thinking style, she realized that she was more energized by relationships than ideas. Her orientation was more towards Connector thinking than Explorer thinking. She used ideas to nurture relationships, rather than relationships to nurture ideas. This insight led her to shift the focus of her work toward account management and business development, leading to much higher levels of energy and engagement.

The landscape of business is changing rapidly, and we have to find new and better ways to connect and communicate. We all aspire to work better together; the challenge is actually making it happen. Understanding collaboration through the lens of thinking rather than doing is a practical and powerful step forward. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month.

What kind of thinker are you though? A multitude of ways. It depends on the problem. There is only one real way. Many depending on how you want to solve it. I'm always lost in thought. Not usually. It depends on how I feel that day. The person. The colors. The contrast between color and black and white. The structure of the building. Of course. No I do not. But how well do you really know your own mind?

And what kind of thinker are you? This free, fun quiz will teach you a lot about your own thought patterns. It uses your responses to 21 brain-teasing questions to create a detailed report on your mental characteristics, including:.

Which of 16 reasoning styles you use, with a description of your style. Your overall level of rationality relative to the population. Your performance on 4 subscales, including quantitative reasoning and cognitive awareness. Links to resources that can help you shore up your rationality skills.