MindSonar Privacy Policy

What is GDPR?
MindSonar is GDPR compliant. The GDPR is the European Privacy Law, which was instated in 2018. Basically, this law gives people control over the personal information that is being stored about them. Also, you have to give explicit permission to have your information stored and you have the right to see what is stored about you and to demand it be erased.

Take, for instance, the famous ‘Download This Free E-Book’ forms. When you downloaded the e-book and gave them your email address, you would then receive promotions from that company. This was, for most people, an implicit understanding: I trade my email address for the book. But with the advent of the GDPR, this is no longer legal in Europe. You need to get explicit permission for your promotions. So this text would now read: ‘Subscribe to Our Newsletter and Get the E-Book for Free’. More explicit, more transparent.

A good thing
Actually, I think this has been a good thing. Of course there are still plenty of excessive, illegal and often invisible data gatherings going on. But at least the EU government now has some tools to fight this. So while I am not happy with all the work it entails for small companies like MindSonar, I am definitely proud of the resulting privacy upgrade!

Europeans and Non-Europeans
At MindSonar Global we decided to not distinguish between Europeans and Non-Europeans in terms of privacy. I think right now, Europe has the strictest privacy laws and we want to extend that level of protection to everyone, no matter where they live.

Our Privacy Policy describes why and how we collect and use the personal information of your respondents (people who fill out their information for a MindSonar Profile). It also describes their options to choose how we use their personal data and how to contact us with any concerns and requests.

And as always: suggestions are welcome, go ahead and comment.

Read our Privacy Policy here

How do Criteria, Values, Meta Programs and Graves Drives Fit together?

Standards
Let’s start with criterion. This is actually the broadest concept of the four.  Criteria are standards by which we evaluate things. When you meet someone new, you may be using ‘happy’ as a criterion for evaluating the other person. Do they look happy? Great! Do they look unhappy? Not so good.

Values
Values are criteria too, but they are very important criteria. ‘Honesty’ might be a value when you meet someone new. Sometimes these very important criteria are called ‘core values‘. If someone you meet doesn’t seem very happy, you may find that not so good, but even though happy is a criterion for you, you might not worry about it too much. But if they strike you as dishonest, you might think twice about meeting them again. There is a sliding scale between ‘Criterion’ on the one end and ‘Value’ on the other end. As a criterion becomes more and more important, at some point we call it a value. So when we ask ‘What do you find most important in this situation?’ we are asking you to give a value.

Meta Programs
Meta Programs are ways in which you handle your values. For instance: are you presupposing people will be honest (meta program: matching) or are you presupposing they will be dishonest (meta program: mismatching)?

Graves Drives
Graves Drives are a typology of criteria. In MindSonar we ask you to indicate, for each of your criteria, which Graves drives they are related to most. For example: is honesty about power for you (red drive)? Or is it about community (green drive)? If somebody else had ‘Openness’ as a value, would that be similar to honesty or not? We can’t know  from looking at the words ‘honesty’ and ‘openness’. But if we know that two people both categorise their (differently labeled) values in the same Graves Drive, we know that their values are similar.

Categorizing Criteria
The American psychologist Clare W. Graves theorized that there are eight value systems, which evolved over the course of human history. He assumed that each value system flows from the previous one as a response to:
a. Ever more complex life circumstances
b. Problems with the previous set of values.

MindSonar measures the extent to which your criteria are associated with seven of the eight Graves Drives. We call this ‘Graves categorisation’: putting your criteria (which you already described) into one or more Graves categories. This makes it possible to compare criteria between you and other people or between yourself in different situations.

Graves
Clare W. Graves was a professor of Psychology in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century at Union College in New York, the same university where Abraham Maslow taught at the time.

Maslow was developing his motivation theory (Maslow’s pyramid of needs), which shows the development of individual needs. The highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy, ‘self-actualization’, fit right in with the prevailing views of the seventies.

Graves thought this model did not offer a broad enough base for understanding man as a bio-psycho-social-cultural being. He assumed that human behaviour was not determined by individual needs alone, but by a combination of social, biological and psychological factors. Graves theorized that there are eight value systems which evolved over the course of the past 100,000 years of human history. Graves called these value systems ‘Levels of existence’.

Types of Inner Conflict – How to Identify them in a MindSonar Profile

Pavlov: Experimental Neurosis

In MindSonar we work with the distinction ‘towards’ versus ‘away from’ thinking. This distinction has a long history, be it under a different name. In the beginning of the 20th century, experimental psychology already used this distinction when they were researching what they called ‘experimental neurosis’. The famous I.P. Pavlov was one of the scientists involved in this research.

Pavlov created ‘approach/avoidance conflicts’ in dogs. In terms of meta programs we would say: Pavlov trained his dogs to want to go towards and go away from at the same time. First, he conditioned them with one stimulus (for example a bell) to go towards a food bowl where they were rewarded with food. Next, he conditioned them with another stimulus (for example a horn) to move away from the food bowl because if they stayed there they were given an electric shock. Then, both stimuli (sounds) where presented at the same time: the dog was put in an approach/avoidance conflict. He wanted to go towards the food bowl to get the food and at the same time he wanted to move away from it to avoid the shock. When subjected to this conditioning, the dogs started to show strange behaviors; they stayed completely still or they started doing illogical things like running in circles.

This is what was called ‘experimental neurosis’. Human beings sometimes find themselves in quite similar situations. We call them dilemma’s: on one hand I want to give my boss a piece of my mind (towards, approach), on the other hand I don’t want to get fired (away from, avoidance).

Types of conflict

Psychology makes a distinction between three types of conflict:

Approach/approach conflicts (I want two things, but I can’t have them both). We would say: towards/towards conflicts. When we look at the emotions that thinking ‘towards’ and ‘away from’ are associated with, we expect that this kind of conflict will evoke mostly sadness and anger.

Avoidance/avoidance conflicts (I don’t want either one of two things, but I can’t avoid both of them). We expect that this kind of conflict will evoke mostly fear and anxiety.

Approach/avoidance conflicts (I want one thing and I want to avoid something else, but I can’t have the one thing and avoid the other). In this situation we expect a mix of the above-mentioned emotions.

Conflicts in MindSonar work

In MindSonar we are gathering information on someone’s criteria and their counterparts. These are towards- or approach-issues and away from-  or avoidance-issues. The positive criteria the respondent gives us are things they want to move towards. The counterparts are the things they want to move away from. Similar to when Pavlov’s dogs wanted to move toward foor and away from electric shock. If Pavlovs dogs had filled out MindSonar for the context of ‘Being in Pavlov’s experiments’  they could have filled out ‘Tasty food’  as one criterion and ‘Being safe from electric shock’ as another criterion. With a counterparts: ‘Being hungry’  and ‘Getting shocked’.

Here are some things you could do, as a MindSonar Professional, with the criteria-information in terms of these three types of conflict.

  • First have look at the ‘towards’ and ‘away from’ scores.
  • If the ‘towards’ score is high (say 8+), then look for approach/approach conflicts. Have a look at their hierarchy of criteria and discuss with the respondent if they can achieve all of those criteria simultaneously. Are some of them exclusive, meaning they cannot both be achieved at the same time?  Then there is a potential approach/approach conflict. You may find emotions of anger and sadness. Unless the hierarchy of criteria is very clear. In that case (clear hierarchy) it may not be a problem. Sure, they cannot fulfil both criteria at the same time, but is doesn’t bother them, because criterion 1 is clearly more important than criterion 2. So they are happy achieving a lot of criterion 1, even if that means they won’t achieve much criterion 2.
  • If the ‘away from’ score is high (say 8+), then look for avoidance/avoidance conflicts. Have a look at the counterparts in their hierarchy of criteria. Discuss with the respondent if they can avoid all of those counterparts simultaneously. If not, there may be an avoidance/avoidance conflict. You may find emotions of fear and anxiety. Here also, the problem may be ameliorated or prevented by a clear hierarchy of criteria.
  • If the ‘towards’ and ‘away from’ scores are balanced, look for approach/avoidance conflicts along the same lines as the other conflicts.

And what could be a solution?

And if you find any of these conflicts, what’s next? In terms of coaching, helping the client clarify their hierarchy of criteria might be helpful. Or – as a next step – you might help them negotiate between parts, if you know how to do that. How can the two parts of the person, one of which wants to achieve A and the other wanting to achieve a mutually exclusive B, cooperate, in order to achieve new goals that are satisfactory to both of them?

MindSonar is Not a Personality Test

A colleague from the UK mailed me saying: “I suppose what I have difficulty with is … if ‘personality’ is situational, in other words we are ‘at cause’ and can choose to be whoever we wish to be depending upon our outcome and upon our context, then how could we ever measure that? Personality from this perspective is not a stable trait which can predict certain behaviours and language in certain contexts, it is simply what someone chooses to do Continue reading

Recruitment and Teambuilding with Heleen van Elburg

Meet Heleen van Elburg, a Dutch trainer/coach who works primarily in team building and recruitment. In this video she describes how she uses MindSonar in recruitment  and to help teams become more efficient.

It is interesting to hear Heleen describe how, in recruitment, she looks at profiles in four different ways. She goes beyond recruiting and selecting the candidate. She also works on the fit within the organisation after the person has been selected.

  1. Does the candidate have the right thinking style, the right meta programs and values for the task?
  2. Does the candidate fit with the other team members in terms of their profiles?
  3. What is a good sequence for the team, given their profiles?
  4. What is the best way for a supervisor to motivate this candidate (once they have become a team member, of course)?

Building a New Team: Alignment or Diversity?

A colleague from the US asked me: when profiling for a new team, would I want to see great diversity? In my mind that would make sense, but in reality I might want to see it aligned in some areas. What is your opinion?

In my opinion, the desired meta programs depend on what the team needs to accomplish. A sales team is different from a policy team. So in terms of priorities I would say: first of all you want the team to have the required meta programs and values to be successful at their main tasks. Once that is accomplished, you want to have as much diversity as possible. It is a bit like the relationship between towards (achieving goals) and away form (solving problems) in coaching. You want away from in the frame of towards. With team you want diversity in the frame of alignment.

If you want to put it in a procedure (which I often like to do) it would be something like this:

1. Define what the team’s main task is

2. Define what the necessary meta programs and values are for that task.

3. Make sure some team members have all (or as many as possible) of those thinking style elements.

4. Find additional team members how have some task-critical meta programs but who also have some meta programs an/or Graves drives that are distinctly different.

5. Explain thoroughly to the team why you composed them like this, and what the benefits of thinking style diversity are.

6. Prepare the team for dealing comfortably with conflicts that may arise from this engineered meta program diversity.

Good luck!