People have sometimes asked us: “Why don’t you offer the MindSonar questionnaire on the web?” or “Why don’t you make MindSonar available directly to the general public?” We have four good reasons for not wanting to do that and for making MindSonar available to trained professionals only.

Better interpretation
First of all, interpreting MindSonar, although it has quite an extensive written report, still works best when a trained professional is helping. A professional understands much better how combinations of different Meta Programs and Graves Drives work. They also have a better understanding of and how certain mindset influences how someone feels and behaves in a certain situation.

Better application
A measurement is useful only to the extent that you can actually do something with it. A trained professional can help people translate insight into action, through advice, coaching and training. The same goes for organizations. Understanding how people think is only valuable in so far as people in the organization can use that understanding to change.

MindSonar and the professional enhance each other
We see MindSonar as part of a formula. A coaching or consulting ‘Powered by MindSonar’, it is much more than just the measurement. The other part – usually a quite important part – is the professional using MindSonar. It is the combination of the fine grained measurement of MindSonar with the passion and expertise of the MindSonar professional that make for a great product.

Preventing data contamination
Yet another reason for not opening MindSonar up directly to the general public, is data contamination. If the measurement were open to just anybody, many people taking it would not be very serious about their answers. They might, for instance, just be trying to see if they could fool the system or they might make it their sport to get an extreme score. By opening up MindSonar to just anybody, we would increase the amount of ‘frivolous data’, degrading the quality of our database.