Go Beyond Your Thinking Style Limitations

During turbulent times, the organizational development team of a large health insurance company had been tasked by senior management to develop a new business strategy. But each time the team was about to submit a proposal, one or more of the members would insist on revisions to make the strategy better. Administration of the Profile revealed that the team was entirely made up of conceptualizers. (Only their administrative assistant was an implementer). A typical conceptualization style is to defer moving forward until the problem is fully understood and defined completely. In this case, information from outside the company frequently changed, such as new government regulations, so the team would stop to increase their understanding and conceive an altered strategy; the previous strategy was not perfect anymore. This cycle would repeat. What was happening was they were relying only on conceptualization skills to handle the shifting information, and the team was paralyzed. After training in the Profile and experiencing the 10-minute problem solver, they developed an understanding of the importance of having all four styles present and the innovation process. Even though their work was largely conceptualizing, they decided to expand their membership by adding generators, optimizers, and implementers. Once all four styles were leveraged, rather than trying to attain perfect understanding, the team created and delivered an innovative strategy in which they had sufficient confidence for management to consider.