Are Your Conscious and Unconscious Minds Aligned?

While working on Innovation Personality Poker® over the years, one question has lingered in my mind…

How do we know we are getting the most accurate picture of someone’s personality?

Personality Poker is based on a 75 year old psychological testing technique called a Q-sort.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, in a Q-sort, “a person is given a set of sentences, phrases, or words (usually presented individually on cards) and is asked to use them to describe himself (as he thinks he is or as he would like to be) or someone else.” In some variations, the cards are sorted from most like the individual to least like them.

If you read academic paper about Q-sorts, you will see that the question arises as to whether or not a self-assessment is accurate. Researchers question if other methods of personality testing are more accurate.  They posit that there are three testing methods…

1. Self-assessment (of the conscious mind)
2. Assessment by a friend, family member, or colleague
3. Assessment by an unbiased 3rd party who is expert in the Q-sort process

Which method is most effective?  It appears that the answer is “all of the above.”  All methods are accurate, depending on the situation.

However, there is a 4th method that is not listed above that may prove even more interesting.

Can our unconscious mind be a better predictor of our personality than our conscious mind?

There are very few methods available to answer this question. Fortunately I was introduced to people at Harvard University who developed a tool called “Implicit Association Testing (IAT).”

Harvard’s website gives a very simple introduction to the concept…

“It is well known that people don’t always ‘speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people don’t always ‘know their minds’. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology. This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods.”

In short, these tests tell you if your conscious mind (i.e., explicit) is aligned with your unconscious mind (i.e., implicit).

We are about to start work with Harvard that will assess if the conscious mind (tested via the card-based version of Personality Poker) correlates with the results from the unconscious mind (tested via a specially designed Personality Poker IAT).

One of three scenarios will prove to be true:

1. In most people, the conscious mind is perfectly aligned with the unconscious mind
2. In most people, the conscious mind is not aligned with the unconscious mind
3. Alignment between the conscious mind and unconscious mind varies from person to person

If scenario #1 proves to be true, then we will have proven the validity of the Personality Poker at both a conscious and unconscious level.

However, if scenarios #2 or #3 prove to be true, we have a new opportunity…to develop an online IAT-based Personality Poker game that we can make available to the public. In some respects, scenario #3 is most interesting, because it means that in some cases “explicit” personality testing (done via cards, questionnaires, and other diagnostics) is accurate. However in order to get a full picture of one’s personality, “implicit” testing is also required. Only through both types of testing can we get an accurate assessment of one’s total psyche.

In order to better understand Implicit Association Testing, I encourage you to take some of the tests on the Harvard IAT website. This may give you some interesting insights into your own personal biases…some of which you might not want to even admit to yourself.

My New T-Shirt

For any die-hard Boston Red Sox fan, the New York Yankees are the evil empire.  Therefore, being a native Bostonian, this T-shirt makes me laugh.  I particularly like it because it uses the suits from poker cards.  This is perfect for me, the creator of Personality Poker.

What’s Your Twitter Personality Style?

After giving a presentation last week on Personality Poker to a client, one of the other speakers discussed social media and Twitter.  The emcee for the event asked me to comment on which personality style uses Twitter.

My response was, “All of them.  But WHY they Twitter and HOW they Twitter differs.”

We designed Personality Poker to focus on attributes rather than activities.  The reason is that activities do not differentiate personality styles, motivations do.

Nearly everyone reads.  You are reading this blog.  Maybe you read books.  Maybe you only read toothpaste tubes.  It doesn’t matter what you read.  The fact that you read is less interesting than WHY you read.  This  may give insight into your style.  Do you read to learn as much as possible?  If so, you might be an analytical “spade.” Experiential “diamonds” may read to escape.  Competitive “clubs” may read to make them more successful. Emotional “hearts” may read romance novels (I’m joking about this one…maybe).  Of course this is a broad generalization.  In reality, we read for different reasons at different times.

HOW we do what we do also helps us understand our personality.

I am primarily a “high diamond.”  That means I love new experiences.  Travel is my favorite activity.  I am thrilled to be returning to Copenhagen and Greece to speak next week.  What is interesting is HOW I plan my travel.  Although I knew about this trip for many months now, I just made my flight reservations an hour ago.  I still haven’t booked my hotels.  Spontaneity is a cornerstone of my personality (which admittedly is a strength and weakness).  Many people travel.  But HOW we travel may differ.  For example, clubs (especially “low” clubs who are methodical), would have everything planned out well in advance.

So WHY we do things and HOW we do things are indicators of our style.  Not what we do.

So back to Twitter.

If you were to assess who Twitters, I suspect you would find a good cross section of people.  I know many who are competitive clubs and Twitter to help them be successful.  The heart-oriented Twitters are more interested in the connection with other human beings.  Spades may be more data gatherers. Diamonds may be using Twitter because it is new and cool.

I’m a diamond.  I don’t Twitter to become more successful or grow my business (the club style), although that would be nice.  I don’t Twitter to build relationships with people (the heart style), although that too would be nice.  My motivations fall more into the spade (my secondary style) and diamond (my primary style).  I spend more time reading tweets than writing them  And I tend to read more about topics than people.

I use Tweetdeck.  This software allows you to create columns with filters.  For me, my first filter is the word “innovation.”  Anyone who uses the word innovation in a tweet shows up in that column, even if I don’t follow them.  The next column is Boston.  I am interested in my community and the “cool things” going on (a very diamond attribute).  The next column is Boston Innovation.  Finally I get to my friends status updates, replies and direct messages.  The other columns change over time and often feature a client’s name.  Click the image above to see my Tweetdeck.  And no, your eyes are not going bad.  I blurred out the conversations…

Based on WHY I tweet and HOW I tweet, you might get a good sense of my personality style.

Based on the limited information provided in this article, I would love for you to answer the following 3 questions:

• What do you think is your primary style (analytical spades, creative/experiential diamonds, methodical/competitive clubs, people-oriented hearts?
• Why do you Twitter?
• How do you Twitter?

I plan on doing more formal studies on Twitter personality styles in the future.

P.S. I love this story…The other day I did a Personality Poker session with a client.  Someone in the room came to me with their hand – a combination of hearts (lovers of people and relationships) and “high” clubs (lovers of action and competition).  He laughed and said, “I love to play tennis.  And I love to kick the butt of my opponent (a typical high club attribute).  But afterward I feel bad for the person I beat (a heart attribute).”

Podcast: Creating Innovative Products

How do you create products that sell themselves? That is what I will be speaking about at the National Speakers Association (NSA) national convention in Phoenix, AZ this summer.

As a way of promoting that event, I was interviewed by professional MC, Camille Valvo, for the “Voices of Experience.” This audio CD is sent to all members of the National Speakers Association.

Although this 8 minute interview (which you can listen to below) is targeted at professional speakers, the concepts apply to anyone in any industry. After discussing the innovation bell curve and its relevance to the speaking business, I talk about how to create…

• interactive products that can be used during a speech (mine is Personality Poker®) (link).
• books that help your clients quickly understand the breadth of your expertise (mine is “The Little Book of BIG Innovation Ideas”).

What is interesting is that these two products were created “by accident.”

Personality Poker® was originally developed as an innovation tool for me to use with my corporate clients and in my keynote speeches. Inevitably, participants at my events would ask where they could buy the poker cards and the accompanying instruction manual. Instruction manual? I never planned to write one because I never planned to sell the cards. However, I decided to give my customers what they wanted. The first version of the instruction manual was pretty rough but was available within a month. The current version took quite a bit longer. The next version will be available September 2010, but more on that another time.

“The Little Book of BIG Innovation Ideas” was originally conceived as pamphlet. It was going to be 25 tips condensed into a booklet small enough to fit in a jacket’s breast pocket. Each tip would be 3 sentences long. What I discovered was that I had a difficult time choosing only 25 tips. And I had a more difficult time limiting each tip to just a paragraph. The result would have been trite sound bites. But I liked the idea of cataloging my 20+ years of experience into a series of tips. So during my spare time, I continued to write my thoughts in a Word document. I eventually pulled together 75 tips, each between one and two pages in length. I never expected to turn the Word document into a salable product.  But my clients loved the content and wanted to buy copies for the attendees of their events.  So, once again, I decided to listen to my customers and to give them what they wanted.  Interestingly, the current book cover was designed by one of my clients.

In just 9 months I have gone through 1,500 decks of poker cards (enough for 12,000 people), and over the past 18 months I have sold thousands of copies of the “Little Book.” Not bad for two accidental products.

The interview is not a sales pitch.  We do not focus on the products, but rather the thought process I went through in developing them. The purpose is to help people think differently about their products…and to help promote the NSA convention.

Stream the interview…

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Download the mp3 (right click and “save target as” to download to your computer)

Small Business Radio Interview

Today I was interviewed on “The Small Business Advocate” with Jim Blasingame. This internet radio show address a wide range of topics of interest, no surprise, to small businesses. This was my 4th time on his show, and I honestly believe that Jim is one of the best interviewers out there.

On this morning’s show, I spoke about Innovation Personality Poker. And in particular, I spoke about how to create high performing innovation teams by getting each person aligned with their innovation strength.  Be sure to listen in…

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