Insights Discovery helps colleagues understand their personal preferences and behaviour better, both for themselves, and about others. It’s a psychometric system based on the power of self-awareness, and a great starting point for team and leadership development, and for optimal collaboration at work.
It’s also a tool for engaging in genuinely enlightening conversations that build relationships. The personal profile itself lays the ground for properly insightful dialogue: you quickly get to the heart of interpersonal matters without judgment or bias.
Insights Discovery uses a distinctive color-coded system— Cool Blue, Fiery Red, Sunshine Yellow and Earth Green —to represent personality types. This visual and intuitive method makes it easier for users to understand and remember their own and others' traits.
But don’t be fooled into thinking this is a superficial system – quite the opposite! Insights Discovery’s seemingly simple four-color system is based on Carl Jung’s theories of personality. It’s our knack for making incredibly complex theory simple to remember – therefore applicable in the workplace – that sets it apart from other color-based personality products.
Personality assessment, color test... it’s tempting to refer to Insights Discovery in these terms, and many people do. But no-one’s testing anyone (phew)!)
With a test, you're evaluating a competency. You're trying to determine how good (or bad) a person is at something. You can pass or fail, get a high or low score...
But here, we’re exploring behavioural preferences. We explore at how a person prefers to communicate, learn, manage and be managed, and we observe potential strengths and weaknesses in these areas, but only in regard to how we interact with others.
These preferences having nothing to do with the outdated notion of measuring for competencies, they’re about understanding evolving and changeable personality traits within ourselves and others.
We believe that, because we all have all four color energies within us, people can’t be pigeon-holed into “best in class profiles”. And we walk the talk; our ethical guidelines confirm that the Insights Discovery personal profile must not be used for recruitment, selection or evaluation purposes.
One of the things people appreciate most about Insights Discovery is that there are no good or bad scores. We create a judgement-free zone. Instead, you get to learn which one or two of four color energies you tend to lead with, and which ones you tend to use least.
Each color energy palette has potential strengths and weaknesses (with regard to how some personality traits can be experienced by others). By understanding one’s own psychological preferences and using the approachable language of color energies to talk about them, participants become aware of how they -and others- communicate and interact.
A learner may begin to realize, for example, that the colleagues they find hardest to understand often lead with opposite color energies. As they learn about different personality preferences, they acquire the agility to communicate more effectively by consciously shifting their communication style to better suit the other person (sometimes using a style different from the one they naturally prefer).
Relationships between colleagues improve dramatically when they understand each other better and respect and appreciate each other's differences.
Another popular aspect of Insights Discovery is the simplicity of its four-color model.
It’s designed to ensure that people remember, share and continue to use the knowledge they acquire in the Insights Discovery workshop.
In many organzsations, Insights Discovery's language of color has become part of the corporate culture, but what does the language of color energies really mean?
You can’t stick a color on a person
First, we must preface that people are not ‘a color’. Insights Discovery teaches people to avoid comments like “John’s blue/green, etc.” when discussing personality types.
Instead, we’d say that our friend John ‘leads with Cool Blue color energy’, and probably use a few extra details when talking to him (people who lead with Cool Blue color energy often appreciate detail).
Our colleagues may act with a lot of Cool Blue, Fiery Red, Sunshine Yellow or Earth Green energy on any given day.
Similarly, we sometimes hear comments like, “managers have Fiery Red energy as their dominant color, and accountants have Cool Blue energy”. This is false. All color energies can master any skill in their own way - it will simply have a different behavioural form.
The four Insights color energies enable you to understand your colleague’s preferences and act accordingly. If you know that the person you're talking to has a preference for Fiery Red energy, but is less comfortable with Earth Green energy, then you'll know how to communicate effectively with them. For optimal communication here, you’d want to keep it short, get straight to the point and put aside personal arguments.
One of Insights Discovery's greatest assets is the personal profile, the most comprehensive and most nuanced profile of its kind.
It’s entirely personalized and highlights the uniqueness of one’s personality without judgment. It has clear guidance for use and is always interpreted and explained to the recipient by an accredited Insights practitioner.
At Insights, there’s no such thing as a standard description. Here’s how we do it…
There are four color energies on the Insights color wheel, eight Jungian personality types, and 72 wheel positions. But those 72-wheel positions are the thin end of the wedge.
Within the 72, there’s huge diversity of personality preferences. For example, two people may occupy the same wheel position but communicate and make decisions differently. Accordingly, if you were to read their Insights Discovery personal profiles, you’d find these differences – these unique personality traits – clearly identified.
It’s estimated that the Insight Discovery evaluator is capable of generating as many unique profiles are there are people in the world...
While the language of color energies is based on the four colors, keeping it simple enough to be widely understood and adopted throughout the biggest companies in the world, when we get down to the individual level, the depth of each profile is the most accurate and detailed personality descriptor on the market today.
Just as we don't stigmatize people, we don't pigeonhole them into a single type or behavioural trait.
Your color energy and position on the Insights discovery Wheel are not static. Your preferences and behaviour are always shifting, shaped by the demands you place on yourself, the expectations of your environment and your relationships.
When these factors change (for example, with age, with experience or when taking on a new role), it often results in a shift in your preferences, which can mean that your position on the Wheel changes.
We recommend that accredited Insights practitioners in particular repeat their personal profile every 18-24 months. Quicker, if the person has experienced something profound. For example, many practitioners and executives alike found their wheel positioned evolved throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Insights Discovery personal profile represents a snapshot in time. After all, people change from day to day, month to month and year to year. When you add in the fact that everyone has four color energies within them, and can become skilled at dialling energies up and down as the situation demands, it makes sense to work with a system that allows for this kind of constant evolution.
Learners constantly tell us how “eerily accurate” their profile is. One client said in a recent case study interview that he felt like the profile looked into his soul!
But as our product managers would assure you, there’s nothing mystical about why the Insights Discovery profile is so accurate.
The accuracy of each profile is down to psychology and science, and there’s not a single psychometric profile on the market today that comes near it.
Insights doesn’t measure personality, aptitude or competence. Our questionnaire measures a person's preference for one of two psychological dichotomies: Extraversion/Introversion (Jungian Attitudes) and Thinking/Feeling (Jungian Rational Functions), and it also takes into account Sensory/Intuition (Jungian Irrational Functions).
The validity of these attitudes/functions are widely recognized, as they correspond to standard scientific models, and it has been extensively researched by various independent external academics, psychometric experts and assessment bodies.
This level of accuracy is one of the reasons why so many companies enjoy working with Insights. In general, almost all participants recognize themselves in 90-100% of the statements printed within their Insights Discovery personal profile.