Editor | On 05, Aug 2018

Darrell Mann

How do you know if new job candidates will fit with the values of your enterprise? How do you know that current employees do the same? That they are authentically ‘talking the talk’? Especially since, looking at the spectrum of Mission, vision and values statements, it seems that there are almost as many different values systems as there are enterprises. One way would be to have someone design you a bespoke values questionnaire and have prospective new employees fill it out. Maybe, too, you could use it to conduct periodic surveys of everyone in the business? Either way you fall into the usual traps of high cost and low accuracy.

The Values-Match challenge is something we’ve been looking to use PanSensic to help with for some time now. By analyzing existing (anonymized) narrative input it overcomes most of the problems with traditional surveys. PanSensic already comprises a broad range of different ‘lenses’ that allow us to analyse narrative in a variety of different ways. As discussed in previous articles, if we want to measure Gravesian Thinking Styles, there’s a lens for that. If we automatically wish to measure Myers-Briggs profile (or their Jungian roots), we can already do that. Ditto Belbin, ‘ABC-M’, ‘Archetypes’, ‘Metaphor Themes’, ‘Adapter-Innovator’, ‘Starter-Finisher’ and a host of other dimensions. At first, when we were developing these lenses, we were driven by replicating existing psychometric taxonomies. But not far down the road we learned that what we were actually doing was measuring all the ‘first principle’ attributes that enable a person or a cohort group to be characterized. Now ‘getting to first principles’ has become a key tenet of the PanSensic offering.

It’s something that doesn’t come without its own set of problems. Very few people, for example, are familiar with Clare Graves, ‘Thinking Styles’ work. So, when we print the outputs of the analyses, not everyone understands the significance of what they’re seeing. That’s the big potential downside of looking at the world from a first-principles level: Graves implicitly understood how human psychology works at a first-principle level, but he wasn’t good at communicating that fact to his audience.

On the other hand, once you’ve captured ‘all’ the first-principles stuff, it starts to become very easy to combine the various different lenses to derive whatever values measures a client might ask us for. You just have to know how to combine the right parameters in the right combination.

For example, if an organization has ‘integrity’ as a core value, we can measure this by combining the following ‘first principle’ measures:

Integrity =

f {  ‘Equilibrium’ (JupiterMu)
– ‘Orphan’ (Archetypes)
+ ‘Monarch’ (Archetypes)
– ‘Feudal’ (Thinking Styles)
+ ‘Rocks’ (MercuryPhi (Vital Friends))
– ‘Anger’ (Sentiment Analysis) }

In other words, sticking with Graves and his Thinking Styles research for a second, that, all his findings pertaining to the impulsive nature of individuals when they are in the (CQ) Feudal mindset, tells you that their level of integrity is quite low. When someone is expressing Feudal behavior they are inherently impulsive, and this very ready to switch allegiances to the next shiny object that grabs their attention. So when we see an individual (or team) has a high Feudal score, we know this is going to detract from their level of integrity.

Repeat this for all the other Values of the organization and each of the current round of candidates and you can start to produce outputs like this:

Figure 1: Typical ValuesMatch Output For Job Candidate Evaluation

We haven’t quite reached the point of having PanSensic make the first-principles-to-company-values conversion automatically, but even at this early stage in the evolution journey it doesn’t feel like we’re too far off.

It turns out there aren’t a million different words and expressions enterprises use to describe their values to the world. Nearly everyone talks about ‘integrity’ in some form or other, for example. Almost as many, these days, use the word ‘innovation’. Very few of them, as far as we can tell, actually mean it, but that’s a whole other story. Very soon after we first combined all of the First Principles lens results together to create an ‘innovation’ values lens, we quickly came to see that, while individuals within an organization might exhibit innovative traits, most enterprises are close to 180degrees opposite. Everyone, it seems, feels the need to say they’re innovative, but they rarely know what they’re asking for.

That’s the sort of thing a First Principles level understanding of the world is likely to reveal. If you think your organization might be ready for that kind of truth, you might like to come and do some kind of gentle-entry PanSensic experiment with us.