Using the

Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI)

As a Tool to Improve Team Dynamics and Job Productivity

An introduction to HBDI for the members of the American Society for Quality

By Alex Fedotowsky, March 8, 2004

Introduction:

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a physicist, stated that the greatest tragedy of western management is in its inability to understand human nature. Ned Herrmann, also educated in physics, designed an accurate instrument to connect thinking styles to organizational communications and productivity issues. It caught my attention that these two distinguished trailblazers with similar educational background pursued interest in linking the human element to organizational effectiveness. Competitive organizations have made significant accomplishments in improving quality and operational efficiency. The most challenging performance issue still facing organizations is in optimizing the workforce thinking contributions and improving internal/external communications. Organization with over one hundred employees usually will have an equal number of left and right-brained people. However, they are typically led by left-mode management styles that fail to integrate the thinking habits of the entire workforce. That simply means, management styles in most cases, tend to be administrative process intensive suppressing the right brained emotional conceptual thinking contributions. Traditional problem solving methods have been effective, but can stifle alternative methods that can be explored using the Herrmann Whole Brain concept. The purpose of this article is to begin the process of understanding how to link the HBDI profile information to worker productivity, and team dynamics.

With all the recent efforts in quality improvement, compliance in quality certifications, Six-Sigma, and implementing lean operations, the cost of not trying to understand people should be described as significant. Thinking style issues related to customer satisfaction and senior management team decisions can also have a dramatic effect on the bottom line. According to Ned Herrmann, companies loose 20% to 30% in productivity due to misalignment of thinking preferences to work related functions and organizational communications. The next generation of productivity initiatives should focus on aligning job, team, and tasks with the individual’s, teams’, and management thinking style strengths. The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) and the HBDI Whole Brain Technology provide useful data to improve such an alignment. HBDI facilitates motivation theory by better understanding how people relate to productivity issues, problem solving and work habits. It can help align thinking styles to tasks to improve, teamwork, supervisory leadership, safety, and several productivity initiatives. The scope of this article will not permit detailed coverage on how to completely read and understand all the HBDI profile measurements. The focus will be on the core concepts and the four quadrants that makeup the HBDI profile. It is my goal to help readers form a general understanding on how thinking style strengths can contribute to improving team dynamics.

What is HBDI?

HBDI is similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), however it provides a weighted data measurement approach that is placed on a radial four-quadrant chart making it well suited for the data probing quality profession. In comparison, the MBTI profile based in psychology while the HBDI is based in physiology.

The HBDI profile is generated by completing an online website survey (www.hbdi.com) using an access code provided by a licensed HBDI practitioner. The online form consists of a 120-question diagnostic survey that measures your thinking preference/avoidance, not your ability to perform tasks. You will answer questions forcing you to choose key descriptors, adjectives and situations that build your thinking preference profile. It is not a test and it does not measure competency to perform tasks. Consequently, a low score in an area does not indicate incompetence. The profile data will help better understand the thinking potential of the workforce to improve leadership and teamwork, that can lead to better designed operations and work functions.

Survey questions include, biographical info, interests, handedness, work elements, hobbies, how you describe yourself, and how you solve problems…etc.

The physiological brain is metaphorically divided into four color coded quadrants, where each quadrant represents (A) Rational, (B) Organizational, (C) Human Feeling, (D) Experimental.

People have preferences and avoidances to their thinking styles in various strengths in all four quadrants. A HBDI chart can be generated for individuals, teams, company culture, and even a product.

By understanding how the 4 quadrants of the brain work together to profile thinking preferences, the potential exits to improve communications, productivity, performance, and management effectiveness. The radial graphic chart serves as a metaphor to the 4 physical divisions of the brain. In Fig 1.0, the illustration shows the division of the physical brain and how it is connected to the 4 quadrants of the HBDI profile. Without going into all the detail, I’ll simply state that we have a left-right division of the brain and an upper (cerebral) and lower (limbic) division of the brain to create the 4 quadrants. Fig 2.0 shows the Whole Brain model with descriptions to help understand thinking styles contributions from each of the four quadrants.

To help facilitate the understanding on the applications of HBDI within the scope of this article, I will continue to place work and task descriptions that connect to each quadrant (Fig 3.0). For example, people dominate in the “A” quadrant, meaning their chart will score diagonally high in the blue area of the chart, will enjoy analyzing data, solving problems and deriving conclusions with genuine data. The “B” quadrant people prefer, working in a safe situation, following procedures, planning their work, creating order, and paying attention to detail. The “C “quadrant people like, working together in groups, teaching, coaching, listening, helping, and facilitating teamwork. Finally “D” quadrant thinkers are conceptual. They like to, experiment, take risks, bring about change, sell ideas, and look into the future. People can have strengths in more than one quadrant or in all quadrants (whole brained). The combinations are too numerous for the scope of this article. However, with more understanding of the thinking contributions of each quadrant, we can begin to understand how to use this tool to improve teamwork and productivity.

Using HBDI to Improve Job Functions:

The first level of HBDI application should be at the job or task level. According to Ned Herrmann, most jobs are not designed. They are pieces of required work put together to create a whole job. Though HBDI does not measure competence in any occupation, it can help align job tasks that match thinking preferences displayed in the HBDI profile. The more aligned the tasks to one’s thinking preferences, the higher the expected productivity. Consequently, people will enjoy their work more and drive their own productivity. Job misalignment can create, lower levels of quality, lower productivity, more accidents, and increased worker absenteeism. For example, if a person is dominant in the “C” and “D” quadrants and most of their assigned work is “B” dominant in administrative tasks with intensive details, they can be performing adequately. However, this misalignment would suggest that person would be a high performer in leading teams, improving sales, or be an outstanding customer contact person. Typically, but I can’t say for all cases, “A” quadrant people who are intensely logical, analytical, low on emotions, and tend to be critical, could jeopardize a sales contract if continuously placed in a direct customer contact position. A few Dilbert comic strips come to mind.

Using HBDI to Improve Team Dynamics:

According to data collected by Herrmann International, organizations with more than 100 people are very likely to have a near equal balance composite of all four thinking styles. Hidden productivity problems may be present if the right side thinkers are not fully integrated to form a whole brain organization. The opportunity will present itself to form Whole-Brained high performing teams by identifying the thinking styles using HBDI. Without the HBDI data, there is a high probability to form homogeneous thinking teams, which tend to produce adequate results but not great ones. Homogeneous teams, referred to as “Tribes” by Ned Herrmann, are subject to experience the Groupthink phenomenon and/or experience extreme competitiveness among its members. Teams dominant in the A-B (left brained) tend to be less creative while C-D dominant teams (right brained) tend to lack developing procedures to move forward with their ideas. The immediate but mostly adequate benefits of homogeneous teams for each quadrant of thinking style include the following:

A Quadrant homogeneous team – quickly reaches consensus on logical and analytical tasks.

B Quadrant homogeneous team – quickly form and setup administrative procedures to direct the team performance.

C Quadrant homogeneous team – will quickly develop relationships to form a collaborative team.

D Quadrant homogeneous team – will tend to seek creative outlets before setting up a team structure.

Heterogeneous teams have more difficulty developing through the forming and storming stages and take longer to achieve consensus. However, once they are past the norming stage and are in the performing team stage, they can expect to deliver numerous solutions some that may be superior to the homogeneous team. Fig 4.0 show the profile of several members of a homogeneous “A” quadrant dominant team and Fig 5.0 shows the profile of a heterogeneous team.

The ASQ body of knowledge study material for several of the certification programs has made reference to the fact that optimum team performance often needs mental diversity from its members. Some team members will steer the team toward planning, procedures, and task completion, “B” quadrant activities. Other members will focus on facilitating the camaraderie of the group nurturing participation and encouraging communications, “C” quadrant activities. Creative members will openly submit ideas, “D” quadrant thinkers, that will analyzed by the groups “A” quadrant dominant members. This is the fundamental nature of a whole-brained team and how they achieve their high performance. When tough problems occur in production or development, in most cases you need to involve the idea person, the analyst, the team facilitator, and the organizer. From my own past experience working as a engineer, I was part a trouble-shooting team trying to find out why our newly developed software product was communicating irregularly via TCP/IP Ethernet to a production controls PLC rack. We bought in consultants, tested the software and hardware by every possible means, organized the debugging process, and examined every line of code with no results. Finally, because of my conceptual “D” quadrant thinking preference, I started to walk around the factory floor looking for something perhaps in the factory environment that might be causing the random stop and go communications. Watching for patterns on the floor, I eventually detected that communications stopped whenever a nearby motor drive was turned on during production. Sure enough, there was an electrical grounding problem with the cable and it fixed the problem. The consultants went home and we were back in business. Of course at that time, I didn’t think in terms of the HBDI Whole Brain technology. However, the one sided detailed analytical thinking wasn’t leading the team to the right solution. By taking a risk in the approach to solve the problem, a lot of time and money was saved.

Conclusion:

The applications of HBDI as a tool to diagnose organizational effectiveness will become self evident as you gain knowledge in its origins, concept and applications. HBDI can be used in marketing to help understand what information customers may be filtering out when making a decision to use your product or service. It can be very effective in developing IT and high tech products by understanding how people relate, interpret, and resist to learning technology functions. It has been used in leadership and management development. By being aware of diverse thinking styles, you begin the process of improving employee and customer relationships. HBDI is being used by many of the Fortune 500 companies for numerous applications from employee training, leadership development, to creating new and better products.

Improving the workforce contributions by understanding thinking styles is a tremendous opportunity many organizations neglect to pursue. When quality initiatives fail, in many cases it can be connected to people, team, leadership, communication, and motivational issues. Why spend money on improvement programs and employee training without first understanding your employees and how they prefer to think. According to Ned Herrmann, a study in the early nineties revealed that the average CEO believed they were getting about 20% contribution of brain power from their employees. Imagine the output if that number was significantly higher.

My first application with HBDI was to use it as a front-end assessment tool to help a client develop a systematic innovation process. Delighted with the outcome, our client has recently requested to have more HBDI profiles completed for other improvement teams. What I feel is great about the HBDI is that it offers easy to understand data quickly in order to diagnose team problems and formulate solutions.

The application of HBDI as a tool to improve teamwork and operations, from my point of view, is hopefully moving beyond the pioneering stage. We are in an age where organizations need to continue to find ways to get the most brainpower from their workforce and respect employees who think differently. HBDI is a very valid tool to begin this process.

References:

1. Ned Herrmann, The Creative Brain, Brain Books, 1988
2. Ned Herrmann, The Whole Brain Business Book, McGraw Hill, 1996
3. Ann Herrmann Nehdi, Creativity and Strategic Thinking, The Coming Competencies, Herrmann International, www.hbdi.com/docs/Ann_CreativityAndStrtegicThinkng.pdf
4. Dr. Victor Bunderson, The Validity of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, http://www.hbdi.com/hbdi/validation-creativebrain%20appendix%20A.pdf

Fig 1.0

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Fig 3.0

Fig 4.0

Fig 5.0

Alex Fedotowsky, HBDI certified, ASQ certified CQMgrOE, and CQIA, Managing Partner

Customer Focused Technologies, Inc.,152 Cushwa Drive, Dayton, Ohio 45459.

Tel: 937.901.8301 Fax: 508.464.2690 Email: AlexSky@earthlink.net

Short Bio:

Alex is a managing partner with Customer Focused Technologies, Inc., Dayton, Ohio.

He has a B.S. in Physics with 28 post grad credits in education & engineering. He is a certified CQMgr & CQIA member of ASQ and is certified as a HBDI practitioner. Prior to joining CFT, Alex worked as technology instructor and senior IT engineer. Alex is also an accomplished, artist, musician, and creative thinker.