Bertrand Russell accepting his Nobel prize in 1950

Let me correct this misunderstanding (the remark about personality, not the compliment about raising the standards of NLP ). MindSonar is not a personality test. MindSonar measures how someone thinks in a given context. We presuppose that they may have a completely different MindSonar profile in a different context. And in fact people have often demonstrated this. One of the assignments in the certification training is to make a profile for two different situations: one situation in which you were ‘in flow’ and everything was going just fine, and another profile for another situation where you were unhappy with how you responded. People usually come up with strikingly different profiles for these two situations. This principle is expressed by Rodger Bailey in his old adagio: “Everything changes by context”.

That being said, I have also noticed that people do differ in the extent to which their thinking changes by context. Not everyone changes as much when the context changes. Although this seems relatively rare, some people will have stable profiles, no matter what happens. And others may have certain clusters (metaprogram combinations) that remain the same in different contexts. These stable elements might be considered personality traits for these specific people.

• Dynamic sonar graphics: the size of the symbols now corresponds directly to the scores.
• Graves scores are represented by circles, ordered from lowest to highest score and compared with averages for the population.
• Response times are now related not only to averages for that person but also to how much their times vary. This gives a much more accurate impression of what an exceptional short or long time is for that particular person.

First of all, interpreting MindSonar, although it has quite an extensive (30+ pages) written report, works best when a trained professional is helping. A professional, to mention just one aspect, understands much better how combinations of different metaprograms work and what the implications of a certain profile could be.

Also, interpretation is useful only to the extent that you can actually do something with it. A trained professional can help people translate insight into action, through advice, coaching and training. The same goes for organizations. Understanding how people think is only valuable in so far as people in the organization can use that understanding to change.

We see MindSonar as part of the formula. Even if a consulting product is ‘Powered by MindSonar’, it is usually much more that just a test. The other part – usually the biggest part by far – is the professional using MindSonar. In combination they form a great product.

Yet another reason for not opening MindSonar up directly to the general public, is data contamination. If the test were open to just anybody, many people taking it would not be very serious about their answers. They might, for instance, just be trying to see if they could fool the system or they might make it their sport to get an extreme score. We admit that even with professional applications, one can never be certain about the extent to which the answers reflect people’s thinking. But by opening up MindSonar to just anybody, we would be likely to increase the amount of ‘frivolous data’ enormously, degrading the quality of our database.

We believe that in the long run, we will be able to maintain a much higher quality product by linking MindSonar to trained professionals.

See: MindSonar certification

1. Benchmark Profiles

   This forum is meant for exchanging and discussing benchmark profiles (norm- or wish-profiles for certain tasks or functions).

2. Requests and Suggestions

   What would you like to see changed in MindSonar? Put your requests here.

3. MindSonar FAQ

   Questions about MindSonar, its functions and its background. The questions that are now in FAQ will be moved here.

Not much is happening yet on these fora. But it’s good to have them ready when you need them…. Right now, if you have ideas about benchmark profiles for ‘coaching management’ or ‘hospitality’ please visit these fora and respond.

Thinking in options however, can have its downside too. Shelle Rose Charvet, for instance, has pointed out that thinking in options can be quite stressful when you are being admitted to a hospital, and you’re going over all the different possible illnesses you might have…. One group that can testify to the dangers of options thinking, is the Amsterdam mob. Although, ‘testify’ is probably not be the right word here… Thinking in options wiped out a significant part of the Amsterdam mafia. How did this happen, exactly?

Criminal losses
Ever since the 1980′s, the Amsterdam underworld – like most of its counterparts in other countries – is financed primarily by drug trafficking. And sometimes things go wrong. Large transports are caught by customs or police. A criminal can loose a lot of money that way. As long as the criminal community in Amsterdam was not responding creatively to these mishaps, in other words: as long as they were not doing too much optional thinking, these accidents did not have great consequences. They would feel frustrated, hope to compensate their loss with the next shipment, and carry on as usual. Until one of them thought of a new option….

Make them pay!
The loss of a drugs transport is never entirely a matter of coincidence. There are always partners in the chain of production, packaging, transport, transfer, wholesale, etc., who have made mistakes. They might have talked about the transport in a bar. They might have forgotten to pay off the right officials. So here was the new thought: why not make them pay for their mistakes? True to form, this concept was emphasized quite graphically by violent threats. Already, even just this one single new option cost a few Amsterdam criminals their lives.

Nest option: Why not simply make it up?
For a while this system worked.The ‘victims’ had few other choices than either paying or disappearing. But then somebody came up with the next option. Up until then, the accusations had all been based on real events. Opinions might differ as to who was to blame, but the losses themselves were real. But – here was the creative new option – why wait until something went wrong? Why not simply make up an accusation and have people pay? A stroke of genius! The Amsterdam mob developed a whole new source of income, extorting real estate developers operating in the twilight zone between crime and regular society. They would, for instance, tell a shady real estate entrepreneur that his son had started an affair with the girlfriend of a Russian gangster. The Russians were planning to kill his son, but they – the Amsterdam mob – could protect him. Of course there would be a price to pay. With fantasized stories like these, and without much risk, they made millions of euro’s.

The lethal option
And then somebody came up with the next option. If this worked with ‘civilians’, why not use it on their colleagues too? And so they started extorting each other with fantasized stories. And soon after this, somebody came up with yet another innovative option: why bother thinking up excuses at all? Wasn’t the whole process of extortion based on power anyway? People paid because someone had a reputation for using violence, not because of the credibility of the story. So why make up a story at all? The next phase was, that they started extorting money from each other without any excuse. The fact that they could was reason enough… And pretty soon Amsterdam criminals were liquidated by their colleagues for defaulting on their ‘payments’.

Systemic effects
Liquidations could hardly be avoided, because if you did not actually execute your threats, your reputation would be damaged. And in the new situation this was especially dangerous, because if you appeared to be weak, other criminals would start extorting you. They would do it to you, if you didn’t do it to them, so to speak. This lead to an escalation of violence within the criminal community that had never been seen before. At the peak of this process, in 2005, three major players in the Amsterdam mafia were liquidated in one single week.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Then somebody asked him: “You are thinking about things that you could have done. But if you had actually done these things, could you really have prevented what happened?” Our colleague admitted to himself that -  within in his professional limitations – there really wasn’t anything he could have done to actually prevent this death. And this thought gave him some peace.

This started me thinking once more about the metaprogram ‘internal locus of control’. When you have an internal locus of control in a given situation, you believe that you have power over your circumstances. You can influence the world around you. You are in control. When you have the opposite, an external locus of control, you believe that the situation has power over you. You have to accept things as they are, there is nothing you can do. You throw your hands in the air. So, naturally, somebody who has an internal locus of control, tends to take responsibility. They are thinking: ‘I can change this’, and therefore they are responsible. Usually this is seen as a positive thing. People like other people to take responsibility. And having an internal locus of control also goes together with a focus on goals, with trusting in your own values and with looking at the bright side of things. So it is not surprising that this metaprogram has a good reputation.

There is, however, a dark site to it too. As our famous Dutch soccer coach Johan Cruijf puts it: ‘Every advantage has its disadvantages’. People with a strong internal locus of control will often feel responsible for things that are actually outside their control. The colleague I described might be an example of this. He could not sleep because he felt responsible for something that he could not have prevented. So I believe there is a connection between a strong internal locus of control on the one hand and being stressed out on the other hand.

It all depends on how you handle ‘failure’. If you are responsible and yet you don’t succeed, how do you respond? What does that mean to you? If you respond with the metaprogram set ‘general-mismatching-people’ you are in trouble. You think you are doing everything wrong as a person (everything = general, wrong = mismatching and your as a person = people). On the other hand, if you respond in terms of ‘specific-matching-activity’, you might feel like this particular activity did not turn out right, but that there were actually quite a few things that went fine. And the things that did not go well? They brought a lot of learning and insight.

So at the end of the day, I am reminded – as I often am -  of the famous prayer: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference”. In other words: help me be flexible in my locus of control! Even a hero does not have control over everything.

Metaprograms in MindSonar

The concept of metaprograms

Metaprograms and working with people