The personality tests that have been a mainstay of hiring and coaching may finally be ripe for disruption. Not because they suddenly don’t work. They never have been more than 80% valid, so whether you define that as working or not, I leave up to you. Nor because they treat people like loaves of bread, slicing them into traits, which can’t reassemble themselves into the real people we are. Nor even because they are so easy to game. I like a good game myself, but if I’m putting a team together for a specific purpose – whether to rebuild a bridge or to bring an innovative product to market – I want to know how people are going to play together, not by themselves.
AI is game changing technology, and it is the combination of Autonomous AI Agents and those humans we call Change Agents that I hope will launch a new era of positive-for-humanity disruption. Here’s how I see it.
If your association with Constellation Research dates to the first few years, you probably experienced the technology then known as ‘Teamability’ – a way to measure how a person interacts with others and thereby predict, and improve, how a team will perform. (A use case was a winner in the first Supernova Awards.) It was, as many innovations are, ahead of its time. It was waiting for Autonomous Agents to appear. While it waited, the work went on to prepare it for the time when a coach could be a silicon-based ‘life’ form, as well as human. And, in keeping with the philosophy that data should belong to the individual, it was renamed KnowMe™, to acknowledge workers’ desire to be understood and appreciated for who they really are.
To acquaint you (or reacquaint you, if you are a long-time friend of CR) with KnowMe™, it begins with an online exercise in which the user is immersed in an interactive experience, described as ‘starring in a movie’. The technology monitors how the user interacts and reports that information back, not a series of static measures, each of one slice of one person, as would be true for a scale in a personality test. It measures three unique and interrelated aspects of human interaction: style, focus, and additional characteristics, defined as
- Style: The way a person prefers – or is driven to – serve the needs of a team with a vision greater than oneself (there are ten) is reflected by someone’s style. This information can be used to match any position with the person most likely to perform best at it, and to match a person with the type of job that best suits them, although other data, below, is required to match for other factors such as success and retention.
- Focus: The innate ability to effectively maintain preferred behaviors under varying conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, which vary enormously with not only industry, company, and position, but with the type of interactions needed to be successful in the position. For instance, someone with high focus is a good match for a high-level executive position in a rapidly growing company but will likely be bored working in a typical government bureaucracy.
- Additional Characteristics: The varieties of characteristics that support or interfere with human functioning are many. The technology looks primarily at those that are additional strengths, weaknesses (not to be strengthened but to be supported by other team members), areas of extreme conflict, and those of extreme lack of awareness. The latter two are almost always problems in high performance teams, as is an overarching fifth measure which indicates the level of interaction that requires ‘reading’ people. These are not personality traits or strengths as the terms are typically used but are characteristics that fine tune fit to a specific role within a team or organization.
While at present there are two styles of reporting, a short format for the participant, and a more comprehensive one meant for a decision maker, data dashboards allow for ultimate customization and the integration of AI for reporting and guidance. With the advent of Autonomous Agents, this knowledge base can be considered a SLM (Small Language Model). It can easily be used to train a system to provide advice to the individual manager on interacting with others, such as manager to report, and manager dealing with an interactional issue between two or more peers. It can also be used to develop Agents that coach one-to-one and one-to-greater than one, specifically to the way the people operate in critical business relationships.
Recruitment and Screening Agents can use the knowledge for selection, assignment, reassignment, team design, and other tasks which have been performed the past two decades by hand. When combined with other data, the process can be speeded up to the point of having zero loss of excellent candidates who take other positions while waiting to hear from HR, and increased employee satisfaction, which is most influenced by the feeling of being understood by your manager, and the feeling that you are being rewarded for making the most satisfying contributions you are capable of.
