CONATIVE CONNECTION
Uncovering
the Link Between Who You Are and How You Perform
by
Kathy Kolbe
Smashwords Edition
* * * * *
Published on Smashwords by:
Kathy Kolbe
Conative Connection
Copyright 1990-2011 by Kathy Kolbe
Kolbe
Conative Index copyright 1987 by Kathy Kolbe
The terms Kolbe Conative Index®, Kolbe Concept®, Kolbe Wisdom™, Niche for Knack™, Kolbe A™ Index, Kolbe B™ Index, Kolbe C™ Index, Kolbe Y™ Index, Think-ercises!®, Natural Advantage™, and Action Modes® are claimed as trademarks. Where those terms appear in this book, they have been printed in initial capital letters.
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* * * * *
Praise for Kathy Kolbe’s
CONATIVE CONNECTION:
“I’d never draft a player for the Suns without consulting Kathy Kolbe. Her system gives you 20/20 vision with people, maybe even better. It helps you zero in on who’s going to produce for you and how to make the most of what they bring to the game—any game. We’ve found a whole new chemistry for the team using ‘conation’ and I’d say the results speak for themselves.”
—Jerry Colangelo
Former President and CEO
Phoenix Suns
“Kathy Kolbe has developed a unique method of evaluating her fellow human beings and predicting how they will act.”
—The Chicago Tribune
“Our management group has experienced a higher level of productivity as a direct result of understanding the concept of conation. More importantly, the Kolbe Index has helped us recognize our strengths and capitalize on them to build a strong quality management team. It works!”
—Sharon Browne
Vice President and General Manager
Xerox Voice
Systems Division
“The Kolbe A™ Index could revolutionize organizational design and staffing decisions.”
—Paul Brinkman
Director of Human Resources
Honeywell, Inc.
“Kathy Kolbe’s Kolbe Index is a powerful tool to aid us in understanding and overcoming the struggles that emerge when we cannot achieve unity between what we do and who we are. The implications for its use in researching the psychology of meaning and character formation are vast.”
—Morrie Olson, R.P.h., M.F.T.
Clinical Research
Coordinator
University of Pennsylvania
Treatment Research
Center
“This book uncovers a missing piece of the human communication puzzle. By providing clear and practical applications, Kathy Kolbe helps us understand how we can communicate more effectively, both interpersonally and professionally.”
—Elizabeth Berry, Ph.D.
Professor of Communications
California
State University, Northridge
“Finally, a concept that links personal dynamics to organizational patterns.”
—Ramon G. Corrales, Ph.D.
Family Institute of Kansas City
“Conation has given me an appreciation of divergent as well as convergent creativity and how to help people of varying backgrounds and motivations work together. I am amazed by its basic simplicity and far-reaching implications.”
—Ralph G. Bohrson, former Program Director
Ford Foundation
* * * * *
To the memory of my father, E. F. Wonderlic,
who nurtured my
creative instincts and taught
me to value the freedom to be
myself.
Thanks, Dad, for egging me on.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter
1: Acting on Instinct
Chapter
2: Taking Initiative
Chapter
3: Targeting Mental Energy
Chapter
4: Creating Synergy
Chapter
5: Playing with Intensity
Chapter
6: Trusting Another’s Instincts
Chapter
7: Nurturing the Will
Epilogue
Appendix:
How to Get Your Kolbe A™
Results
Glossary
* * * * *
You can search the early evening sky a long time and find only one or two stars. After a long wait, another appears, then the next, and then a few more. Those you squint at to keep in sight are finally joined by myriad stars that seem to appear all at once.
And so it’s been with the Kolbe Concept. I’m grateful for the many who show their support now, but I am especially appreciative of those few stars who shone through during my lonely early efforts.
Author, editor, and book reviewer Sheila Whalen was the first literary mind to grasp the significance of putting the Kolbe Concept into book form. Her practical and humor-filled perspective helped keep the project on course. Her constructive criticisms and other contributions helped immeasurably in bringing this book into being.
Sculptress Helen Blair Crosbie was the first person whose work validated my own. In her definitions of artistic talent I found another who recognized the universal nature of creativity. That she chose to publish her work with my company was an honor; that she is my good friend is a special joy.
While others knew I would be able to recover from a debilitating accident and write once again, Laurel McKiernan was the only one who knew just how difficult it would be to get to that point. She helped me return to fighting form, all the while accepting me in the shape I was in. Her special talent for nurturing those people others consider handicapped is a burden few of us could carry and a gift she shares unselfishly.
My husband, Will Rapp, an international expert, not only believed in the universal applications of the Kolbe Concept, he introduced it into numerous countries. He has been the ambassador who bridged cultural differences and the diplomat who has broadened my world view. He has also put into practice the very principles of humor, trust, and respect on which the concept is based.
These five stars gave me hope and great help. My children, Karen and David, gave me a hard time—which was often exactly what I needed in order to overcome the difficulties of trying to write once again. By not letting me off the hook for a commitment I made to complete this project, they told me they believed in me and that they valued what I had to say.
The synergy necessary to put this book into final form has come with the help of Kolbe Corp team members past and present. I owe a special debt to those whose talents were not well utilized; it’s from my many management mistakes that I’ve gained the greatest understanding of the need to find better solutions.
I also appreciate the efforts of Jane Isay, George Gibson, and my agent, Gail Ross, who all trusted the scope of an unwritten concept, and my editor, Nancy Miller, whose cooperation and professionalism helped bring 1,400 pages down to those you’ll read here.
Dozens of leaders in business, education, and government were willing to cooperate in the research necessary to validate the Kolbe A™ Index. They were in the forefront, and therefore absorbed the brunt of naysayers’ barrages. Their tenacity was proof of their dedication to the principles of individual accomplishment and group synergy—and their willingness to help bring conation into the light of day.
* * * * *
Several years ago, a drunk driver going 55 miles an hour rammed into the back of a Volvo stopped at a traffic light. The two vehicles, totaled by the impact, spun across the intersection and into a third car, creating a tangle of metal and glass.
I was a passenger trapped in the back seat of that mangled but still protective Volvo. After being extricated from the compacted steel and rushed to the hospital, I was found to have broken bones and lacerations, but my mental abilities seemed to be intact.
The process of healing included many months of physical therapy. But like so many personal crises, this ordeal also proved to be something of an opportunity and a source of profound insight.
In my first public appearance, months after the accident, I discovered its most devastating impact. I was moderating a business panel on educational issues, and was about to introduce the speakers from resumes they had just handed me. The letters on the page swam like amoebas under a microscope. My eyes and brain were conspiring against me like they had when I was a child, before I’d gained control over what was later diagnosed as dyslexia.
But the full impact of what had taken place didn’t hit me until almost a year after the accident, when I sat down to write a letter to my daughter, Karen.
“Dear Swijkn,” I began.
I could no longer read or write with any consistency. The muscle relaxants I needed to take had somehow made me lose the eye coordination I had conquered through years of effort. Although in earlier years I had challenged my dyslexia by getting a degree from one of the toughest journalism schools in the country and earned my living as a writer, editor, and publisher, I found I now needed immense concentration just to sign my name. I knew I was going to have to “overcome” all over again.
Ironically, I had spent the preceding five years producing activity books for gifted children, books to help them use their minds productively. It was a bizarre twist that I now found myself using the materials I had designed for others to help me retrain my own mind.
It was eerie but fascinating to meet myself in this manner. It gave me the opportunity to test some of my own theories, to consider what about me had changed and what had remained the same.
Intellectually—or cognitively, if you will—I had been returned, at least in part, to a childlike state. Emotionally, I had suffered all the ups and downs you might expect of someone whose entire way of life had been disrupted. Yet there was a part of me that remained constant that neither the emotional strain nor the physical and intellectual impairment of the accident could alter.
Throughout the initial ordeal and the entire recovery process, I never once lost my capacity for striving after goals, nor my own distinctive ways of tackling the challenges that confronted me. When I could not even sit upright and had to be moved by a mechanical conveyer, my determination to rebuild my body’s strength and dexterity led me to create challenges for myself. I painstakingly picked up pretzel pieces I had dropped on the floor by using a hand-operated arm-extender. I used spoons to flip balled napkins into paper cups I’d gotten others to place around the hospital room.
This is the way I had always been, even as a child—improvising, making deals. But what struck me most was the way the accident had isolated this “striving” part of me, the part that was not thinking or feeling, but simply doing. It had endured over time, and it had remained unchanged even through an upheaval that had altered so many other aspects of my being. Clearheaded or jumbled, happy or sad, optimistic or depressed, I had my own characteristic way of doing things, my own orientation toward action.
The book you are about to read defines the ways in which we all use our creativity and channel our mental energy to act and do. It is about a distinct part of the mind few of us have ever heard of, which was once the common currency of academic thought but was left behind in the face of seemingly more promising avenues of research about seventy-five years ago.
The part of the mind I’ve explored and now written about was accepted as a given by Aristotle and Plato, by Augustine and Spinoza. It is the part Immanuel Kant described as “practical reason”—the domain of action and the will, set apart from “pure reason” (the intellect) or “judgment” (the realm of feeling, pleasure, and pain). It is a cornerstone of almost every major system of Western thought having to do with human nature. From Plato to Freud, action has always been seen as a separate domain of the mind, independent of but coequal to thinking and feeling.
But in the twentieth century, as behavioral and cognitive and developmental psychology diverged, and as other areas of the brain sciences became increasingly sophisticated, the study of the willing or active part of the brain was increasingly left behind.
Fortunately, that situation has now come full circle, with work such as that by Gary Goldberg of Temple University School of Medicine, and Antonio R. Damasio of the University of Iowa College of Medicine. Their work and that of many others focuses on a region of the brain called the supplementary motor area (SMA), which they consider a significant factor in the development of the intention-to-act and the specification and elaboration of action. This region is part of the center brain, or “executive” brain, thought to provide a conduit between the medial limbic cortex and the primary motor cortex. According to Dr. Damasio, anatomical and functional knowledge of the SMA and its vicinity will someday “permit us to model the neuronal substrates of the will.”
Scientific opinions vary greatly about the exact topography of the mind, and about the precise structures that might account for the behaviors I’ve studied and described. But my own work is much more pragmatic, dedicated to solving problems in the real world of human action, reaction, and interaction.
This book describes the method I’ve developed for identifying talent and targeting human effort, a method based on my observation of this hidden part of the mind in action. It is a new way of focusing creative energy, of dealing with change, and of predicting performance—of actually quantifying the probability of achievement in any particular endeavor. It helps create synergy out of conflict, and helps maximize mental energy by discovering and liberating our own most basic instincts for success.
Despite the fact that my theories and the Index I’ve developed to measure ways of striving are now being incorporated into research in many institutions, my own initial research took place completely outside academia. I am not a neuroscientist or even a psychologist, rather a management strategist, an educational innovator, a specialist in creative learning, and an entrepreneur—but articulating the conative concept became more important than running a business. Most of all I am a crusader who believes each individual has his or her own destiny—a unique nature that persists through all life’s struggles—and that, if we are free to act on our instinctive talents, every one of us will not only overcome obstacles but also achieve distinction and fulfill our sense of purpose.
My ideas will stand or fall on the power of their theoretical insight and on their practical value, not on the isolation of the particular anatomical structure or neurochemical pathway underpinning it. The proof is in the pudding. The action always speaks louder than words.
It took me four years since being pulled from that mangled car, but I was determined to write this book. I offer it to you as the best evidence I can provide that there is an internal power which allows all of us to do what we were meant to do.
•
Conation (koh NAY shun) n. Conation is the area of one’s active mentality that has to do with desire, volition, and striving. The related conatus (koh NAY tus) is the resulting effort or striving itself, or the natural tendency or force in one’s mental makeup that produces an effort. Conative (KOHN uh tiv) is the term in psychology that describes anything relating to conation. All these words come from the Latin conatus, past participle of the verb conari (to try). The Scottish philosopher William Hamilton (1788-1856) considered conation to be one of the three divisions of the mind, the one that included desire and volition, the other two being cognition (perception, awareness) and feeling... Conation differs from velleity (the wish without the effort).
—1000 Most Challenging Words
* * * * *
CONATIVE CONNECTION
* * * * *
The player breaking down court had all the right instincts for the up-tempo game. He was one of pro basketball’s best guards, a guy who had proven he could rise to the occasion and make the clutch play, and here he was with the outlet pass and a chance to score, while the defense was scrambling to get set up. But just as he was about to break loose he saw the coach on his feet, waving his arms and shouting out signals, insistent on setting up the pattern. The player turned his head to listen, broke stride, and had the ball stripped from his hands.
Sitting in the Phoenix Coliseum that night, I cringed as I saw our team lose yet another chance to get into the game. Every night of the season had been like this. Talented players were being reined in, their instincts squelched, as the coach’s perfectly valid instinct for structure was pushed too hard. After years of working in the area of enhancing human performance, watching these games was like witnessing some perverse case study in how to do everything wrong.
I went back to my office the next day and called the team’s general manager. “I can’t stand it anymore,” I told him. “Please...let me help.”
And that is how I began an association with one of my most visible clients, in the unlikely role of consultant on player selection for the NBA Phoenix Suns.
Within two basketball seasons, with a new coach who understood the power of instinctive action and management that encouraged building on it, the Suns had moved from near the cellar of their league to status as a force to be reckoned with—one of the most improved teams in the history of the NBA. Which is just the kind of turnaround I’m used to seeing in the workplace whenever my clients discover and then go with the innate strengths of their managers and employees.
Abraham Maslow, the guru of self-actualization, said that man seeks “to be true to his own nature, to trust himself, to be authentic, spontaneous, honestly expressive, to look for the sources of his action in his own deep inner nature.” He also said that “capabilities clamor to be used and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently.”
This book offers you the ground-breaking opportunity to maximize your capabilities by recognizing the power of your own will—and won’t. It will help you discover the instincts that drive capabilities, the sources of action, the authentic expressions of self that you need to trust in yourself and others. No longer will you find yourself taking debilitating detours as you search for your path of least resistance. You’ll be spared the frustration of wondering why what works for your boss doesn’t help you close the deal. You’ll understand how and why your creative urges can generate productive effort, and how conflicts can be turned into synergy. You’ll find validation for what you’ve known all along: that you have a unique way of doing things that works when you get to use it. And you’ll be confronted with something you may not have realized—that others don’t have to follow your example in order to do as well as you do.
The problem in Phoenix was a by-the-book coach stifling the instincts of more intuitive players, but that’s just one variation on a much larger theme. You can see the same basic squandering of human potential when a crisis-driven entrepreneur waits until the last minute and then expects his controller to find new financing overnight. You see the same misguided expectations when a bunch of great “idea people” come up with blockbuster marketing concepts but no one’s keeping inventory on the shelves. Or when the boss keeps hiring clones of himself. Or when a father tells his son to get his nose out of the encyclopedia and go play football with the other guys. Or when a wife thinks her husband who’s smart enough to be a lawyer ought to be smart enough to fix the lawn mower. Or when a husband expects his wife to automatically be the one to keep up with everyone’s birthdays and all the kids’ dental appointments.
All it takes is having more than one child to know that all of us are born with unique ways of approaching everything we touch, and that even two people brought up in the same environment take on the world in vastly different ways. Unfortunately, this common-sense reality has been lost in the notion that we can be anything we want be—if only we have the right schooling, the best therapists, and the financing behind us.
The Kolbe Concept is a practical approach to creative problem solving that not only helps you discover the source of actions in your deep inner nature, but also shows you how to build on those strengths. Unlike psychological self-help books or popularized management theories, this is a concept which does not try to change you. Instead, this book explains why the key to success is in trusting your instincts.
There’s more to achievement than what you know you ought to do, or what you wish you could do. There is also that which by your very nature you simply will and won’t do. We all know you don’t have to teach a cat to chase mice. You can, in fact, waste a lot of time trying to teach a cat not to chase mice, and even more trying to get it to bring you your slippers. When all is said and done, it is instinctive action that most truly speaks louder than words.
My own search for ways to build on innate talents led fifteen years ago to my founding a publishing company that offers kids options that challenge their creativity. I developed Think-ercises!® learning materials, books, and games that use children’s problem-solving abilities to allow them to pursue knowledge through individual paths. Teachers find that children perform beyond grade level when able to map their own efforts through this variety of creative alternatives. Now I’m working with businesses throughout the world, using this same concept to analyze their options and improve bottom-line productivity.
Throughout this period, I’ve carefully observed human behavior, both in the classroom and in the business world.
It became clear to me that being intellectually gifted didn’t determine what a person would do. Some smart kids wouldn’t read directions, while others wouldn’t do anything until they read them completely. Some experienced employees would count every marble in inventory and others would “guesstimate.”
By focusing on how people actually succeeded, as opposed to how well they followed instructions, I found that there were different knacks, or capabilities, that propelled people toward their goals. I discovered that achievement multiplied when individuals of any age or status were able to use their knacks for getting things done. These knacks, I realized, were so basic that they were, in fact, instinctive—the human “wills and won’ts” that determine not what we think or feel or what we wish or hope, but how we most naturally deal with detail, with structure, with risk, and with the three-dimensional world. These creative instincts determine our most natural way of approaching problem solving, of arranging ideas or objects, and of using time and energy.
I observed that people’s actions clustered into four sets of behaviors, or Action Modes, as I came to call them. The behaviors within each set did not overlap with the others and were distinguishable from them.
After years of observing and cataloging actions, interactions, and reactions, I became convinced that every intended response fit into one of the four Modes. That I later found the ancient philosophers had recognized that human “will” was channeled through modalities was validation of the concept I had arrived at independently. That there was an almost universal agreement that four forces exist within the driving mechanism of the human being was also an after-the-fact revelation that I found reinforced my conclusions.
But most of all, the validity of my work was confirmed when I found I could predict behavior with an accuracy that astounded even me. I could dissect the process any person went through when striving toward a goal and define each volitional act as coming from one of the four Action Modes:
Fact Finder: Precise, judicious and thorough, this Mode deals with detail and complexity, seeking to be both objective and appropriate. Keen at observing and at gathering information, people who lead with this Mode sometimes discover that information—facts—means more to them than to others. Sometimes they can be too judicious, seeming overly cautious as they wait for more data.
Follow Thru: Methodical and systematic, this Mode is focused and structured, and brings order and efficiency. People who lead with this Mode are meticulous at planning, programming, and designing, and predictability is essential to their being. Every organization needs people who lead with this strength in their operations, accounts receivable, and design functions. Obviously, there are times when an intense need for order can get out of hand.
Quick Start: With an affinity toward risk, this Mode is spontaneous and intuitive, flexible, and fluent with ideas. People who lead with this Mode are deadline- and crisis-oriented. They need an atmosphere of challenge and change, and sometimes they can be impatient.
Implementor: Hands-on and craft-oriented, this Mode brings tangible quality to actions. People who lead with this Mode have a strong sense of three-dimensional form and substance and the ability to deal with the concrete.
There was no effort that fell outside these clusters of actions or that couldn’t be categorized within them. Their use did not correlate with levels of education, age, amount of training, or experience. Nor did genetics seem to offer an answer; siblings do not necessarily respond in the same manner to the same stimuli. The intellect didn’t seem to be a factor, either; children of similar IQs studying in the same classroom reacted differently to educational demands. Nor did it seem to emanate from personality, as I observed there were both gregarious people and shy people who operated best through each Mode, as well as happy and sad people.
The Power of Will
The modern-day nonsense of categorizing people as “thinkers,” “feelers,” or “doers” ignores common sense and historical evidence that these faculties are not mutually exclusive. Everyone has an urge to make things happen—be those things good or bad, smart or dumb. We have an indomitable will that powers our instincts to act.
• The instinct to probe makes us initiate Fact Finder activity.
• The instinct to pattern forces us into Follow Thru behavior.
• The instinct to innovate drives Quick Start energy.
• The instinct to demonstrate comes out through Implementor actions.
Once I understood that the actions I’d observed and measured were instinctive, I also knew that they were the capabilities that Maslow and Spinoza and Kant and a multitude of philosophers had sought to identify. But I still didn’t know that what I had discovered was the answer to a puzzle that had so mystified scholars—perhaps because they lacked practical business experience.
The importance of these instincts first came home to me in my early days of running a publishing company, as I was trying to understand the nature of the creativity I was trying to encourage. I found myself sometimes hiring the right person and then putting him or her in the wrong job, not fitting that person’s knack into the right niche. I looked at resumes, talked to references, conducted in-depth interviews, and used personality and ability testing instruments to size up what a person had to offer. What was I missing?
I got it wrong because I was leaving out the one most reliable variable. “I will” is more important than IQ. “I will” is more a driving force than “I wish.” This was a distinctly different aspect of the mind—the power of the creative instinct, or will—set apart from thinking and feeling.
The distinction between volitional action and the intelligence and emotion faculties have been observed throughout the ages. It had also been given a name, one I’d never heard before, but which confirmed the universal nature of my observations. The actions that determine how one strives toward a goal had for centuries been known as conation—from the Latin verb conari, meaning to strive.
Marketing experts in the mid-20th century singled out the conative act as the clincher in the decision-making hierarchy: Intelligence helps you determine a wise choice, emotions dictate what you’d like to buy, but until the conative kicks in, you don’t make a deal—you don’t put your money where your mouth is.
Conation is our knack for getting things done. It is separate from a person’s intelligence or personality type. Some people think before they leap, employing their cognitive mind before engaging conative energy. Others want something so desperately, their affective emotions cause the conative to kick in ahead of any cognitive assessment.
The time-honored three-faculty concept of the mind is as follows:
Three-Faculty Concept
The Creative Force
Too often potential is discussed in terms of its limitations: intelligence, education, experience. Yet we have all seen instances where those with average IQ scores outshine geniuses in common-sense problem solving.
The difference has been conation.
Creativity, often considered out of the realm of everyday concerns, is a part of every one of us who benefits from the freedom to be ourselves.
By definition, to create is to bring into being, to cause to exist, to produce. Since every individual has conation, the ability to take action, every individual also has the capacity to create. Because one does it with facts and figures rather than with paints does not make it any less a part of the creative process.
I have witnessed creativity in the accountant bringing order out of the chaos of a client’s record-keeping; in the young person elaborating on the old family recipe; in maintenance people taking the risk of jury-rigging a repair; in a scheduler finding alternatives when the airport was fogged in.
We have always known a “doer” when we have seen one, a person who tackles even the most difficult task. But, while learning theorists have taken a microscopic look at the process of acquiring knowledge, and psychiatrists have increased awareness of our emotional makeup, those in ivory towers have skirted a practical approach to understanding conation, the key to how thought and emotion are translated into action.
Without conation there is no product, only potential. Conation is the achievement aspect of ability, the process through which we fulfill our goals.
I thought back to the times in my own life when I was all thumbs, the times when the pieces fit magically together, the times when the writing flowed, and the times when I could slug away for hours and get nowhere. I had excelled when I had been free to act according to my own insistent knack. Whenever I had been true to my conative instincts, I got work done without becoming mentally fatigued. Whenever I had applied my talents naturally it had been like tapping into a torrent of energy just waiting to flow.
For me, that natural flow meant unleashing an instinct to take on challenges, to innovate, and to discover patterns as I went. It meant not being held to specifics or getting caught up in justifications. In the case of this book, it meant using my talents to take over where others had left off decades ago. Now my challenge was to get to the bottom line of the conative connection. To do that, I had to find a way to help people discover the force of their natural talents.
The Four Action Modes
Through observation and testing over many years, I’ve come to realize that everyone has some of each of the conative instincts and acts through all four Modes. The talents we have in these Action Modes are different for each of us. We lead from different strengths, and the mix of those Modes is what gives each of us our own ways of doing—our modus operandi or “M.O.” That, I decided, was the measurable bottom line.
Conative Characteristics
Fact Finder: It is through the Fact Finder Mode that you are a pragmatist, prober, arbitrator, practitioner, researcher, judge, or realist. Targeting your efforts through your strength in the Fact Finder Mode requires the freedom to:
evaluate
prove
formalize
investigate
probe
inquire
deliberate
differentiate
calculate
justify
specify
prioritize
define
research
allocate
You will prevent stress and respond to needs by using your Fact Finder Mode to act:
correctly
strategically
practically
thoroughly
expertly
deliberately
prudently
studiously
conclusively
tactfully
discerningly
appropriately
•
Follow Thru: It is through the Follow Thru Mode that you are a planner, designer, regulator, pattern-maker, systematizer, theorist, programmer. Targeting your efforts through your strength in the Follow Thru Mode requires the freedom to:
arrange
design
chart
consolidate
translate
schedule
plan
provide
service
budget
prepare
format
coordinate
structure
guarantee
integrate
You will prevent stress and respond to needs by using your Follow Thru Mode to act:
consistently
dependably
methodically
systematically
routinely
comprehensively
fashionably
concisely
theoretically
efficiently
cautiously
continuously
•
Quick Start: It is through the Quick Start Mode that you are a catalyst, generalist, innovator, entrepreneur, promoter, improvisor.
Targeting your efforts through your strength in the Quick Start Mode requires the freedom to:
deviate
brainstorm
contrive
ad
lib
intuit
originate
risk
play
hunches
promote
change
devise
experiment
invent
challenge
abbreviate
You will prevent stress and respond to needs by using your Quick Start Mode to act:
fluently
intuitively
imaginatively
decisively
insightfully
defiantly
rapidly
spontaneously
conceptually
flexibly
adventurously
inventively
•
Implementor: It is through the Implementor Mode that you are a molder, builder, handcrafter, athlete, manufacturer, agriculturalist, artisan.
Targeting your efforts through your strength in the Implementor Mode requires the freedom to:
craft
repair
render
use physical
effort
construct
display
shape
demonstrate
master
mold
form
put
together
build
practice
You will prevent stress and respond to needs by using your Implementor Mode to act:
skillfully
mechanically
athletically
tangibly
strenuously
physically
sturdily
handily
demonstrably
technically
dexterously
substantively
•
No matter how useful it may be to use this shorthand account, the four Action Modes do not represent “types” of people, rather aspects of us all. Any mind can operate in every Mode, using each of the skills attributed to that Mode. The variables are intensity, reliability, and effectiveness without stress.
Even with this rudimentary insight into the conative domain, I could see why a person who is hard-working and driven to achieve, who organizes massive projects and brings home lots of bacon, might not ever lift a hand to fix a broken faucet. Why some executives carefully outline a subject while others scribble triggered thoughts. Why those who tinker with tools often choose to make no comment on their constructions. Why planning sessions seem silly to some and totally necessary to those who already have plans. Why some executives insist on feasibility studies and others flee from them in terror. Why “focus” is the key to some people’s tennis game and the way to self-conscious frustration for others.
Discovering the Creative Instincts and the Action Modes was a breakthrough that helped me understand why two secretaries who both typed 80 words a minute, both took shorthand at 120, and both had made good grades in school, could contribute so unequally on the job. But I still needed a way to keep from hiring the wrong one.
Working closely with the leadership of multinational companies, unions, professional firms, and educational and nonprofit groups, I have found that problems and opportunities inevitably center on conative issues. More than 80 percent of lost productivity was clearly caused by the use or misuse of strengths in the Action Modes—the universal characteristics that are the same for the file clerk, the surgeon, and the longshoreman, the same in any culture on any continent. They were nothing less than a new common denominator in our understanding of human nature.
Equally important, they were bedrock, something that did not change over time the way our conflicting ideas and emotions do. Yet here we were spinning our wheels every day, trying to bend these instincts into conformity, erase them, overcome them, or cover them up, when what we needed was to see them as an incredibly powerful source of energy to be harnessed.
It was when I began delving back into psychology and philosophy to explore this concept of action instincts that I came across the curious fact I alluded to before, that the conative connection had been known, yet not fully explained. Through the centuries, thinkers ranging from Plato to Spinoza, Hobbes, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Freud, and Piaget all accepted the three-part structure of the human mind. They recognized the conative as just as important as intelligence or personality in making sense of the individual.
The conative for these philosophers was the source of all striving, longing, ambition, and self-expression. It was the root of a person’s persistence against obstacles, the very essence of the person, for it is through conation that we strive toward goals or self-actualize. And it is through the conative that one is productive, for as Hume and others point out, intellectual awareness alone cannot move us to do anything.
It was the discovery of this long history that made me fully realize the significance of the conative connection. It astounded me, even angered me. For whatever reason, once Binet had quantified intelligence in the early part of this century, researchers—even Piaget, who found the conative the mental domain most difficult to differentiate—lost interest in the more elusive concept of striving. What had been the accepted wisdom fell out of favor. University scholars told me: “We don’t study conation anymore. It’s considered archaic.” Psychologists cautioned me that discussing the will had become outdated and was only making a slight comeback in non-traditional circles. Stanford’s Richard Snow differed: “The conative seems to have dropped out of modern psychology’s consciousness. It deserves reinstatement and research.”
The problem that had discouraged Piaget was differentiating the conative from the affective personality and the cognitive intelligence. This barrier, as well as an inability to define conative modalities, had apparently kept academics thinking about thinking and psychologists worrying about feelings. It was left to an entrepreneur like me to do something about doing.
As the daughter of E. F. Wonderlic, the originator of the concept of personnel testing, I had been involved with psychometric measurement most of my life. Unlike most people who might follow their curiosity, I was able to design the necessary pencil-and-paper test, a way to index this striving part of the mind that was altogether different from the mental ability my father had quantified. Dad had always agreed there was more to what made a person tick than mere intelligence and personality. Now I could prove it.
What I developed is called The Kolbe A™ Index (Kolbe Conative Index®, or simply “Index” for short), a disarmingly simple way of measuring the distribution and intensity of the four Action Modes within each individual. It takes most people only a few minutes to complete and provides an easy-to-use result. It doesn’t tell how a person thinks or feels or how much he knows or values—those are attributes on the cognitive and affective levels which the Kolbe Index strips away.
What the Kolbe A Index does tell you is what a person, left to his own devices, will do.
I’ve now tested hundreds of thousands individuals on five continents and from all walks of life and I’ve used the Kolbe Index to restructure businesses across the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. On every continent, I’ve found evidence of the universal nature of conation. People everywhere acted on the same four instincts through the same Action Modes. Cultural variations influence career decisions, and economic and political conditions have an impact on opportunities, but the internal drives and natural talents are distributed equally everywhere.
Oddly enough, even with just the four primary Modes, and even when the subject is themselves, people’s guesses as to their own M.O.s are wrong about 50 percent of the time. But of the thousands of subjects to whom I’ve given the Kolbe Index assessment and fully explained the system, only a handful have ever responded that the result did not accurately reflect how they function.
In fact, whenever I consult now with organizations or individuals, my ideas trigger recognition in almost everyone, the “Aha!” that comes when you present a truth that simply feels right to people, that matches up with their gut reactions. The real breakthrough in credibility, however, comes with the realization that what I’ve developed is an assessment of human behavior patterns which is not only accurate, but both quantitative and predictive.
Over the years, the test and its results have been validated and proven to be reliable. Proving its ability to predict performance, the Index has singled out those individuals who would be prone to industrial accidents, those who will comply with regulations, those who won’t. It clarifies why a person with strength in Quick Start rebels against Fact Finder educational programs, why management by objectives makes sense for some and “walking around” management is the answer for others. The conative connection finally puts to rest the issue of why time management never will “take” for everyone—yet explains why there will always be those who insist it is absolutely necessary.
The predictive validity of the Kolbe Index was obvious every time I showed a result to a group of co-workers and they could single out who it depicted, or when I could use it to forecast how a particular person would respond to a situation and he or she would do just as I had predicted, or when I would interpret otherwise unapparent stresses and have them confirmed.
That such information related to innate strengths was corroborated with in-depth interviews, twin studies, and repeated examinations. When people retook the Kolbe A Index, no matter how many months or years later, the results were within the 5 percent margin of error on the Index.
Perhaps the most telling research was finding a natural distribution, or bell curve, for each Mode in a general population—and seeing the variation from it by career path. Men and women, youths and senior citizens, retarded and gifted, white and black all have equal conative power or mental energy. How they used it varied dramatically. Those who have the freedom to follow their instincts find self-fulfillment. Those who don’t suffer lack of self-esteem and a loss of sense of self.
I recommend you complete the questions on our website, www.kolbe.com. Online, you will be able to get an instant Kolbe A Index result that identifies and validates your own instinctive strengths. Nonetheless, you don’t need the Index result to benefit from this book. You can go a long way on common sense and careful observation, absorbing the applications for this kind of insight into your daily vocabulary and even your world view.
Understanding the instinctive nature of conation is a valuable first step toward learning to unleash and target mental energy, and toward discovering and directing the different forms of creativity within yourself or within any group of people. You’ll find that a basic grasp of the conative connection will enable you to work more intensely without stress, by shifting gears among different types of creativity when you’re stuck for the long haul and might otherwise burn out. You’ll find that it improves communication, because conation helps you understand what drives both the speaker and the listener and how they’ll respond to differing directives or appeals.
Unfortunately, we’re still swimming against the tide of the same old world that never took these distinctive ways of doing into account. From the earliest parental influence to the moment we enter the school system to the moment we retire, the world conspires to enforce only one way. “The way I was brought up.” “The curriculum as it’s written.” “According to standard operating procedures.” So much mental energy has gone into simply persisting and overcoming all the obstacles presented by a world determined to work against us. None of us, given a clear range of options, would choose to live our lives fighting just to be who we are, instead of using our talents for more productive purposes.
Why do we have so many clichés about square pegs in round holes and barking up the wrong tree? Parkinson’s Law and the Peter Principle? Because most people are forced to go through life as a blunder hunt. This book is an attempt to change all that, and to share with a much wider audience the same insights and techniques I offer my corporate clients.
How do you know what you’ll be good at? You can proceed by trial and error and waste a lifetime trying to find the answer. What should you look for in a relationship? Who should you hire for that job? What kind of team do you need in research and development? How can you work out a deal with your teenager?
In this book I don’t narrowly isolate the business or career implications of the conative connection, but rather try to focus on the whole person. After all, it’s when we’ve used up certain energies at the office that we have none of that strength left to give at home.
The measurable results of using the Kolbe System include athletes dramatically improving their records, salespeople bringing in more than 200 percent in new business, managers cutting turnover in half and cutting stress-related absenteeism altogether, students being able to get better grades, and companies reaching productivity goals for the first time in years.
There are, however, benefits which cannot easily be quantified. The cost of not knowing your creative power, of having your personal performance inhibited and your contribution denied, cannot be measured in numbers.
Gratifying as it is to spend the day with a CEO, helping him to isolate the conative strengths of the people on his organizational chart and build productive teams with the right leadership, what means much more to me is the number of these tough-guy bosses who will close their doors and share how the Kolbe System has made a difference in their own lives, how trusting their instincts has opened their eyes to a new definition of success: the freedom to be yourself.
* * * * *
Imagine lying in bed in the early hours of a spring morning, half-asleep and half-awake, because the room’s turned cold and now you’re uncomfortable. You know there’s a nice warm blanket at the foot of the bed, but you can’t quite bring yourself to reach down and pull it up.
No matter how much you wish you could get warm or how well you know the simple steps necessary to reach that objective, you won’t solve your problem until you take initiative and actually reach down and pull up that blanket. That’s when you engage your conative self when you get beyond thinking and feeling and commit your mental energy to action.
Everyone has an equal capacity of conative striving mechanisms, or mental energy, to direct toward action. My studies with people from all over the world indicate that the Action Modes do not discriminate by sex, age, race, or educational level. We all have Fact Finder, Follow Thru, Quick Start and Implementor abilities and we all have the potential to use our own distinctive combination of those Modes for equally productive lives. The problem is that not all of us are using it to our advantage.
Creative Modes
Early in my work on conation I believed Quick Start was the Mode through which people initiate action. I spent many months testing this belief before realizing I was wrong. My own conative bias had misled me. Having a lot of Quick Start, I usually initiate action intuitively, by originating methods and taking on challenges.
But all of our acts are the expression of our individual creative instincts—our conative selves. Our goal-directed efforts are attempts to bring our thoughts and feelings into being. We don’t accomplish this just by innovating; we do it when we probe, pattern, or demonstrate.
As I worked with people throughout the world in a variety of circumstances, it became clear that the creative process begins with a person’s most dominant Mode, whichever that may be. Often, creative problem-solving begins by probing what isn’t working, or by setting priorities. Fact Finders initiate activity in this way—by setting agendas, outlining proposals, and clarifying needs. A Follow Thru might establish a theory or plan as the first step in achieving goals, putting matters in context before going off in new directions, or integrating disparate elements into a whole. The Quick Start creates by trying something new, or coming up with alternatives. Implementors initiate by shaping a form or model, or through a physical demonstration.
Within the individual there is a kind of internal synergy that can come from learning how to make the best of the four talents. By learning to recognize when and how to engage each aspect of your own mental energy, you can push your creativity beyond the limits you thought possible.
You can use the conative connection to isolate the four distinct parts of your own creativity and bring them all into the game, but you start the internal creative process with whatever Action Mode is your strong suit.
Degrees of Effort
Why do some people have to put a lot of effort into straightening up a room, while others keep it tidy as they go? What’s behind one person easily managing a diversity of projects and another who’s just as bright finding it tough to do more than one thing at once? The answer is that there are degrees of each Action Mode in each individual that determine the amount of energy available for different types of activity.
You have some Quick Start capacity, but do you have enough to keep a dozen projects going at once? Some people simply have to keep a lot of balls in the air while others dig in their heels when you try to get them to take on too much all at once. You have Implementor ability but when is the last time you volunteered to operate heavy equipment? Any equipment?
I have found it possible to distinguish three levels of performance for each Action Mode. People either initiate action in an Action Mode, respond to action in a Mode or prevent those actions.
Prevent does not mean an inability to act within a Mode—anyone can follow procedures. It means you won’t act that way of your own volition.
A preventive Fact Finder will try to use his new computer with as little help from the manual as possible. He won’t figure out all its options before starting in, and probably won’t discover for two years that it has all sorts of “bells and whistles” he didn’t know were there.
A preventive Follow Thru won’t buy groceries until she’s run out of a necessity. She may clip coupons, but is unlikely to have them with her when she finds herself at the store.
Preventive Quick Starts won’t plunge into water or a new business or a game. “What’s your hurry?” they’ll ask if pushed, sensing they’re best to avoid anything that comes at them too fast.
A preventive Implementor won’t dig up the soil for a garden or have a home workshop, or tinker with the car if he can avoid it. He probably won’t have the right tools even if he needs to fix something.
Prevention means that, while you may be able to get by in a certain Mode, you’ll be dragging your feet or overcompensating all the way, and if you have to operate with initiative in that Mode for too long a period, the stress of going against your grain will sooner or later lead to burnout. If you prevent in a Mode, you’ll never shine when you have to act against your grain with an insistence in that Action Mode.
Initiate means that given free rein, this is how you will proceed, as naturally and intensely as a cat chasing a mouse. This is where you need to be most of the time. This is where you will soar.
Respond (or Accommodate) means going with the flow. You can function comfortably in this Mode, using it as needed, and, while you probably won’t be a leader or a star here, you won’t feel stress, either.
An initiating or insistent Follow Thru creates systems; a responding Follow Thru will stay with the system. A preventive Follow Thru may stay with the system for a period of time, feeling great stress, but will eventually burn out and exit the system. An initiating Quick Start initiates change; a responding Quick Start can cope with change; while a preventive Quick Start stabilizes a situation by preventing chaos.
Where a person’s instinctive talent lies in an Action Mode is indicated on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the most preventive and 10 being the most initiating. I found half of people’s mental energy to be the maximum effort they will make in any one Mode and that everyone has at least one unit of intensity in each Mode. While individuals usually fall in different places in different Action Modes, everyone has the same amount, 100 percent, of conative effort available to give.
The Initiate zone of operation is the range from 710, the midrange (46) is the Respond zone, and a score of 13 means a person is in the Prevent zone of operation in that Action Mode. Being highly accommodating at the 6 level means a person is more likely to take on a task requiring such actions than simply do it if necessary. Kolbe Index results contain four numbers that describe a person’s strength in each of the four Action Modes—the individual’s modus operandi, or M.O.
The chart following is for a person who leads with Quick Start energy but has a second suit in Fact Finder. This person is preventive in Follow Thru, and mildly accommodating in Implementor. His modus operandi would be expressed as 6384. This means 6 in Fact Finder, 3 in Follow Thru, 8 in Quick Start, and 4 in Implementor. Once you get the hang of it, you can use just the numbers, provided you always keep the order the same—Fact Finder, Follow Thru, Quick Start, Implementor.
Even when a person leads with one strong suit, the Mode with the second “highest” number puts quite a different spin on the first (remember, though, that there is no better or worse result, just different results). My research shows Quick Start/Fact Finder to be the most common M.O. among entrepreneurs, who by my definition are people who risk their own capital, not just anyone running a small business. Yet that Quick Start is a very different person from the Quick Start with a strong second suit in Implementor—one who would excel in more physically adventurous settings.
Nothing says a Quick Start/Implementor can’t run the company too—he or she would simply do it in a very different way, with less research and more hands-on demonstration. Quick Start/Implementors combine their risk-taking with tangible pursuits—be it sky diving or selling products they can demonstrate. Someone highly insistent in Follow Thru might find a service-oriented business more appropriate.
My M.O. is 2684, Quick Start combined with Follow Thru. If that looks like a contradiction to you, you may be making the mistake of thinking of Quick Start as having a sales personality and of Follow Thru as being a shy librarian type. Perhaps the most important distinction I’m trying to make is that such descriptions of personality have nothing to do with talent or knack or striving—with conation. Conation is an entirely separate domain of the mind. It is neither thinking nor feeling, neither left brain nor right, but rather the center brain, which is triggered into action by these others. Personality can camouflage the underlying conative truth, and sometimes lead to symptoms of what are, in reality, conative problems.
Preventive talents sometimes lead to guilt. An executive who prevents in both Fact Finder and Follow Thru had a recurring nightmare in which he saw himself lost on a university campus unable to locate the proper classroom until he’d missed a lecture and found gibberish printed on an assignment sheet. After twenty years of waking up in a cold sweat, he discovered that knowing his M.O. gave him permission to not worry about going back to get an MBA The nightmare stopped.
Some months ago, executives at a public utility company asked me to talk with a young electrical engineer who was an important part of their strategic planning. They thought of him as one of their star performers, and they were all set to invest big dollars in sending him off to a leading-edge training program. Their plan was to send him out of state for a year of extensive knowledge transfer from a major supplier. But lately he’d developed an attitude problem that troubled his managers. That’s where I stepped in.
“It’s not fair,” he told me, anxious to justify his position. Since his relocation allowance and total compensation were very, very generous, I asked him to clarify what was bothering him.
As we spoke, the real issue surfaced. He was single and therefore he wasn’t going to get the same incidental cost-of-living compensation as the engineers who were married.
“That’s inappropriate,” he kept saying. And what he found most inappropriate was that the terms varied, however slightly, from the details of the agreement on which he’d based his decision to go. Despite the fact that the company was making every effort to accommodate him and being very generous in the process, he considered any change whatsoever to be entirely unacceptable.
The manager who had asked me to step in could not cope effectively with this situation because he did not understand the young engineer’s conative makeup, or the concept underlying it, for that matter. A Quick Start himself, he thought the challenge alone should be enough to motivate the young man. What he didn’t understand was that being young—or a man—does not necessarily equate with being adventurous.