This article is a guest post from Ashley Blackburn, Director of Programs at Uncharted Learning.

Do you know what your brain “looks” like?

I didn’t, until about 3 months ago when I completed a Whole Brain® Thinking assessment (called the HBDI®) and participated in a debrief workshop as a professional development event led by our friends at Miami University’s John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship. Through this experience, I gained exciting new insight into my own thinking and that of everyone around me - students I’ve taught, colleagues I’ve worked with on teams, supervisors I’ve reported to, even my personal connections.

In this ongoing comparing assessments blog series, Anne Griswold, our Whole Brain ® Thinking Catalyst, is taking a look at the similarities and differences of many employee assessment instruments and how you might use them—individually and together—to achieve your business and talent development needs. For this post, Anne discusses the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) and how it compares with Whole Brain® Thinking and the HBDI®.

As we take a look at another assessment, let’s start once again with the premise. The premise of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is psychological assessment with a focus on personality, and it measures personality preference on four scales: Extraversion – Introversion (E – I), Sensing – Intuition (S – N), Thinking – Feeling (T – F), and Judgment – Perception (J – P). These personality preferences are then reported through the MBTI tool and result in 16 different personality types.

The MBTI assessment is used as a part of work with individuals and teams to build self-awareness and help people understand differences. It is often used in leadership development to help leaders understand themselves, their behavioral motivations and the impact their differences have on others. It’s also used in areas like career planning, conflict management and decision making.

Want to know what your personality is? Or find out your “inner truth”? How about which “Game of Thrones” character you are? There are plenty of employee assessments and online quizzes out there that will reveal what box, character, style or type you fall into—the answer to the question: Am I a “this” or am I a “that”?

But when it comes to the HBDI®, we talk in terms of thinking preferences. No one is strictly a “this” or a “that,” because everyone has access to their whole brain, regardless of what your preferences are. You simply prefer (and in some cases, actively avoid) certain kinds of thinking over others.

So, what exactly do we mean by thinking preference? Well, it might be easier to start by explaining what a preference is not.

In this ongoing comparing employee assessments blog series, Anne Griswold, our Whole Brain ® Thinking Catalyst, is taking a look at the similarities and differences of different assessment instruments and how you might use them—individually and together—to achieve your business and talent development needs. For this post, Anne discusses StrengthsFinder and how it compares with Whole Brain ® Thinking and the HBDI.

One of the best starting points when looking at any employee assessment is its premise. As the name implies, the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment is a talent assessment with a premise rooted in identifying strengths. It’s based on Gallup research that shows that people succeed when they focus on what they do best.

Many companies think of employee assessments as performance management or recruiting and hiring tools. But this represents only a limited slice of the spectrum. Used properly and in the right circumstances, employee assessments can part of a powerful work toolkit, not just for evaluating job fit or lagging performance, but for helping people and teams work more effectively and accomplish their key business objectives.

Choosing the right employee assessment for your team or organization can be confusing. Many instruments overlap in what they measure and in how they’re used. So, we’re kicking off a new blog series to compare those different assessments and dive into how you might use them to achieve your business and talent development needs. This series is written by Anne Griswold, our Whole Brain ® Thinking Catalyst. Anne has been a facilitator, trainer and coach for over 20 years, working both inside companies and as an independent consultant. She is certified in many assessment tools and leadership trainings programs, including the HBDI, MBTI, DiSC, Hogan, Firo-B, EI 2.0 and Franklin-Covey Training Programs.

First up: Anne takes a closer look at the DiSC assessment and how it compares with Whole Brain Thinking and the HBDI.

DiSC is a popular employee assessment that is a good tool for understanding different styles, behaviors and perspectives of ourselves, of other people and how we respond in different situations. Like the HBDI, it’s a four-factor model, but in the case of DiSC, each color-coded letter represents a behavior trait: D for Dominance, i for Influence, S for Steadiness and C for Conscientiousness. Unlike the HBDI—which has a brain-based premise that considers, “How do I process information?”—DiSC is a behavior-based assessment that considers, “How do I behave in a specific situation and how do others perceive me?” DiSC, like most assessments, gives us insight. Those insights are focused on the impact of the individual’s behavior.

The world of learning and development is changing at an unbelievably rapid pace. From artificial intelligence to augmented reality, some of the concepts and mechanisms that, on the surface, might seem “out there” are actually already gaining traction in today’s learning environments. And like that rearview mirror warning, innovations of the future are closer than they appear.

It’s an exciting time to be working on innovations around learning, to say the least. One area that we’ve been focused on in particular is the future of thinking-based employee assessments and how they fit into the process of building insights that can be applied to everyday business issues. Our London-based innovation lab is looking at everything from the way people communicate to how they use social media to the way they play games and use technology.

We connected up recently with Ann Herrmann-Nehdi (CEO of Herrmann International / Herrmann Global), Karim Nehdi (Global Head of Innovation), and Danny Stanhope (Applied Data Scientist and Psychometrician) for a wide-ranging discussion about the evolution and future of assessments in light of new directions in learning, new technological advances and new learner expectations. Here are some highlights from that conversation.

The brain is getting a lot of attention in corporate learning and development circles these days. But the growing interest and discussions about neuroscience and its relevance to learning, along with continued questions about the value of brain training games, can make it difficult to separate the breakthroughs from the myths.

We recently had a chat with Herrmann International’s CEO Ann Herrmann-Nehdi who shared some of her insights about the brain training fad as well as her thoughts about the future of learning.

We hear that they’re entitled. Lazy. Hard to please. Self-centered. Lacking a strong work ethic.

But just who is that “they”? Today’s Millennial workforce? The Gen X “slackers” of 25 years ago? The spoiled “Me Decade” Baby Boomers?

All of the above?

While there’s no denying that differences do exist between the generations, when you take a broader view of the topic, a lot of similarities emerge. Is it possible that the stereotypes aren’t so much about generations as they are about life stage?

This holiday weekend made us think about independence.

In particular, it made us think about the fact that we’re not always fighting against someone else for our independence; sometimes we’re our own worst enemies.

We get stuck in a rut or a comfort zone, and it clouds our view. We tell ourselves stories about what we can and can’t accomplish. We move in autopilot, reacting unconsciously to the events and noise around us, only to discover that we’ve been treading water without getting anywhere.

Think you’re not creative? Think you can’t deal with details?

Think again.