Being Different Doesn't Mean Being Wrong

I am consulting with an up and coming business in Bozeman, providing the latest in Organizational Engineering with the I Opt tool, an assessment that measures how individuals process information. This particular assessment has excellent validity and reliability and was created in 1991 by Dr. Gary Salton. I recommend taking a look.

As I study I Opt, it occurs to me that this particular assessment would be excellent for families. I'm impressed that it reveals the way individuals process information, certainly a major motivator of behavior. What's going on that they do what they do anyway??

Besides describing each individual's processing style (there are four basic ways), I Opt's program can also describe how a team of people will function--the ups, downs, ins, outs. In fact, they can show clients how to build a team that produce specific results. It's a matter of getting the right combination.

So how about it? Along with deciding what color of eyes our children have, couldn't we, once we had them, use the I Opt to 'better understand, measure, predict and guide the behavior' of our families?

For instance, Claud and I are are both the youngest in our original families, and perhaps that's not why, but our parenting styles have sometimes been less organized (yet with the value of creativity) than I wished. What if someone had entered our home and identified how Claud and I processed information, which would have shed light on what was motivating our sometimes scatteredness. Perhaps the I Opt computer would have spit out recommendations about how we might adjust to create a more functional family--or maybe added students from a cultural exchange program to balance us out.

According to I Opt, when an individual processes differently than another, if they don't understand why, they think the other person is wrong! (Sound familiar?) Another comment, that gave me hope, is that this particular tool, not only helps people understand each other, but once they understand, they continue to treat each other differently. What a relief--some acceptance followed by change and walla--better results.

I say all of this as an I Opt Relational Innovator (someone who can make connections out of what others might think are disconnected avenues of thought). And, if you aren't a Relational Innovator too, you might not be able to follow this blog. Just keep in mind that we're different--and that doesn't make either of us wrong.