Our approach

PDF is small, creative and hardworking and delivers high quality results for its customers. Our culture of genuine relationships, foresight and results permeates all we do. We work with you to get the best results, challenge current approaches, introduce new practice and have fun doing it.

Our work is both future-focussed and evidence-based, provides practical ‘know how’ and encourages further inquiry. Our broad experience means that we bring a range of skills to any situation and find the most effective way to resolve it. Many assignments have included audiences with different starting points, educational attainment, life experience and professional viewpoints. We are skilful at facilitating differences and developing inclusive narratives.

Our Toolkit

DiSC

As individuals, we each have a behavioural style that influences the way we think, solve problems, express feelings and interact with others. We can gain a more profound understanding of our natural behavioural style through the DiSC profiling system. DiSC is an acronym for four primary dimensions of behaviour – Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness – and measures the attributes and qualities of a person. It scopes behaviour into the four dimensions as follows:

Dominance - direct, results-oriented, strong-willed and forceful
Influence - outgoing, enthusiastic, optimistic and lively
Steadiness - even-tempered, accommodating, patient and humble
Conscientiousness - analytical, reserved, precise and systematic

These dimensions can range in intensity and work independently or in tandem with the other behavioural dimensions. The interrelationship of these factors describes how an individual responds to the work environment.

Everybody has a primary DiSC style, yet we are all capable of, and at times display aspects of, other styles. People with similar behavioural styles tend to exhibit specific characteristics common to that profile, while knowing how to adapt behaviour can improve relationships and communication with people of other primary styles. The understanding gained through the DiSC assessment provides the knowledge needed to practice other behaviour styles and to be more adaptable to others.

The report generated by the DiSC analysis is designed to help individuals and organisations to achieve a better understanding of each person's behavioural style. It provides helpful insight into the individual's behavioural strengths as well as areas in need of possible improvement. It can be used to develop strategies and methods to help increase personal flexibility in working with clients and colleagues.

The DiSC behavioural model is based on research conducted by William Moulton Marston PhD. Marston wanted to examine the behaviour of "normal" people in their environment or within a specific situation. He documented his findings in the book Emotions of Normal People.

WHOLE BRAIN THINKING

People perceive and assimilate information, make decisions and solve problems in markedly different ways. Appreciation of, and attention to, these different thinking styles can literally change the way you do business – with the workforce and with customers.

The awareness of one’s own thinking style and the thinking styles of others, combined with the ability to act outside one’s preferred thinking style, is known as Whole Brain Thinking. Scientific studies have shown that instruments that classify and describe how people perceive and interact with the world around them can be powerful tools in developing employees, and building change to achieve business objectives.

The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) is an assessment system that allows people to understand their own thinking preferences and those of others. Understanding your own profile helps to build self-awareness, self-esteem and performance.

The HBDI is based on award-winning research that evaluates and depicts the degree of preference individuals have for thinking in each of four brain quadrants:

Rational
Practical
Feeling
Experimental

Research has shown that everyone is capable of moving to less preferred thinking styles and learning the necessary skills to diagnose and adapt to the thinking preferences of others. Presenting information in a way that recognises, respects, and is compatible with, different preferences is crucial to meeting co-worker, customer and client needs and expectations.

HBDI can be used to resolve conflict, build teams, develop leaders and achieve organisational transformation. It can build individual and team awareness, focus effort around specific objectives, align work groups to corporate goals, and transform organisations, where whole brain thinking is an operating philosophy across the business.

CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION TOOLS

Cultural Transformation Tools (CTT) are a powerful diagnostic based on the premise that the most successful organisations are values-driven organisations. In these organisations, employees and strategy are aligned through their shared values; these values drive culture, culture drives employee fulfilment and employee fulfilment drives performance.

There is considerable research to support this premise. In Corporate Culture and Performance, John P Kotter and James L Heskett reveal that companies with strong adaptive cultures based on shared values outperform other companies significantly. Similarly, in Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras note that over several decades, companies that consistently focused on building strong corporate cultures outperformed companies that did not by a factor of six.

Traditionally, intangibles like culture and values have been difficult to measure and it was in response to this that Richard Barrett developed CTT, which provides an innovative set of assessments that map the values of individuals and organisations. In particular, it assesses personal values, and the current and desired culture of the organisation and provides a detailed diagnostic report.

The basis of CTT is a simple survey, known as a Values Assessment, which asks individuals to identify their ten top personal values, the ten values that best represent their perception of the current organisational culture and the ten values they wish to see in their desired organisational culture.

The templates are customised for each organisation and its operating environment. Values are included from the organisation’s strategy, vision, mission and values statements as well as those that relate to the sector and predominant professional disciplines. Any values that don’t match the sector are removed.

The results of the organisation’s values assessment can be disaggregated horizontally by group, such as management team, middle managers or occupational groupings; vertically by department or unit; and by demographic factors such as gender, length of service or age.

The Values Assessments form the basis for the development of an agreed set of organisational values, for revising current values sets and for understanding needed interventions to achieve a high performance culture capable of delivering the agreed strategy.

STRENGTH DEPLOYMENT INVENTORY

The Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) offers teams a way to increase their interpersonal skills and enhance their communication effectiveness and relationships by working from the motivational values that underpin behavioural choices. It is a validated instrument based on Relationship Awareness Theory, which premise is that one’s behaviour traits are consistent with what one finds gratifying in interpersonal relations.

The flexibility of the SDI allows tailoring to meet the needs of any group. It quickly and easily shows how people perceive and respond to the world differently in two states: when things are going well and when things are not going well.  It dispels the false assumption that everyone sees the world exactly as we do, which can lead to confusion, misunderstanding and missed opportunities.

The SDI experience leaves participants feeling more empowered to choose and control their behaviour. Participants tend to increase their understanding and appreciation of each other, to recognise conflict, and manage the sources and results of conflict in their relationships. It provides guidance about how to identify and manage our strengths as well as, importantly, our overdone strengths, and to recognise those in others.

The Inventory provides a colour-coded shorthand to your motivational value system and those of your colleagues. For example, blue identifies a concern for protection, growth and welfare of others; red shows a concern for task accomplishment and for the organisation of people, time, money and any other resources to achieve desired results; and green identifies a concern for assurance that things have been properly thought out, and that meaningful order has been established and maintained. These attributes are visually mapped for individuals and the group, with associated nuances about how people relate. It helps to identify the type of environment that is most conducive to individual and team performance.

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