Transform your team by understanding how you think.
The Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) is the world’s leading thinking styles assessment tool, designed to identify individuals preferred approach to emotional, analytical, structural, and strategic thinking.
It introduces the concept of Whole Brain Thinking, empowering individuals and teams to embrace cognitive diversity to enhance collaboration, communication, and decision-making.
HBDI helps decode the different ways people think, enabling teams to align their strengths and stretch their thinking when needed to solve complex problems, foster engagement, and build organisational agility.
By understanding thinking preferences, leaders and teams can unlock new levels of productivity, connection, and innovation in their workplaces.
By identifying and applying thinking preferences across your organisation, HBDI helps foster collaboration and deliver measurable outcomes.
Following a 116 question survey, the HBDI measures four systems of thinking preferences generally broken down as Analytical, Experimental, Practical and Rational.
Some of the key benefits of the assessment include:
1
Optimise collaboration with cognitive diversity:
Understand and leverage the strengths of each thinking style in your team to enhance cooperation and build alignment.
2
Improve communication and engagement:
Recognise how different thinking styles influence interactions, enabling better conversations, stronger connections, and improved team morale.
3
Drive innovation and adaptability:
Use Whole Brain Thinking to foster creativity, agility, and unique solutions in a fast-changing environment.
4
Enhance decision-making and problem-solving:
Gain clarity on your own thinking preferences and develop strategies to stretch beyond them for more balanced and effective solutions.
5
Boost leadership and management capabilities:
Equip leaders with the tools to adapt their management styles to suit diverse team members, enhancing performance and outcomes.
6
Strengthen team dynamics and reduce conflict:
Develop a deeper understanding of how different thinking styles influence behaviours, which can help teams navigate differences, resolve conflicts, and build stronger, more collaborative working relationships.
Using HBDI as part of a leadership program or team building
The Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument is fully adaptable to your leadership development or team building needs. Whether it’s used as part of a workshop, such as Critical Thinking & Decision-Making, or integrated into a broader leadership program, our experienced facilitators can create customised experiences that meet your organisation’s goals.
Our actionable, results-driven approach ensures leaders and teams not only understand their thinking preferences but also learn how to use them to drive meaningful and lasting improvements across your organisation.
The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) is a psychometric tool that measures thinking preferences across four quadrants: analytical thinking (facts, logic, data), sequential thinking (planning, organisation, detail), interpersonal thinking (relationships, feelings, communication), and imaginative thinking (ideas, big picture, creativity). Understanding your thinking preferences helps you leverage your natural strengths, develop your less-preferred styles, and work more effectively with people who think differently.
Most complex business challenges require all four types of thinking – analytical rigour, systematic planning, collaborative relationships, and creative innovation. Leaders who default to only their preferred thinking styles often miss critical perspectives. Whole Brain Thinking helps leaders build more inclusive, diverse decision-making approaches, communicate more effectively across different thinkers on their team, and build teams that collectively cover all four quadrants.
Absolutely. One of the most practical applications of HBDI is in team composition and collaboration. By mapping the thinking preferences of a team, we can identify where the team is strong and where it has blind spots, and develop strategies to ensure all four thinking styles are represented in important decisions and planning processes. This is particularly valuable for innovation projects, complex problem-solving, and cross-functional teams.
HBDI specifically focuses on thinking preferences – how you process information and approach problem-solving – rather than communication style (DISC) or psychological preferences (MBTI). All three tools are complementary and provide different lenses on human behaviour. Many organisations use a combination of these tools across different stages of leadership development to build a richer, more complete picture of individual and team capability.
Contact us today to discuss how HBDI and Whole Brain Thinking can help your business unlock its full potential.