How can people's thinking skills be represented?

This collection of radar plots represents the relative strengths of different people across six thinking skills.

A custom survey tool collects data on each person's preferences and inclinations for different thinking skills. Here, six skills have been selected for illustration, represented as a diagnostic prompt to support self-reflection.

Each person's individual profile can be inspected, with pop-ups revealing their 'scores' for each dimension. Their collective profile can be viewed by selecting combined plots. The teams they belong to (here, Legal and Finance) can be filtered in or out to examine the data for sub-groups.

In large groups or organisations, individual profile data can be sorted in various ways:

This configurable dashboard represents each person in an organisation as a dot; each dot can be grouped, shaded, sized and compared.

Depending on what is being assessed, different visualisations can be produced. For example, try grouping by team, shading by qualifications and comparing by strength. Such dashboard views provide a foundation for discussing issues such as resourcing, training and team formation.

The two representations above assume that each thinking skill is an isolated concept, but they are sometimes considered to form a hierarchy:

This sunburst plot represents four people in terms of three course-grained skills, each comprised of three fine-grained skills.

For each individual, their relative strengths on each skill can be reviewed. Comparisons can be made between individuals, along with the average weighting of the combined group (All). The perceptions of different stakeholders can also be selected.

All the representations on this page are derived from ongoing work focused on the development and delivery of training activities. Details of the publications from which this work draws can be found on the About page. Note that the visualisations on this page use data that are not associated with real people.