The Nose on Your Face | FourSight

What do assessments and your nose have in common? Believe it or not, your nose is the perfect analogy for assessment.

 

Video Transcription

So today I want to talk about your nose. The one on your face. I’m Sarah Thurber and this is your two-minute thinking tip from FourSight. We publish an assessment and people often ask me, “What’s the value of doing an assessment?” And I realized that the answer to that question is “your nose” because your nose provides a perfect analogy for a cognitive assessment. Think about it: Your nose, you’ve had it always, it’s with you, it’s part of you, you’re used to it and it works. And it probably works like other people’s, although you really can’t be sure. But have you ever looked at your nose? I mean recently? Not in a mirror, or a photograph, but you, look at your own nose. Ready? On the count of three, look at your nose. One, two, three. That was ridiculous. And I could see virtually nothing. Which is the point! Your nose is like your thinking. It’s too close to you for you to have any perspective on what it really looks like. To really understand what it looks like you need a tool that reflects it back to you, like an assessment which will show you, in the case of Meyers-Briggs, your personality type or, in the case of DISC, your behavior or, in the case of FourSight, your preference when you problem solve. Each of those assessments reflects information back to you that you can then use to change your behavior or to solve problems better or to make better decisions. In every case, the assessment is like a mirror that lets you see something too close to otherwise see. And it lets you see it as plain as the nose on your face. That’s your thinking tip from FourSight.

 

Sarah Thurber

Sarah is managing partner at FourSight and the author of Good Team, Bad Team, The Secret of the Highly Creative Thinker, Creativity Unbound, and Facilitation: A Door to Creative Leadership. Her work helps teams and leaders think creatively, work collaboratively and achieve innovative results.