Decision-making

If not, you might be part of a hybrid strategy that’s about to fail.

As employees return to the office, they’re expecting more flexibility in their social contracts with employers. How can HR help?

How can we help you reach better resolutions?

Change your approach to conflict and you can change the outcome

Explore resources to help use self-awareness for self-improvement

In business, human dynamics is rarely considered a top priority. Katy Lyne explains why this is a serious problem.

Exploring the MBTI Thinking-Feeling Step II facets in the context of Brexit

Exploring the glass ceiling using MBTI data.

How can we make it easier to talk about the real power of MBTI: Type dynamics?

Alexis Hutson, professional coach and mentor, shares her experience of using MBTI Step II for team development. A great example of the differences between Step I and Step II.

We’ve all heard the horror stories about bad business decisions. Way back in 1876, Western Union turned down an offer to buy the patent on the telephone, as the device clearly had ‘no commercial possibilities’; more recently we could cite Kodak inventing the digital camera but then doing nothing with it (because it could have cannibalised their film business) or Lehman Brothers borrowing hugely just before the housing bubble burst. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see how wrong these decisions were, but the sad truth is that we are all prone to biases in our decision-making.

Economic theories used to have one massive stinker of a mistake at their core: the idea that people make rational choices with money. Thankfully, eminent psychologists pointed out that humans are far from rational in their financial decisions; now a growing body of work is showing the same for political decisions, particularly voting.

People make decisions largely on the basis of intuition and emotion. We might like to think otherwise, but it’s true. Even the most logical and rational amongst us find our cognitive functioning heavily influenced by a broad range of both positive and negative emotions.

Visits to our Personality Matters blog were at an all-time high in 2014, and we covered a wide range of topics in our weekly posts. Over the last 12 months we've talked about the best MBTI-based books and the various resources available for L&D teams. We’ve promoted Movember, and we’ve commented on the Paul Flowers furore. We've also continued to thrive as thought leaders in a diverse range of workplace psychology issues, from recruitment and assessment centres to polarity management. But what are the top five posts that readers have returned to again and again?

In the second of our blog posts looking at 20 invaluable books about MBTI^® and type, we review another ten titles that have impressed MBTI practitioners or been a key support in their work with the MBTI assessment. As with the first batch, the books featured here are listed in no particular order, and comments are from individual reviewers who responded to our request for reviews on the Linked In group OPP Qualified Professionals.

Few things in life are free – but OPP has some really cool free resources to support you in your work! To help celebrate our 25 years in the business, we’ve taken a trawl through the various goodies available for zero outlay on our website. They range from white papers and feedback materials to fun quick guides and infographics – many of which can also be found on our practitioner downloads page.

Some people leave their Christmas shopping until the last minute, while others have had everything sorted since the previous January sales. Some enjoy working through their Christmas lists amongst the buzz of high street shoppers, while others prefer facing the Christmas consumer blow-out online.

At OPP, we don’t pretend to be experts in politics – but we do know a little about personality. A little while ago we carried out some research to look at the personality traits associated with different political viewpoints. Now that the votes are safely in, we can reveal what we found. People who said they held Conservative views were more likely to be tough-minded introverts, compared to those with left-wing views, who were more sensitive and less self-controlled.

I was recently asked to run a focused and pragmatic MBTI session with a team of nine sales managers in a very successful FMCG company. My brief: “They’ve been through MBTI before and they are bright go getters, so it needs to be impactful”. “No pressure there, then!” I thought.

In December, our lives are dominated by Christmas. That, at least, is what TV, internet and high street window displays would have us believe. In the interests of glimpsing the truth behind the tinsel glitz and Christmas muzak, OPP carried out a survey a few years ago to see how people approached the various elements of the festive season.