Draw time.
Really, try it before you read on.
I do this exercise in sessions all the time. Take a sheet of paper, or at least picture it: you’ve been given the task “draw time”. What do you draw? Don’t read on until you have it. What popped into your head has just given away the least known letter of personality typology. And maybe also the reason why you talk with someone close for an hour and still miss each other.
What that drawing told you
Time is an intangible concept. You won’t pick it up off the pavement anywhere. And that’s exactly what the exercise stands on, because every head deals with an intangible thing in its own way.
A sensor translates time into a tangible thing that stands for it: he draws a clock. Often with details too, with cogs, with a second hand. An intuitive takes the idea and plays with it: he draws a line, an arrow, a squiggle, a sideways figure of eight, the cycle of life. Something abstract.
It turns out the same when I show people a photo of a sunset and ask them to tell me what they see. The sensor describes it factually: a sunset, the sea, a beach, an orange sky. The intuitive names the feeling: calm, beauty, the end of something. Neither is better. They’re two different aerials we pick the world up with.
Two aerials
This letter says which information you trust and where your attention drifts. A sensor trusts what he can touch, smell, lick. That’s his data. He takes information in order, one after another, and stands with both feet in the past and the present: in what is, what was, what’s been verified. He’s brilliant at zooming in, at detail. I say he can’t see the wood for the trees.
An intuitive has it the other way round. He takes information out of order, connects things that at first glance have nothing to do with each other, and lives half of the time in the future: in what could be and isn’t yet. He’s brilliant at zooming out, at the whole and at patterns. He can’t see the trees for the wood.
And one important thing: this is the only letter where the ratio in society isn’t roughly half and half. There are markedly more sensors, something like three quarters. That’s why the world is largely built for them: schools, healthcare, offices, most companies. Intuitives, like it or not, learn to use their left hand in it, and many of them spend years not knowing that their “oddness” has a name and is completely all right.
More of a sensor
Trusts what can be touched. Detail, the present.
- Wants facts, numbers and examples, not visions
- Goes step by step, in order
- Tries new things only once they’re proven
- Talks to the point: mountains are mountains, not a metaphor
- Improves what works, in small steps
More of an intuitive
Trusts patterns and possibilities. The whole, the future.
- Cares more about what could be than what is
- Jumps between topics, connects the unconnectable
- Talks in metaphors and between the lines
- Routine grinds him down, he needs mental stimulation
- Changes things in big leaps, not bit by bit
Not sure where you stand? The test will show you that too, and how strongly you have it.
Why you talk for an hour and still miss each other
A sensor communicates directly. What he says is what he means. When he says mountains, he means mountains, don’t look in it for obstacles on life’s path. An intuitive goes the long way round: he talks in metaphors, between the lines, and before he gets to the heart of it he’ll manage to tell you what he had for lunch yesterday and how his grandmother raised him. I call those detours stepping stones. For him they aren’t detours, that’s how his head assembles a thought.
And now picture those two in one conversation. The sensor waits for the point and inwardly goes mad wondering when it will come. The intuitive, for his part, can’t understand why the other “doesn’t read between the lines” when it’s been there the whole time. One seems patronising to the other, the other seems foggy to the first. And yet it’s just two aerials missing each other.
To be fair, I’ll say it about myself too: I’m an intuitive who tries terribly hard to speak directly. And in the end I still do it through metaphors. I’ve worked with personality typology for fifteen years and I still won’t beat my own nature, I just know it and know how to handle it.
At work: the combustion engine × Musk
The difference shows best in how each of them changes things. A sensor takes a working system and improves it: patiently, in small steps, happily for decades. The combustion engine was tuned to perfection like that for a hundred and thirty years. An intuitive comes along and says: “We’ve got a combustion engine? Let’s throw it out and come up with an electric one.” The new thing may have more bugs, but it solves the one thing the old one never could.
A company needs both. All intuitives means a pile of brilliant ideas and nobody to finish them and pay for them. All sensors means a more perfect version of yesterday, until someone turns up with an electric motor and the whole field drives off without them. And a leadership position should have the aerial the situation calls for: putting an extreme intuitive in charge of making Swiss watches is a disaster, in a year they’d be making digitals.
One warning for intuitives: routine will kill you. As soon as your head has no mental stimulation, it starts to get bored and entertains itself, usually with something that blows your concentration apart. It isn’t a lack of discipline, it’s a property of the aerial. Count on it when you’re choosing work.
How to build a bridge, concretely
Name out loud who has which aerial
As with all the letters: half the problem disappears the moment you both know the other isn’t ignoring you and isn’t being vague, he just picks the world up differently. Feel free to do the time exercise with each other.
Intuitives: the point first, stepping stones after
When you’re talking to a sensor, flip your natural order. Say the conclusion in the first sentence and only then, if he wants it, the way you got there. And give him at least one tangible example for every vision. It isn’t a restriction, it’s a translation.
Sensors: let him fly it out
When an intuitive is circling, don’t cut him off after the first detour. Ask “where are you heading with this?”, that helps him land without knocking him down. And take his metaphors seriously: for him it’s the most precise way of saying what he sees.
Split the roles by aerial
In a couple and in a team: the intuitive paints the where, the sensor builds the how. Who dreams up the holiday and who deals with the motorway vignette? When you split it consciously, it stops being a source of arguments and starts being a division of labour.
Train the weaker aerial, in small doses
Intuitives, once in a while carry a detail all the way through, so you know how it tastes. Sensors, once in a while ask yourself “and why are we actually doing this?” and stay with it for longer than a minute. It isn’t about remaking yourself, just about the other hand being able to hold at least a mug.
Does this sound familiar?
Tick what fits you:
The first two = more of an intuitive, the next two = more of a sensor, the last two = the reason to read all this. The whole picture is given to you by the test.
If you and someone keep missing each other and don’t know why
A partner, a boss, a colleague, a child. In the session we’ll go through your specific communication, find where exactly the aerials diverge, and build a translation to measure. The intro session is free and commits you to nothing.
Talk through my situation →