Understanding your Thinking-Intentions Profile
Whether you operate alone or in a team or large organisation, in every case, the results you and your colleagues get come from the actions that you decide to take.
The thing about our actions is that, although we are all aware that they happen as a result of our mental operations, nobody is really thinking about what exact mental operations are occurring and whether they might be appropriate to that specific task or not!
This is what can so easily lead to very poor productivity. If you apply the wrong thinking to a given task, you won't achieve your desired result. This can be a big problem.
Through a very well-tested model, Effective Intelligence shows us that our thoughts are driven by a set of invisible forces known as Thinking-Intentions.
The fascinating thing about this is that each individual, including you, has their own innate and hidden preferences when it comes to which Thinking-Intentions they like to use.
Your complete personal set of thinking preferences makes up your very own unique Thinking-Intentions Profile.

In this diagram, you can clearly see how your individual thinking preferences (your profile) directly affect your results on the cause-effect chain.
Thinking Preferences and Productivity
If we prefer things, it means that we like doing them. This means that we are a lot less likely to become tired doing these things.
For example, if you really like spreadsheets and data, you’ll quite happily work away at them for hours without even noticing where the time is going. No sweat.
At the same time, you may really not enjoy coming up with creative new ideas. You may find this tiresome and boring. It might even give you a headache because of all the energy you need to summon to be able to do it.
Conversely, another member of your team might be your opposite. They may love being creative and not find it taxing at all.
If you put them to work on a spreadsheet, it might take them all day to grind it out and they’ll hate you for it too!

These are of course simple examples. Thinking-Intentions are much more refined and specific in terms of areas of preference. In fact, there are 21 of them in total.
Now of course, preference and ability are not always correlated. Some people are really good at things but dislike them at the same time, and vice versa.
With that said though, more often than not there is a correlation between preference and ability. If you enjoy something, you’ll do it often. Just like when you exercise a muscle frequently, you build strength with it and get better at that thing over time.
So in the context of productivity, what we can see here is that if we want to be efficient with our time, energy and resources, we need to assign the right people to the task in hand.
If you know the preferences of yourself and your team members, you can start to build a picture of who is best suited to which component of the task.
The good news is that you can gain this knowledge by understanding the Thinking-Intentions Profiles of both yourself and your team.