Mindex: Theory

What is a thinking style?

Your thinking style is your characteristic way of processing information. It's the way you acquire your knowledge, organize your thoughts, form your views and opinions, apply your values, solve problems, make decisions, plan, and express yourself to others.

What aspects of thinking style does Mindex measure?

Mindex measures four basic dimensions of cognitive preference, i.e. left-brained and concrete; right-brained and concrete; left-brained and abstract; and right-brained and abstract. It also measures 16 additional components of mental process:

  • Sensory Mode Preference:

    • Kinesthetic

    • Visual

    • Auditory

  • Structure Preference:

    • Time Orientation

    • Detail Orientation

    • Technical Orientation

    • Goal Orientation

  • Mental Flexibility:

    • Tolerance for Ambiguity

    • Opinion Flexibility

    • Semantic Flexibility

    • Positive Orientation

    • Sense of Humor

    • Investigative Orientation

    • Resistance to Enculturation

  • Thinking Fluency:

    • Idea Fluencey

    • Logical Fluency

Where does one begin in using the Mindex model?

The most commonly used elements of the Mindex model are the four primary patterns formed by the left-brain / right-brain dimension and the abstract-concrete dimension. Although all 20 dimensions are useful, most users and most participants seem especially fascinated with these four primary habits of thought.

To make these four thinking styles easy to understand and remember, Dr. Karl Albrecht has given them simple metaphorical names, in terms of colors. We can call the left-brained mode of thought "blue" thinking, perhaps because we tend to think of analytical people as having relatively "cool" temperaments, represented by a cool color like blue. We can call the right-brained thinker a "red" thinker, because we think of intuitively inclined people as having "warmer" temperaments, as suggested by a warm color like red.

Similarly, we can give simple metaphorical names to the other dimension — the concrete and abstract levels. We can call them "earth" and "sky" respectively. "Earth" thinking is concrete, immediate, and results-oriented. "Sky" thinking is imaginary, hypothetical, and conceptual.

Using these metaphorical names for the four key styles, we have:

A. Red Earth (right-brained & concrete)

B. Blue Earth (left-brained & concrete)

C. Red Sky (right-brained & abstract)

D. Blue Sky (left-brained & abstract)

The figure shows these four styles in the convenient form of a two-by-two matrix diagram.

matrix-diagram