When your work is fluid, many assume it’s vibes: charisma, intuition, personality. It becomes ‘like magic’ – meaning, there seems to be no clear, shared capacity to describe what is done, nor understanding of the relationship between what is done, and what is achieved.
Our first initiative, when developing Shapeshifters Group, was to look at what shapeshifters actually do. By observing, interviewing, and reflecting on lived practice, we articulated this subtle work into seven core areas of competency, blending skills, mindsets, and aptitudes:
You can explore the extended (beta) version of this model in our Shapeshifter Competency Framework. These competencies, blending skillets, mindsets and inner aptitudes, form the foundation of a profession-in-the-making. They are the what of shapeshifter practice.
In parallel to our competency framework, we developed a profiling tool.
Many psychometric tools are developed to help us understand ‘where am I’, either in relation to others, or some ‘should-like’ development ladder.
There’s possible value to that, but this is not what our test aims to do. Rather, when we developed it, we start from this observation: that many of the profiling tests we took didn’t work for us. As if they were looking at our professional reality from an angle that doesn’t make sense. Think profile vs frontal.
So we thought: what would it look like if we asked questions that directly make sense of shapeshifter work, not something else. And what would it look like if all of this ‘holistic’ or ‘in-between’ work we do could be reflected in a more granular manner?
This is what our profiling tool is about.
The test is available in beta version here - use the password ‘shapeshifter’.