The Birkman Method® Knowledge Centre for Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia
A guide to the Birkman Method in NZ and Australia
This site is aimed at fostering the use of The Birkman Method in Aotearoa NZ and Australia - and promoting the community of practitioners who deliver it to individuals and organisations.
If you want to know more about The Birkman Method, you are in the right place;
If you want to connect with a provider, go to Find a Consultant; and
If you want to add Birkman to your own professional toolkit, go to Certification.
TBM is the best-in-class assessment used by Blue-Chip companies, Government Organisations and Not-for-Profits around the globe - and thousands of other businesses of every shape and size.
TBM is taken by individuals via an online Questionnaire available in 25 languages; results can be produced for the individual, and for their team, function or entire organisation.
Results are highly stable over time, and applicable at every stage of the People cycle, from Recruitment Screening, through Onboarding, Team-building, Performance Management, Change, Leadership Readiness, Executive Coaching, Succession Planning, M&A Integration - and pretty much anything else you can mention.
What is The Birkman Method (TBM)?
Organisations prefer TBM because it actually works. TBM is based on decades of empirical research, ie building a predictive model based on how people actually behave. That turns out to be far more reliable than trying to balance an assessment upon a stack of theoretical assertions.
Roger Birkman spent 12 years doing the initial research that produced the original version of what became the Birkman Questionnaire. He was observing variations in behaviour and, in particular, people’s differing responses to stressful situations; and then developing a set of questions which would allow him to reliably predict those responses.
The result is an instrument which ‘sees’ people accurately, objectively - and positively. Instead of putting people in a box and passing judgement on them, Birkman is like a mirror that reflects who they are, and in a way that can be relied on in every phase of organisational life.
Organisations prefer TBM, and use it, because it doesn’t waste their time with mumbo jumbo; and it does enable people to work together productively, regardless how different their perspectives and motivations may be. That is bankable insight.
Why Organisations Choose TBM - and Keep Using It
Imagine a long camera lens, that lets you zoom in on Saturn’s rings or Jupiter’s Red Spot - and then zoom back out to see constellations and eventually the whole Milky Way. That is pretty much what TBM offers organisations, and the consultants who serve them (internal and external). You can zoom in to coach the CEO or advise the newest hire, you can zoom out a notch to look at a small team, or a little further to see a whole function; and you can even zoom right out to look at the whole organisation. Groups of a couple of hundred can be reviewed using Birkman’s built in reporting; typically people use a data visualisation tool such as Tableau to manage and explore larger data sets
The thing that is true at every level of zoom is that you have an incredibly fine-grained dataset to work with; and yet for the trained BCP (Birkman Certified Professional), things will immediately stand out. That could be the key question to ask the CEO, or the potential and unexpected blind spot that shows up for the Marketing Function or the Maintenance Team. TBM isn’t a set of standardised hoops to jump through: it is the ultimate sandbox for asking great questions of every individual and group in the organisation.
Individual vs Team vs Organisational Applications
Birkman is not just for organisations. Individuals use it as the basis for their personal and professional coaching, and as a support in making significant decisions - for example what course to pursue at university, how to navigate a transition to leadership or a change in role, how to prepare for retirement, even as the basis for Marriage Preparation or couples counselling.
TBM for Private Clients
TBM is already used around the world with teens and young adults (typically ages 16-24); some use the standard Birkman Signature Report, but others use Birkman data in a format tailored for the needs of young people. In New Zealand and Australia, both hoozyu (from Elaura) and The Grow Report (from Kokkoi) are proving popular with young people and those who work with them.
TBM for Young People
Most assessments you may have come across have a a theoretical foundation, whether the work of Carl Jung (MBTI), William Marston’s The Emotions of Normal People (DiSC), or “Socioanalytic Theory”, a blend of evolutionary theory, sociology and classic psychoanalysis developed by Robert Hogan, and underpinning the assessment that bears his name.
(The theoretical basis of StrengthsFinder2.0 is less clear; it claims to be based on a meta-analytic review of thousands of semi-structured interviews, but Gallup is unable to document the empirical findings of these studies or their connection to their 34 “Signature Themes”.)
Why does this matter? Simply this: if the theory proves not to be sound - and all of those cited above have serious issues - then the conclusions are at best suspect. Dr Birkman took a different approach.
That people react differently to the same situations is an observable fact; he set out to find out if there was a reliable predictor of how specific people would respond to a person or situation; he was able to not only demonstrate that this was indeed so, but developed a comparatively simple Questionnaire which allowed those predictions to be made with great accuracy.
This means that it is still open to us to debate why the world is as it is; but TBM allows us to understand how people are and how they will respond. And that is actually the most useful thing, in any setting where people need to work together to deliver a mission: such as in your business.
See the Learn section of this site for more in depth documentation.
Why it Differs from MBTI, DiSC, Hogan and StrengthsFinder2.0 - and everything else
Use Birkman in your Organisation
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Kokkoi operates this website to promote the work of Birkman Certified Professionals in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.