Creating reliable images of social interaction. We map how people behave, not how they are characterised.
A fundamental challenge in organisational development is the tendency to describe people in terms of fixed traits. Labels like “she's not a people person” create self-fulfilling prophecies and close off development pathways. IDI takes a different starting point: behaviour is contextual, and context matters more than most frameworks acknowledge.
Behaviour varies dramatically depending on relationship and situation. The same person who is highly directive with a junior colleague may defer extensively to a senior stakeholder. Adaptive flexibility, the ability to read a situation and adjust accordingly, is a learnable skill rather than a fixed trait.
IDI draws on Habermas's model of social reality, adapted as I / We / It.
Individual values, strengths and development areas.
Group dynamics, unspoken rules and cultural patterns.
The task, what needs doing and under what conditions.
All three dimensions are active simultaneously in any workplace interaction. Development frameworks that focus only on the individual miss the systemic forces that maintain patterns.
A critical insight from Charles Cooley's “looking glass self” (1902): we form our self-image largely from how we believe others see us, not how they actually see us. Tasha Eurich's research on external self-awareness confirms that introspection alone is an unreliable path to accurate self-knowledge. Structured external feedback is necessary to close this gap.
The scientific foundation of IDI is multidisciplinary, drawing from biological, behavioural, cognitive, social, and developmental psychology. The core dimensional structure has a lineage reaching back to Timothy Leary (1957) and Jerry Wiggins (1979), who identified Affiliation and Directiveness as the two primary axes of interpersonal behaviour. IDI introduced Adaptability as a third dimension to capture something neither axis could: whether behaviour stems from personal preference or from conscious situation-reading.
IDI measures three dimensions of social behaviour, each capturing a genuinely distinct aspect of how people operate at work. Correlations between dimensions are 0.08 to 0.16, confirming dimensional independence.
Measures orientation toward interpersonal closeness and relationship-building. A high score is not better than a low score. Both ends of the scale reflect legitimate and effective collaboration styles in different contexts.
Measures degree of influence-taking and direction-setting. Also value-neutral: highly directive and highly collaborative individuals each bring strengths and potential blind spots.
Captures the degree to which behaviour shifts based on attention to others' needs rather than defaulting to personal preference. This dimension captures the why behind behaviour, not just the what.
IDI uses semantic differentials (Osgood, Suci & Tannenbaum, 1957) built on three design principles: value-neutral polarity (both endpoints are equivalently positive), gradation over categorisation (respondents place themselves on a continuum, not in a box), and perception-based framing (questions ask how the subject is perceived, not how they see themselves). These choices make IDI resistant to social desirability bias and give it stronger predictive validity than trait-based instruments.
Raw scores are interpreted against normative groups, enabling cultural calibration and cross-organisational comparability. The 360-degree methodology combines self-rating (estimating how respondents perceive you) with anonymous respondent assessments. Inter-rater reliability is ICC 0.83 to 0.86. Cronbach's alpha is 0.85 to 0.92 with consistent factor structure across contexts.
Creating an IDI profile follows four steps. First, the respondent defines a specific work context and selects respondents from that context. The context is a specific role, not a generic self-assessment.
Second, the self-rating: a perspective-taking exercise in which the respondent estimates how their selected respondents perceive their behaviour. This is not a self-assessment of how you see yourself, but a prediction of how others perceive you.
Third, respondents complete the same form anonymously. The platform handles reminders and confirms completion without revealing individual responses.
Fourth, the profile is compiled automatically and immediately available. When all members of a team complete IDI, group profiles emerge showing collective patterns, gaps, and imbalances invisible at the individual level.