The Four Tendencies
Running a Four Tendencies session in 60 to 90 minutes
A session plan that turns the grid into a team conversation, with what to say and what is better avoided.
This plan works from the group grid: you open a session, everyone answers from the same link, and the grid updates as answers come in.
Create a session →Free, no signup, from 3 participants.
What the Four Tendencies are, and what they are not
The Four Tendencies come from the American author Gretchen Rubin (The Four Tendencies, 2017): a typology of how people say they respond to outer expectations, the ones others place on us, and inner expectations, the ones we set ourselves. It is an author's model. To our knowledge no independent study has examined it: the only published article we found is a position paper co-written by Rubin, which presents the questionnaire as not yet tested in a medical context (Kirk and colleagues, 2017). This test is an independent test inspired by that model, not Rubin's questionnaire, and it is neither a diagnostic tool nor a measure of personality.
In a workshop, these four names can serve as a shared vocabulary to talk about expectations: the ones placed on the group, the ones each person sets for themselves, and what happens when a request arrives. The answers describe how each person says they react today, not what they actually do, and we do not know how far this changes with the context. It supports a discussion; it does not measure the person. This questionnaire has no reference group, and we have run no study of the stability of its results (test-retest).
What this questionnaire does not allow
- saying how a person or the team will succeed;
- building teams or assigning roles by profile;
- comparing two people on the same axis: answers are forced-choice with a fixed total, so each person's four scores are read against each other, never against someone else's;
- assessing, hiring or justifying a decision about someone;
- reading a tendency as a character trait, a strength or a flaw: it describes a stated way of responding to expectations, in a given context, and according to Rubin each one has its advantages.
The session plan
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Minutes 0 to 10, the frame.
State the goal: talk better about the expectations we place on each other, not rank each other. Say that the tendencies support a conversation about stated ways of reacting, that a first name is optional and that nobody will have to announce theirs. Share the link or the QR code.
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Minutes 10 to 25, taking the test and reading alone.
Everyone answers on their own, then reads their result page in silence and notes one sentence that fits them and one that does not.
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Minutes 25 to 40, the grid.
Show the grid and first ask what people see in it, before any interpretation. Then read the make-up as questions about the group's requests: a frequent tendency, a tendency that is rare in the split, several tendencies present at once. Each reading is a hypothesis the group confirms or sets aside. The grid keeps only each person's top tendency: someone whose two tendencies are close or tied lands in a single box, and an empty box only means nobody has it first. We do not know how far the same person would answer differently depending on the context (work, family, sport): the grid only shows what was answered that day. A uniform grid can partly come from how the group was formed.
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Minutes 40 to 55, the discussion.
Do the "where this profile got me wrong" exercise below, then ask this question: "In which recent situation did our way of working help us, and in which did it get in our way?"
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Minutes 55 to 60, the commitment.
The group picks a single concrete action for the month, based on what was said, not on the tendency names: for example giving the reason for a request when making it, or saying out loud what is expected and by when. It is a practice of the group, never a way of addressing a person according to their tendency. Whoever carries it volunteers: the grid does not appoint anyone.
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90-minute variant.
Between minute 40 and minute 70, work in sub-groups of three or four on a recent request or rule of the group: was it understood the same way by everyone, and what made it clear or blurry? Each sub-group reports back in one sentence, then keep twenty minutes for the commitment.
The "where this profile got me wrong" exercise
Everyone rereads their description and picks out two sentences: the one that describes them least well, and the one that could describe almost anybody. Pool the second ones, without saying which profile they come from.
This is the Barnum effect, described by Bertram Forer in 1949: a general enough description feels personal to most people. Spotting it together is a reminder that the result is a starting point, and makes it legitimate not to recognise oneself in it.
Why start from a real situation
A meta-analysis of debriefs (Tannenbaum and Cerasoli, 2013) links going back together over a specific work episode with better performance afterwards, mostly in simulation studies (medical and military). It does not cover the Four Tendencies or any profile tool: that is why one question in the plan starts from a real, recent situation, and this plan promises no effect on the team.
To avoid during the session
- guessing or announcing out loud the tendency of a colleague who has not shared it, or locking someone into theirs ("you are a Rebel, so you listen to nobody");
- reading out to the group the first names from the facilitator-only list;
- commenting on a pair of named people, or comparing two members on the same tendency;
- assigning a person a task, a role or a way of being asked for things according to their tendency: that is decided with the group, not in place of people;
- drawing from the grid a judgement on what the team is worth or will achieve.
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