Kantor Baseline Instrument Profile
The Kantor Baseline Behavioural Profile helps us have the right conversations in the right way, with the most important people in our lives, at work and at home.
About Kantor
Dr. David Kantor
(1928 – 2021)
Thought Leader and Founder of Kantor Institute & Instruments.
The late Dr. Kantor, institute founder, researcher and author of numerous books and articles, was also the creator of a series of psychometric instruments that provide insight into individual and group behaviours. His ground-breaking research revealed a fundamental structure to all communication, known as Kantor Structural Dynamics, providing solutions to the most common communication challenges experienced in human systems.
Kantor Institute and Instruments Today
In 2021, David Kantor passed away at the age of 93. In his later years, David continued passionately working on unfinished material, whilst attending to his legacy and more importantly the stewardship of Structural Dynamics. At a working session together in Boston, David asked Kieran White from PeopleTalking to take up the ongoing stewardship of his work.
PeopleTalking is deeply appreciative and proud to continue David’s brilliant legacy, in collaboration with Kantor Instruments, and Mark Fuller (Founder and CEO, Monitor Consulting).
The Baseline Instrument
In the systems-based model of communication, the Baseline Instrument is one of the tools that integrates theory into practice. It measures everyday communication tendencies along three dimensions:
This reflects the most easily visible contribution to a group conversation.
While each act is functional, and important for effective dialogue, it is quite common to find ourselves stuck in a particular mode. Our conversations are influenced by the context we are within, often unknowingly.
In every interaction, there are only four basic vocal acts:
Move, Follow, Oppose, Bystand
While these actions happen repeatedly throughout a conversation, individuals commonly make one or two of these vocal acts more frequently than the others. Your strongest propensity reflects the action to which you most often gravitate.
The primary propensity within the Operating Systems is the set of basic rules that you implicitly follow when interacting with others. Some people prefer to operate with greater structure/rules, whilst others prefer much less structure and fewer rules. There are three distinct Operating Systems that Kantor has identified, reflecting different system archetypes:
Closed, Open, Random
Individuals tend to focus on certain types of issues and topics more frequently than others. The dominant propensity within the Communication Domains indicates what you’re likely to pay most attention to when interacting with others:
Affect (heart), Meaning (head), Power (hands)
With Kantor Structural Dynamics Licensed Practitioners, individuals, teams, and organisations can utilise detailed reports to discover their Baseline Profile and develop conversational depth, range and fluency.
The Process
Our approach typically follows 5 steps, led by PeopleTalking’s Accredited Kantor coaches who debrief and integrate the results of the Kantor Instrument.
- Client identifies a group or team of participants and aligns on the program objectives
- Participants complete the Kantor online survey (approximately 20 minutes)
- A certified coach de-briefs the results with each participant
- The certified coach may include a team report, which is later de-briefed with the team
- A custom or co-designed series of workshops focus on identified opportunities & challenges
Creating the Profiles
The Kantor Baseline Behavioural Profile is distinct from other instruments in a number of ways.
It provides:
- Descriptive language for individual and others’ behavioural patterns
- A truly neutral model, with no profile better or worse than another
- Ability to build self-awareness (internal) and capability to ‘read the room’ (external)
- Ability to more easily identify situations in which their profile serves self and others, and where it falls short
- Knowledge and skills to operate more consciously, expanding behavioural repertoires and making significant improvements in interpersonal efficacy
- Ability to see new possibilities for where and how to make behavioural changes to improve relationships and outcomes
The Kantor Team Profile helps teams to identify patterns of communication within a team or group, and explore new and more effective ways to relate to each other, by having better quality conversations.
It provides:
- Understanding of the impact of the organisational system on team dynamics and encourages a more whole-of-system perspective
- Ability to engage in conversations with each other in new ways, no longer placing blame for unsuccessful outcomes on one another, but understanding how a set of profiles can come together to produce both desirable and undesirable outcomes
- A way to build Psychological Safety so that conversations which need to take place can do so constructively ‘in the room’, rather than being held back or taking place ‘in the corridor’
- Help teams who do not yet know how to productively surface and work through difference key to unlocking collective intelligence.
- Ability to recognise different communication styles and preferences within the team, enabling its members to navigate through unhelpful/stuck patterns and create an environment encouraging collaboration, open dialogue, constructive feedback, and innovation
“We have not come across any other tool or model that allows teams to identify and work with their own process over a relatively short period of time. Hence this approach is at the core of much of our work at PeopleTalking.”
Let’s make conversations work in your organisation.
We’ll help transform your people and business through conversations and meaningful connections that improve performance and wellbeing.