Group Styles Inventory™ (GSI)

Designed for serious team-building programs, the Group Styles Inventory assesses the ways in which team members interact with one another and approach problems and decisions. The results show how the group can develop itself to achieve synergy.

Research and development by Robert A. Cooke, Ph.D. and J. Clayton Lafferty, Ph.D. The Group Styles Inventory™ (GSI) is the only research-based tool that provides a valid and reliable measure of how people in groups interact with each other and work as a team to solve problems.

Proven and Safe

Extensively researched and internationally proven, this assessment provides group members with a ‘safe’ way to talk about their behavior and how it affects the group's performance.

The GSI is an excellent tool for helping teams and groups solve problems more effectively. It’s particularly valuable for team development initiatives, such as:

  • measuring and monitoring team performance

  • creating a team environment that encourages innovation and idea-sharing

  • sharpening team members’ analytical skills

  • developing consensus-based decision making

  • achieving synergy and higher quality and acceptance of group decisions

  • delivered virtually or face-to-face

How it works

The GSI is designed for both temporary and permanent groups that are responsible for solving problems and making decisions. It can be completed by team members after they have solved a problem (to identify the behaviors that facilitated or inhibited their performance) or mid-way through solving a problem (to identify and practice more effective ways of interacting with one another and approaching the problem). The use of the GSI involves three major steps:

  • Assessment

    Individual group members respond to 72 statements describing the styles exhibited by the group while solving a problem plus a few questions focusing on team effectiveness, solution acceptance, solution quality, and team synergy.

  • Analysis

    The team members score their own surveys and profile their individual results on the Human Synergistics Circumplex to provide a picture of their own perceptions of the group and its styles.

  • Action

    The descriptions of members are combined to generate an aggregated profile displaying the group’s styles and a bar chart summarizing their collective assessments of performance.

Facilitator and Accredited Practitioner

Karl Perry

Karl is a thinking coach who helps people and organisations get unstuck. Where most of us meet a conflict and reach for compromise — split the difference, everyone loses a little, call it maturity — Karl works the conflict until it dissolves: finding what holds you where you are, what you're quietly protecting, and the assumption keeping the whole dilemma in place.

He built HPtE on the Theory of Constraints Thinking Processes — tools most people reserve for factories and supply chains — and turned them on the messiest system of all: the human one. The bottlenecks we carry around in our own heads. The tensions that quietly run teams into the ground. His work doesn't treat conflict as something to smooth over or minimise. It treats conflict as a source of innovation and performance — something to keep, work, and let show you the way through.

Karl works across the globe and across sectors, with individuals and teams at the operational level and with whole organisations at the strategic level — helping them harness their own thinking and the collective intelligence of their people.