Why do existing people-centred tools, techniques and approaches fail to pick-up people from where they are?

In a recent discussion on managing transformations,  the Change Management Director of a leading global IT software company made a striking comment:

“All change is inevitably emotionally hampered. We've tried a range of culture and people-focused tools and workshops, and none delivered the outcomes we needed. Most ended up being a costly waste of time.”

This sentiment is not uncommon. There is a growing recognition across industries that many people-centred tools, while well-intentioned, often fail to resonate with the target audiences and stop short of embedding meaningful, lasting change.

Organisations are increasingly aware that traditional change management approaches prioritise processes, systems, and structures, relegating the human element to the sidelines. This ends up creating considerable costs and project delays for organisations. According to McKinsey, it is well established that between 70-80% of change initiatives fail due to the human element, resulting in losses of several hundred thousands of pounds. That notwithstanding, many organisations are still continuing to rely on outdated frameworks and tools that ultimately fail to holistically account for how people actually think, work and evolve.

Limitations of popular tools

Commonly used tools and techniques for understanding people’s mindsets tend to fall into two broad categories:(1) Psychometric analyses, and (2) Human capital management.

1. Psychometric Analysis

Psychometric analyses focus on understanding personality traits and aptitudes at an individual level, employing tools such as DISC, MBTI, Thompson, Five Factor Model, Tilt, Occupational Personality Questionnaire, Predictive Index, Enneagram etc. It is well known that some of these tools are very high level and thus prone to generalisations and stereotyping, while others are extremely detailed and require individuals to answer 70+ questions, ensuring a long-winded and often costly process.

In fact, psychometric analyses have earned a reputation as ‘highly weaponized management tools’. Many are not scientifically defensible. For example, MBTI lacks scientific credibility and is meaningless (see e.g. Vox report). It has poor test–retest reliability, meaning people often get different results at different times. Additionally, its theoretical basis has little backing in modern psychology, making it a questionable foundation for change management or leadership development.

Other psychometric tests generate unethical and biased results. Big Five, for instance, was shown to bias against women, causing psychological damage to female participants. Yet other psychometric tests assume that personalities are fixed, such as the Predictive Index, which claims that a person cannot be both evidence-oriented and empathetic. Most psychometric assessments have in common that they are unable to account for the dynamism of meaning-making, which relates to the different mindsets that people adopt depending on situational cues and salient stimuli. They are unable to explain, for example, why a competent female engineer switches to exhibiting ‘feminine’ helplessness when confronted with a flat tyre or leaking tap at home.

2. Human Capital Management

The tools and techniques in the second category, human capital management, focus on capturing personality traits and aptitudes that people need to demonstrate in present or future job roles, or to achieve organisational objectives. Tools in this category include  competency frameworks, skills matrices, success profiles, proficiency levels, and accomplishment -based systems.

However, instead of enhancing learning and development, these tools are often experienced as rigid, disconnected from the realities of day-to-day work, and designed to support structured processes in a compliance-driven environment (e.g. HR systems). They reduce people’s socio-cognitive abilities to excessively specific categories, which create artificial distinctions and are strapped of any context. Consequently, these tools are unable to account for the influence of cognitive biases, emotions, and social factors, and thereby entirely ignore the dynamic, nuanced, and situational nature of human sensemaking and resulting mindsets.

A two-headed beast

In summary, widely popular tools and techniques for understanding people’s mindsets are limited because they overlook two factors that are absolutely imperative to understanding the elusive, contradictory, malleable and situation-specific nature of human mindsets:

Lack of Contextualization

Commonly popular tools and techniques usually ask participants to rate themselves in regards to a particular personal or behavioural trait, e.g. leadership, , without situating the question into a specific context. For example, when confronted with a question such as ‘How would you rate your leadership style?’, a respondent’s first response tends to be ‘Well, it depends!’ This is because the question does not take account of the fact that one would rate one’s leadership style differently in regard to different projects and within different contexts. Providing leadership in one’s capacity as a university professor would be different to tackling the task of leading a university club. 

Ignoring Human Complexity

Secondly, popular tools and techniques overlook the fact that when people make sense of an issue at work, they draw not only on the organisational meaning systems that are prominent at their place of work but they also draw on fragments of meaning from a variety of other meaning-systems that are salient to them.

Let’s go back to the question about leadership. ‘How would you rate your leadership style?’ Respondents will of course draw on their organisational meaning systems and perhaps on current discourses on leadership. But they will also draw on reservoirs of social, cultural, religious, economic and political meaning systems from outside the organisational meaning system. Let’s go through an interesting example of a consultant named Tom Nyugen. He completed his master’s at INSEAD in France, and joined Mckinsey & Company. When asked about his leadership style in business, of course Tom draws on the values, beliefs and knowledge structures  that make up a typical consultant’s meaning system on corporate leadership. But he also incorporates fragments of meaning from a meaning system that he acquired whilst leading as a military officer, in addition to leveraging the meaning system he developed as a  postgraduate student of Vietnamese origin completing his education in France. Tom Nyugen isn’t just a consultant at McKinsey; he is a fascinating individual shaped by multiple layers of experience. When Tom is asked about his leadership style in this context, his response is colored by a rich tapestry of experiences.

Standard tools like MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) or Enneagram (Enneagram of the Personality) can’t fully capture this complexity. They might pin him as an ENTJ (extraverted, thinking, intuitive, judging) or a Type 8 (Challenger), highlighting certain traits (decisive, assertive), but these tests could not understand the complexity of his socio-cultural background, and would fail to effectively capture the personality trait of Tom Nyugen in a leadership capacity.  Businesses and organisations are increasingly aware of how hitherto popular tools are limited in capturing the complexities of the human mindset, let alone motivate a growth mindset and constructive behaviours. For this reason, organisations and businesses are in need of alternative, scientific approaches that offer a more realistic, nuanced and situated approach to understanding people and their mindsets in the workplace.

A New Era: Contextual and Situational Tools

As we have seen, while these tools offer a starting point, they often miss the mark when it comes to capturing how people actually think, feel, and behave in moments of change. They do not pick people up from where they are, because they lack the capacity to recognise complexity and context.

For this reason, there is a growing call for tools that are situational, contextual, and capable of understanding human meaning-making in all its complexity. Organisations need approaches that move beyond personality labels and static job descriptions, towards methods that reflect the real, evolving human experience at work. Only then can we design change initiatives that feel meaningful, personalised, and are ultimately more successful.

One-size-does-not-fit-all

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, understanding the human element is no longer a “nice-to-have”; it is a necessity for driving lasting transformation. Yet too many organisations continue to rely on outdated, ridgid tools that reduce people to static profiles and overlook the rich, dynamic complexity of human mindsets.

At Mindset Dynamics, we believe it is time to move beyond check-the-box personality tests and simplistic models. To truly support people through change, we must embrace approaches that are nuanced, context-aware, and scientifically grounded. This means recognizing that people are not fixed categories but living, evolving individuals shaped by diverse experiences, shifting environments, and layered meaning systems.

By placing human complexity and context at the heart of change management, organisations can unlock deeper insights, foster genuine engagement, and create the conditions for sustained transformation. It is not about finding a one-size-fits-all tool; it is about respecting the richness of the human experience and designing approaches that meet people where they are.

Let us start rethinking how we understand and support people because real change begins when we see the full picture.

This blog was written by Buse İtik, who is working as Digital Marketing Specialist at Mindset Dynamics.