Welcome to the Working Genius podcast, where we discuss anything and everything related to the six types of working genius and how it impacts your work and your life. I'm Pat Lanchoni, your host, joined by the full crew today. We've got Tracy, Cody, and Bo on mic. How are y'all? Awesome.

What up, nerds?

Yippee.

Yippee.

All right. Cody sounds really great.

You said y'all, so I didn't know what to say, actually.

I don't think people in the south say yippee a lot, but, you know.

They can start now.

There you go. Matt's behind the screen producing. Karen's sitting here with me. We have another guest in the studio today watching my son, Casey. So what is the topic today, Cody?

The results are in.

That's right. This is our last episode of 2023 on the Working Genius podcast, and we have so many things to talk about in the new year, so many applications, so many interesting ways to look at working genius. We're learning a lot, but what we thought we'd do today is take a look at the data that Matt has collected and talk about some of the things we've learned about working genius and the numbers that have come in, because we've had almost three quarters of a million people do this, and we are going to talk about what we know. Right. So, Bo, I think you're going to take over here and you're going to kind of interview Matt, and we're all going to talk about this, about what we've learned from the information.

Yeah. And I'm kind of imagining listeners as if we had just printed this report off and we're standing around our lunch table looking at it together. This isn't a presentation. We're not going to go through line by line of all the data. Most data is a little mundane. It's finding the 20% that's really standing out to us that we want to get to talk about today.

Right. And we see our audience for the working genius podcast as the insiders. These are the people that have been with us. We've just finished the third year of this, and so you all are like part of our team, and we just want to tell you what we've learned. We're going to include a lot of the data in the show notes if you want to look at it, but we just want to pour through it with you in real time.

There's kind of two different sets of data. There's the, hey, the experience of the working genius kind of ecosystem and community, which might be fun just to start the highlights. And then there's the data of looking at over 600,000 reports and being able to see some of the nuances and commonality of different pairings, which might be interesting to you based on what kind of data is interesting to you. So I wonder if, pat, we just start with some of the highlights of the year of 2023, three years and a couple of months into this assessment, some of the highlights of the year. I'm just curious for the room, what's one of those that stood out to you?

My favorite thing is that 93% of people that have taken the assessment have said it, nailed their type the first time they got it. So 7%. And we always tell people, hey, don't just trust the data. Make sure that this resonates with you. 93% of people said, no, you got me right. So 7% of the people might have looked at it and said, maybe there's one letter that might be a little higher. So that's my favorite thing. The validity of this from the people.

That are taking it, it is amazing. And that is also sort of the validity in the room. Isn't that true? When we're in rooms with people, it's remarkable how often the whole room, or maybe one person has a question about their results. And so when we saw that 93% of people agree with their results, that's so encouraging. And not just encouraging in terms of, oh, we nailed it, encouraging. This is so helpful to people.

People are discovering who they are and they're losing guilt around who they are, like, oh, this is real. And there's less judgment. People are actually seeing people for who they really are. And that is why we did this. And thank God for all that.

I love that stat because really, the other way to say it is 93% of people have a genuine aha. Moment when they get their results and they read this. And like you said, pat, either it's guilt or judgment or frustration in the work that they've had, but to get a report back after a ten minute survey and to read it and go, man, this explains some of what I've been feeling for a long time. That's sort of the spirit of this. Like the dignifying each person understanding themselves better, how to work together better. And outside of that, in the industry, that is a high mark to hit. In the assessment industry. There's not many out there that have that level of accuracy. So it is really cool to see that that is true.

And I think it speaks to the simplicity of this. It's like, we're really just trying to describe what gives people joy and energy. And people, usually when you ask them the right questions, they have a sense of themselves. Like, yes, this is what I love to do.

Okay, let's give a couple of other overview numbers. One is, hey, as of this writing or this recording, 664,213 people have taken the working genius assessment, which is unbelievable, actually, to think about. That's more than the number of people that live in my county. That's more than the number of people should have had a ready end of that sentence. I didn't have one, but it's a lot of people.

That's more than the number of people that live in Wyoming. I do know that. Wow, that's the least populated state in the union.

Similar big number that's hard to put your head around is there are 2.1 million total downloads of this podcast, which is frightening. And it's really grown in the last words.

But in the last two months, to be serious, the number of people listening to this podcast, it's gone through the roof. There's something going on here, and it's certainly not us being insightful or talented. So this must really work.

Frightening is a good word.

What else is interesting about this? Here's the stuff that's pretty common, right, Matt, what is still the most common of the six types of working genius? Which one is the most represented of all?

And do you mean the most common as a genius? Yes, that would be.

Oh, the combo is et. Yeah.

Oh, do you want the genius or the pairing? I've got both of those spreadsheets directly in front of me, so you let me know what stat you want me to bring up.

Well, let's talk about the pairings. We've come to realize the pairings are so relevant. It's one thing to be an e, but the difference between an E t and an e w is really different. So let's go, pairings. So et is almost 16% of the people who take this are ets. That is way, by far the most. It's an outlier.

Yeah. But it also resonates with our experience, doesn't it, that we've said it takes the most time to do enablement and tenacity, and it's our experience, thank goodness that there are more people who have that genius, because there's so much work required at that level of work.

That's right. And while that's 16%, everything else is generally between about nine and five. So they're pretty common, except there's one at the lower end. And Matt, what's the least common working genius pairing?

I think to us this is unsurprising. To some people it might be surprising, but WG is the least common.

Yeah, wonder galvanizer. It is interesting. I remember saying out of the gate as we were trying to pressure test this with people we knew, we knew in our sphere of people that we know well, almost every other pairing. And it was so hard for us to find a WG to observe and talk through with those behaviors and the geniuses. So it is interesting after three years and 600,000 people later, that is still true and accurate. I remember early on, remember we put it out in the ether for people who listen to this podcast. If you're a WG, we'd love to hear from you because we need to study you a little bit and poke and prod you a little bit. And that's still true after 600,000 people.

Hey Matt, have you received some information from Wgs?

Yeah, I mean, we found plenty of wgs and we still have no idea about anything about them.

Can we fly them here to headquarters so we can put them to sleep and dissect them? Yeah, but it's a real type. We know people that have it, but it seems to be a pretty rare one, which is neat.

I think that of the 15 pairings, we probably won't go through all 15 here. But one of the things that was really interesting to me is of the top four most common pairings, all of them had enablement as part of their pairing. So the top four are enablement, tenacity, galvanizing enablement, discernment enablement, and wonder enablement. And that jumped off the page to me, and I'd love to hear any of you comment on that. Why do you think that is? Or what do you think about that? When I first thought that, I thought, well, I thank God for that. I need enablement in my life, and I'm so grateful there's a lot of you.

Well, first of all, luckily it did back up the results from our previous data set. So I think it was a year and a half ago, something like that, that we sat down and said, hey, we got some data. We're not totally sure if it's a large enough sample size, but it was 66,000 people. Now we have almost exactly ten times that, and it's still reflecting the same numbers. So that was encouraging.

Tenacity. When you look at just the geniuses, tenacity is the second most common. And so almost a quarter of people have enablement somewhere in there, but 20% have tenacity somewhere in there. And this speaks to the idea that ets are the most common. Let me tell you, ets are extraordinarily employable because every organization has et work that needs to be done. So they are very versatile in terms of, you can put them on a lot of different projects and get them things done. So that is not a surprise. But you know what I find interesting about all this is the disruptive versus responsive breakdown. And the disruptive responsive has really emerged this year as something people are really interested in. The difference between those people who respond to others, to the environment, or to others requests for action, and those people that provoke that, the disruptive ones. And so many people have said this is a really interesting dynamic. So what we did is we looked at the data to say, what percentage of people have one disruptive and one responsive, and how many are double disruptive or double responsive? And what's that data tell us, Matt?

So in terms of breaking it down from double responsive, double disruptive, and mixed pairings, which is just one of each, 62% of people surveyed or of people that took the working genius assessment are a mixed pairing, and only 21% are double responsive. And only 17% are double disruptive.

Right. So, bo, you're double disruptive. You're part of that 21% where you are an IG. So both of yours are in that area. So what does that say to you?

That's interesting? It's surprisingly low percentage to me. If I would have guessed what percentage of people are double disruptive, it feels higher, but probably because we're a bit louder. Tracy is smiling and nodding.

And I misspoke. It's 17%. That is the lowest of the three categories. But you're right. We notice double disruptors, and they have a probably oversized impact on people when they're around them.

And just a reminder, those figures, if everything was in a vacuum, if there was an equal distribution of all the geniuses, the mixed pairings would be 60%, but the actual figure is 62. Double responsive would be 20%, but the actual figure is 21%. And double disruptive would be 20%, but it's actually 17%. So we just see more double responsive and slightly more mixed pairings than we.

See, but it breaks down as though, as we'd kind of expect. Okay.

Yeah, it does reflect the normal distribution pretty well.

Now, in our office here in California, Matt, Tracy, and Karen are all double responsive. In fact, so is Danny and so is Hoel. So five of our employees here are double. Yet. And yet in the workplace in general, one out of five is. So what is that all about?

Tracy, that's so interesting. And you definitely feel it when you walk into the office. I know you as a mixed pairing. You feel it because the energy when you walk in is not as lively, so to speak. I don't want to say that we don't have energy, but it's a different sense that you feel when you walk into the office when there's a bunch of double responsive people.

Yeah, they're kind of allowing other people to make the first move.

Exactly.

And it's almost that the energy needs to be provoked by something. So you guys are, when Pat comes with invention, which is a disruptive genius, your discernment and enablement, or wonder, the responsive ones kick in because you're presented something to react to, but in a vacuum. If left to itself, it will wait on being provoked to.

Uniquely. This physical office here is uniquely overrepresented, way overrepresented in responsiveness versus disruptiveness, which is why when Bo comes out, it's like a party, because he is just this double disruptor walking in like the tasmanian devil. Hey, I have an idea. Let's do this.

We love it.

It might be a triple disruptor working genius and then personality as a third layer.

Thank you.

Thank you for saying that. One of the little pieces of data, I don't know if it's exactly data, but is the number of people who've joined the certification community in the last year. So there's over 1400 people who have joined the certification community. And there's so much to say about that and to love about that, because more and more people are getting equipped to be able to use this in their consulting business or with their family or in their workplace who are galvanizing it, who are helping more people discover their genius, which we love. And I know certainly not everybody listening to this is certified, although we'd love for you to be, because we keep learning things from that certified community. We learn from them when they're out in the wild using this, and they're sharing things in our LinkedIn community and sending us notes. And that's some of the data maybe between the lines that has helped inform so much of this podcast and so much of our experience. So I just thought that was pretty fun. Over one 4000 hundred people who've joined that.

Yeah. And if the people that listen to this podcast are the insiders, which they are, you are the people that are certified is like intensely insiders, because they went through this two day program, and now a lot of them are living it, whether they have their own consulting practice or they're living it within their organization, or as one of our certified people is within the zoo that he runs, they're using working genius with the animals. We have an animal assessment coming up soon, so look for that. Here's another really interesting thing to me. I think this might be the distance between people's geniuses is fascinating. So when you're in Wi or an id or a DG, you go down. That's one spot, you're adjacent. And the question is, what percentage of people have two geniuses that are adjacent to one another in the order? And what does the data say, Matt?

So, 41% of people. 41.12% of people have adjacent geniuses. So, obviously, there's five options that you could have. It's geniuses that are right next to each other that are one space away, two spaces away, three spaces away, and then there's wt. And so, obviously, because of the way that the pairings are organized, there's going to be a lot less wts than there are all of the pairings that are adjacent. But we still see more adjacent geniuses than the normal distribution would suggest. So 41% is higher.

We didn't know this going in, right, Matt? We didn't know how this would be. But as it turns out, I look at the 265 percent. So two thirds of people are either adjacent or have one spot between them. So a WD has one spot between them. A DT has one. No, DT has three two spots, but a has one spot between them. So two thirds of people are relatively close. And then you go to WT, which is the furthest apart, and only 5% of people, one out of 20 people, have four spots. So, generally speaking, and I don't know why this is, we'll have to study this in the new year, but generally speaking, people's geniuses tend to cluster a little bit near one another, generally speaking.

So we had a team off site, or some of our team members came here to our Utah office for the last couple of days, and we drew a kind of elevation based team map where we put everybody's name and their geniuses and frustrations kind of based on elevation. And this really stood out that most of the people on our team have a genius that's pretty near one another. Right. There's a lot of ets. We have a DT. There's some des, and that meant that it was more likely that if we were having a meeting, they either loved it or hated it, because if we were having a Wi meeting, there was a lot of frustration at the Wi level. If we were having an ET meeting, a lot of us with higher elevation were frustrated. Does that make sense? So, yeah, it intuitively, again, the data supports my lived experience, which is more people tend to have more work at a similar elevation. Matt, tell me what you're thinking about that.

Yeah. One other thing that I love about this statistic, the distance between geniuses, is that if 41% of people have no space between their geniuses, so 41% of people are wis or GEs or ets, or their geniuses are adjacent. Since there's three options for having adjacent geniuses be in the same stage of work, you can have Wi DG and ET, and then there's only two options for having your geniuses bridge the gap between two stages of work, which is ID and GE. Then we can safely assume that around 25% to 30% of people in general have geniuses in the same stage of work, because there's 41.12% of adjacent geniuses, which I think is a crazy high number compared to what I would guess if I was just saying what percent of people have geniuses that are in the same stage of work? But we could safely assume that it's about 25% at least.

Interesting. Yeah. And now you're going to have to explain to me, matthew, there's some data here. I think I misunderstood it. The three stages, it says here. Well, explain that slide where you have ideation, activation and implementation.

So the three stages slide that we have in there that you'll find in the Show Notes is just the percent of the tested population who have at least one genius in the stage of work. So that one basically just shows us what we talked about earlier, which is implementation has a lot more people that have at least one genius that falls into that stage of work than activation and ideation.

41% of people have a t or an e in there. Yes, got it.

But that is the same number. But it is a totally different stat that we're talking about. What I was talking about is just when people have two geniuses in the same stage of the numbers, you look at both of them and they actually do make sense. When you compare them to the pairing numbers, how common is each pairing? You see that it's much more heavy towards implementation. Like both said, e and t are super heavy at the very top, and then you get less common when you involve the ideation geniuses.

Only a quarter of people have what w or I, whereas 41% have e or t, which gets, again, to this thing about it slides more toward the end of the process. The e and the t. Let's talk about w. We got to talk about w's probably the most misunderstood type. And so we look at the most common and least common pairings, and the four least common pairings all involve w. What's going on there, you guys?

Again, this is sort of a data set that's representative of our anecdotal and intuitive experience in the working world, which is, there's not a lot of jobs that lend itself to spending a lot of time in wonder. And that's not a nature or nurture argument. I just think it's interesting to observe that there's not a lot of activity that spends time and energy and space in wonder. And so it would make sense that that might be in the lowest combination of pairings. There's probably a bunch of other illustrations you could draw from that, but that seems like a very obvious one.

Yeah.

Even when you look at just the commonality of each genius, wonder is the least represented. Actually, wonder and invention are tied for the least represented, which, if you're on a team of about eight people to eight to ten people, that probably means you have one genius of wonder. And to me, one of the headlines of this whole conversation is, wow, every pairing is needed. Every genius is needed. It is so neat to just say again what we've said before, 600,000 plus people. The data shows, wow, people are remarkably spread out. There is a fairly, with the exception of the ET, fairly normal distribution, which we need. Every company is a six letter company. Every job is a six letter job. Right. Go ahead, Cody.

I was going to say that the interesting thing as we're going over this data that I'm finding fascinating as we're having the conversation, is there's this tendency as a human being to go like, oh, I want to be in the minority. I want to be the unicorn. I want to be the one that's least represented, because it means I'm special in some way. But what's so unique about working genius is it's not about what is overrepresented or underrepresented or how many there are. It's about knowing yourself to the degree that you could find the right type of work that gives you joy and energy. So it's super interesting going over this and not feeling like, oh, I see the percentage next to how many discerner galvanizers there are. That's not the point. The point is, hey, that means I know exactly how many people there are out there that fill this specific role. And it's super fun to try to.

Find you're a DG, so you're perfectly average in terms of how common each pairing is.

Thank you.

Matt, you're number eight of 15, and you're squarely in the center.

Thank you. Dime a dozen.

Right? That's the thing. You could look at this and go, do I want to be most represented?

At least?

It doesn't matter. The one thing I would say is, if you're a w, there's a decent chance where you're going to have to be a little bit more. You're going to have to really think about, how can I find a job that's going to allow me to utilize that? There's still plenty out there and every project needs it. When you look at 100% of the time spent on a project, a smaller percentage of that will involve w. Now, luckily, nobody's a wW. If we had a ww on here, I'd be like, oh, that one's going.

To be tough, but you're a philosopher.

Living in the mountains, walking amongst the flowers and pondering the life. That's interesting. So there was something else I thought was interesting. We looked at most common frustrations, and so what is the most common pairing of frustration? So, like, of all the different two that you could have at the end, what is the most common frustration pairing?

So the most common frustration pairing is wi. Unsurprisingly, given the information that we've gone.

Over so far, Julie Dobbins tells me that the most common frustration is galvanizers. So that's slowly frustrates the most people.

That frustrates her the most, right. But if there is a type that more people have in their lowest two, it'd be wi. And again, what's good about this is this is making sense. It's confirming what we thought before. It's confirming what we're hearing from people. It's both qualitative, quantitative. This seems to make sense, which is great, because every time we do this data, we're like, I wonder if there's going to be some crazy outlier? And it's like, oh, it's actually telling us a story that seems to go along with the narrative we have. Anything else, you guys, that you think is interesting in here?

Well, I just like what you just said because it probably comes across on the last podcast when we were presenting the data that we were kind of hedging our bets and saying, oh, I don't know if this is totally accurate or reliable data set. And so it is nice to be able to say, plant our flag in the ground and say, yeah, we know this is good data and it's supporting what we've already believed to be true.

Yeah, I think so, too.

I have one other piece of data that we did not put in this report, which I'll share, which is, we ask people, hey, how likely are you to recommend working genius to a friend or a colleague, or however that standard question is written? And we also asked people, this was in a different survey, hey, tell us what else you do. Do you listen to the podcast? Have you been certified? And what we saw is people who listened to the podcast were much more likely to be willing to recommend working genius to a friend or colleague. So I just go back to how you started this conversation, Pat, which is, we love you listeners. We feel like you are part of the insider group, and we feel that sharing episodes with friends is a great way to be able to help them be able to continue to digest and apply their own working genius results. And the data has backed that up that it seems somewhat od to be saying this on this podcast, but the podcast is a great resource to share with folks who are taking the assessment to help them be able to apply it and go deeper.

Yeah, I think that's true. I got to say this again, too, and this is not an ad, because I hate marketing and advertising. I mean, marketing advertising are fun and interesting, but I don't like to push things that we do. But I love when I meet somebody and they're in a career place, either starting or retiring or changing careers, wherever they are. I love the fact that I can say, hey, here, do this assessment in twelve minutes. And they read the thing and they go, oh my gosh, no wonder it's such a great thing. And when you're looking for that, and I don't mean this like, if you need a Christmas gift, I love that you can give somebody something that 15 minutes later they can go, you just rocked my world. It doesn't take them weeks and weeks to get it in the mail. They can go on, take it right there, and $25 can change a person's life. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, I didn't get anybody anything. This family member, this is something that I think is a gift that they'll want to talk to you about.

And so I just want to encourage people that, hey, I'm going to give people an update. Here's one of the things we're going to talk about in the new year, because there's so many topics that are popping. One of them is the danger of spending having a job where you get to spend all of your time in your genius. So that's just some food for thought that sometimes if you have a job where you get to only spend time in your genius, that can actually be a problem. So we're going to talk about that in the new year. But until then, we hope you have a wonderful Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, great New Year, and we will talk to you in 2024, thanks to all of our listeners, to everybody on the podcast, and we'll see you then. God bless.