The Different² Model

Kingswood developed The Different² Model to describe the factors that makes each of us unique. Understanding individual difference is fundamental to all of our programmes as we believe that this is the key that unlocks the potential for boosting performance at an individual, team and organisational level.

When we meet or work with people for the first time all that we see is their visible behaviour – everything that they say and do and how they present themselves to the world.

Underlying our behaviour or performance at work is a unique set of knowledge, skills and talents.

Knowledge – information and understanding that has been learned and retained. Knowledge may be factual and theoretical or learned from life experience.
Skills – the ability to perform certain tasks; the techniques and ‘the knack’ of how to do something.
Talents – each individual has a way of approaching a task and their own way of going about things.

For example, in order to be able to drive a car we need to:
• Learn the highway code – this is Knowledge
• Practise how to use our clutch and gears – this is a Skill
• And each of us will have developed a particular style of driving (reckless, cautious, considerate) – this is our unique style or Talent

Knowledge and Skills are relatively easy to understand and we can learn and develop new knowledge and skills as we need them.

Talents are more complex to understand - talents are wired in at an early age and become well developed habits that have been reinforced by our life experience. We refer to talents in all sorts of ways and they can be thought of as a combination of personality, style or attitude.

Talents tend to come in three different types:

• Thinking Style - the way in which we have learned to process information; approach and solve problems; our preference for thinking in different ways or with different types of information.
  
• Relating Style - the way in which we develop relationships with others; how we communicate and connect.
  
• Motivation - the things that we seek to obtain and that drive us to behave in particular ways.

The Values and Beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world around us underpin our identity as individuals. To truly understand what motivates an individual and how their talents have evolved we need to take some time to understand and find out about what is important to them – what they care about; what they are passionate about and what they believe to be true about themselves and others.