keymodels
Core quadrants
How can core quadrants improve people, teams, or organisational effectiveness?
Contents
Every person has certain core qualities that truly describe the ‘self’.
A core quality is a characteristic strength visible in a person’s words, choices, feelings and values. Daniel Ofman’s Core Quadrant (2001) helps people examine that strength from four connected perspectives: its productive form, its overuse, the balancing quality to develop and the behaviour that tends to provoke them.
When to use it
Use the model for self-awareness, development, teamwork and conflict preparation. It makes strengths, pitfalls, challenges and “allergies” easier to recognise in yourself and others, helping explain why another person’s useful behaviour can trigger a disproportionate reaction.
Origins
Dutch organisational-development practitioner Daniel Ofman created the Core Quadrant in the early 1990s and later presented it internationally in Core Qualities and the Core Quadrant. The method rests on a simple relationship: excess turns a strength into a pitfall; the positive opposite of that pitfall is a developmental challenge; and excess of the challenge can become an “allergy.” It is a reflective language for development and collaboration, not a psychometric personality test.
What it is
The four elements describe one behavioural system. A
- core quality
- is the useful strength. Applied without balance, it becomes a
- pitfall
- The constructive opposite of the pitfall is the
- challenge
- When that challenge is itself exaggerated, it becomes an
- allergy
- conduct in others that readily irritates the person. The objective is to retain the quality while adding enough of the challenge to prevent overuse.
How to use it
Start from whichever element is easiest to observe and complete the loop with evidence:
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