How Lumina Spark helped my workplace self to see the light

Author: Matt Packer, Business and Management Journalist

All too often, managers who are seeking to build on their careers run into coaching methods that box them in and put them in their place – systems that give them very little indication or hope that they will be able to move on from their current capabilities or circumstances. Those same methods also tend to reinforce workplace cultures that restrict diversity, whether in terms of viewpoints, backgrounds or talents.

Those outcomes do little to encourage the growth of specific organisations, or the economy as a whole. But as I recently discovered, Lumina Spark provides fuel for optimism that is firmly grounded in evidence, supported by an innovative way of picturing subjects’ workplace selves.

My experience of the system – under the supervision of specialist practitioners at Inemmo – began with a questionnaire of 144 statements and comments about various workplace scenarios, which I was asked to grade on a one-to-five scale from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. I knew that if I wasn’t completely honest about my feelings on every single statement, the results simply wouldn’t tell me what I needed to know. So I took my time, and did my best to relate each statement to a memory of a relevant situation I’d encountered at work – testing my responses against reality, and making sure my answers were not in any way varnished, tempered or airbrushed.

Even with all that cautious tiptoeing in place, though, I was taken aback by how accurately the resulting 40-page ‘portrait’ of my workplace persona reflected ideas I already had about myself. But perhaps more remarkably, the surprises made even more of a splash. And I mean that quite literally.

Searching questions
Before I get to that, though, let’s clarify the nature of the questionnaire. The statements I was asked to grade relate to situations we find ourselves in all the time at work. How do you feel about meetings? Do they drain you, or strengthen your resolve? Do you enjoy collaboration, or feel that you produce your best work in solitude? Are you a conceptual imaginer bubbling with original thoughts and ideas? Or do you prefer the exacting yardstick of hard evidence as the most reliable guide for decision making? And is it important to you to competitively beat rival companies, or even your own colleagues? Those are just some of the issues that Spark focused my mind on.

A few days later, once my responses had been digested behind the scenes, my portrait was presented in a fully fledged coaching session by Inemmo director Atiya Sheikh. Atiya told me that Spark’s reading of the subject hinges upon Lumina’s most eye-catching innovation: the ‘mandala’. In Sanskrit culture, a mandala is a circular display of interweaving patterns. Similarly, Atiya explained, the Lumina mandala is a diagram of interweaving personality traits: one that accepts that those traits flow in and out of each other, and – even at their most extreme – still look each other in the eye, right across the table of The Self.

Pattern recognition
Here is how my mandala emerged:

Atiya deciphered the picture for me. Lumina’s readings, she said, come from determining where the subject’s qualities lie in relation to the mandala’s eight, core descriptors. Those are set out around the hexagonal shape in the middle of the mandala – so, starting from the top and going clockwise, we have: 1) Inspiration Driven; 2) Big Picture Thinking; 3) Extraverted; 4)Outcome Focused; 5) Discipline Driven; 6) Down To Earth; 7) Introverted and 8) People Focused.

Meanwhile, Atiya pointed out, in a circle around the mandala’s edge are subsets of those descriptors, with each of the eight broken down into three traits. So, again going clockwise from the top, we have 1) Adaptable, Flexible, Spontaneous; 2) Conceptual, Imaginative, Radical; 3) Sociable, Demonstrative, Takes Charge; 4) Logical, Competitive, Tough; 5) Reliable, Structured, Purposeful; 6) Cautious, Evidence Based, Practical; 7) Observing, Measured, Intimate; 8) Collaborative, Accommodating, Empathetic.

To explain what the mandala meant for me, Atiya drew my attention to the stars and boxes that are scattered around it. The stars, she said, show which qualities I claimed in particularly high numbers in my responses to the questionnaire. So, you can see that I’m particularly inclined towards the traits Imaginative, Demonstrative, Reliable, Evidence Based and, in the top-left, Accommodating/Collaborative (I have landed right in the middle of those two). By contrast, the boxes highlight qualities I claimed to the least extent: Adaptable, Tough, Competitive, Practical and Measured.

The various lines of tension between those greater and lesser qualities can be blended with a distribution of the responses to produce another, revealing graphic. See this thing in the middle of the mandala?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is me – as represented by the Lumina ‘splash’: a diagram made of various ‘tentacles’ that stretch out from the centre of the mandala in the direction of the qualities I’ve claimed. As Atiya told me, the further those tentacles stretch towards specific qualities, and the wider they spread, the more prolifically those qualities registered in my responses.

There are two, really important things to bear in mind, here. The first is that the names of the eight, main descriptors and 24 traits are neutral adjectives – they don’t imply any value judgments at all. Lumina is not giving me subtle digs or hassle for having too much of this, or not enough of that. It’s simply conveying a sense of who I am that I’m likely to remember. The second is that the splash is plotted on a spectrum. There are no lines separating the qualities from each other. Instead, they flow around, bleeding from one to the next like colours – and, as such, display options that may be worth exploring.

So, what do those two diagrams say about me?

Unexpected outcomes
Firstly, let’s look at the things that confirmed what I already suspected. My leanings towards ‘Imaginative’ and ‘Demonstrative’ make sense because I’m a creative writer pretty much by birth, and have always enjoyed roaming along the highways and byways of what my mind comes up with. I also enjoy discussing the creative process – particularly in relation to culture, but also to work – and it often surprises me that many people are rather more contained about their creative enthusiasms. As those qualities point very heavily towards the top-right of the mandala, yellow emerged as one of my two, most-dominant colours.

Far more muted is the colour red (bottom-right), with competitiveness – ie, a single-minded desire to beat other companies or colleagues – seeming to yours truly like the equivalent of a foreign land. However, Atiya said, if we circle round more towards the Discipline Driven side at the bottom of the mandala, my tendency towards the trait Reliable hints that I will strive to come up with the goods to ensure I don’t let colleagues down. It’s certainly true that, even if I need to stay late and fulfil a project to get it in on time against the odds, I will do whatever it takes. As such, I don’t compete with people – I compete with workloads. While I may not have an urge to beat other people, by the same token, I will not be beaten.

What really made me think twice about myself, though, was my inclination towards Evidence Based – slap in the middle of Down To Earth, at the bottom-left. I have, I think, too often overlooked or downplayed my analytical qualities in favour of an overt focus on my imagination, which is something I need to resolve. Perhaps this should have been obvious to me, but somehow it wasn’t. While the creative writing I do for pleasure is rooted very heavily in the imaginary, the journalism I produce is distilled from sources – many of which are often not written with the reader in mind!

There’s no question about it: I have drilled through more than my fair share of annual reports, white papers and legal rulings in search of reportable nuggets, and have frequently had stare-out contests with complex paragraphs until they crumble and give up their intended meanings. It is strange to think that I have treated this process more as the ‘background noise’ of my job, rather than its actual foundation – and this aspect of my Lumina reading makes me want to acknowledge it more than I currently seem to.

That tendency towards Evidence Based and Reliable makes the second of my two, most-dominant colours blue. I am – so Atiya told me – a somewhat rare combination of Big Picture Thinking and Down To Earth. A result that would cause my parents no end of amusement!

Red: latent… not dead
I was also very surprised – not to mention relieved – that I scored so low on Introverted, and instead spiked towards People Focused. The reason why that spike didn’t signify a dominant colour, Atiya said, was because the responses that produced it weren’t especially prolific. However, they were answered with sufficient force and emphasis (most likely with a few, well-placed ‘strongly agrees’) to give me ‘people-person’ qualities. This has proven very reassuring: writers get extremely wrapped up in their work, and really like their alone time. For those simple reasons, I thought I would end up with absolutely the reverse of the reading I received – one that would characterise me as, well… a bit standoffish. Thank you Lumina for a) not working like that anyway, and b) showing me another part of my persona that I should reassess: I’m a better people person than I thought I was.

But the surprises don’t end there. Another way to read the responses is by breaking them down into a quartet of primary colours, defined as the ‘Four Archetypes’: Conscientious Blue, Inspiring Yellow, Commanding Red and Empowering Green. This rates the subject’s use of each archetype on a scale of zero to 100 – and my ratings panned out like this:

As you can see, I make far more use of my conscientious and inspiring archetypes – as defined by my Down To Earth and Big Picture sides – than I do the other two… but even though I scored very low on competitiveness and toughness, that red is still in third place. I asked Atiya to clear up this unexpected occurrence. What emerged was that although ‘beating’ people is not one of my core priorities, my tenacity – combined with the ambition I have to deliver strong results – means that I have plenty of red lurking under the surface… possibly acting as a subconscious driver for my achievements.

That’s the most liberating message I have taken away from Lumina: that qualities you do not regularly access aren’t absent from your personal makeup – they’re latent, and can still be drawn upon in ways that are productive for, and beneficial to, your workplace journey.

Lumina doesn’t say that just because you are particularly strong in one particular set of traits, then you are automatically lacking in their opposites. In fact, it embraces paradox, and shows that contradictory qualities can – and often do – live side by side, motivating and sparking each other into life. For proof of that, look no further than my dual capability for being down to earth and a big-picture thinker: traits that most people would think are mutually exclusive, but which coexist in my workplace self and steer my decisions.

In that sense, Lumina doesn’t dwell on the shapes that peoples’ careers have already taken; it opens up a host of possibilities for how those shapes could, in the future, change in ways that the subjects haven’t even considered. And that has to be good news for anyone who is seeking to achieve.