Self assessmentality [sic]

Have you ever taken a personality assessment? Did you answer COMPLETELY truthfully? You caught the self-deception before clicking submit and altered a few responses. I did. My daughter, entering a stage of teenagedom where she’s obsessed with murder podcasts, wanted to know who had the closest profile to a psychopath in the family. Bob Hare’s “psychopath test” is maybe an extreme example. For any rabbit hole types (like me), it’s also hotly disputed—more on that in the excellent book by Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test.

But self-assessments are common in corporate land, too. Here, we may lack the privacy of a personality test. If the answers impact our livelihoods (e.g., used as a performance metric), might that further compromise our objectivity and honesty? Then there are those self-assessments intended for publication. You know, the “ethics awards” nonsense. How, then, might we bring accountability into self-assessments?

Two ideas, for starters:

👉 Crowdsource

👉 Outsource

When multiple people provide inputs, it becomes harder to game the results. We’re also more accurate at calibrating risk as the median point. I’ve seen this result in integrity culture surveys (anonymised sample output here).

By outsourcing, I mean having someone set questions and review them. This is one of many reasons I’m working with Transparency International UK on their Corporate Anti-Corruption Benchmark. But I need your help. Can you give 30 minutes to discuss your experience of risk assessment, benchmarking, self-assessment, and how a non-partisan entity (like TI, a for-purpose organisation) might help facilitate this?

Let me know (reply to this email) if you can spare half an hour to help. Beyond my eternal gratitude, you may also benefit from whatever TI produces off the back of this research.