Innovation & Creative Problem SolvingFirst workable idea on the table and everyone wants to lock it in. Do you let them?
Twenty-four items — six innovation situations and 18 behavioural statements — measure whether you hold ambiguity open, separate generating ideas from choosing them, reframe stuck problems, make it safe to contribute and protect exploration from short-term pressure. Four banded competencies and a growth plan come back.
The efficient instinct kills the idea, and every option is efficient
The six situations are the moments where a team's creativity is quietly shut down by good management. In the first session on a problem that needs a genuinely new answer, people converge on the first workable idea and want to move. A promising experiment fails to produce the hoped-for result and some see wasted effort. A problem framed as how to make something faster has stalled. You want more and better ideas but the same few confident people contribute while others stay quiet. The options include deeper analysis of the single idea, deferring to the most senior voice, and locking in for momentum.
Options are weighted against public research on divergent generation separated from convergent selection and deferred judgement, on experimentation and learning from intelligent failure, on constructive assumption-testing and problem reframing, on psychological safety as the enabler of idea contribution, and on exploration versus exploitation and the success trap. Each weight carries a written rationale. The bank is original AssessAll work; no design-thinking brand or innovation consultancy's vocabulary is named. The 18 behavioural statements ask how you actually run an ideas session and respond to a failed experiment, and reverse-keyed items catch the respondent who agrees with every creative-sounding line.
The report bands Adaptability & Ambiguity, Critical Analysis, Empowerment & Delegation and Strategic Thinking beneath a 0–100 score, each with a coaching interpretation for the next problem your team cannot solve the usual way. A narrative generated from your own responses says which innovation habit you protect and which you sacrifice under deadline. The growth plan is built from the lowest competencies and proposes specific practices — a divergence timebox before any decision, a reframing question for stuck problems, a silent-first round so quiet people contribute — and the item review explains every weight.
What you walk away with
Adaptability & Ambiguity, Critical Analysis, Empowerment & Delegation and Strategic Thinking each land in Emerging, Developing, Strong or Exceptional beneath your 0–100 score. The radar shows the common shapes — the open-minded manager who never pressure-tests, the rigorous one who converges too early.
Each band carries a coaching paragraph about what it does in practice: how Developing on Adaptability & Ambiguity responds when the team wants to lock in, what Strong on Empowerment & Delegation changes so the quiet half of the room contributes.
Built from your lowest competencies, the plan proposes concrete practices rather than a creativity course — a fixed period of generating before any evaluating, a reframing question to ask when progress stalls, a way to review a failed experiment as data — each usable at the next meeting.
The item review shows your choice, the evidence-favoured option and the rationale for each weight across all 24 items. Where you locked in the first workable idea, the explanation shows what the research says about how much better the fourth idea usually is.
What comes back
Illustrative sample — your report is generated from your own responses.
Every competency this test declares, scored from the items tagged to it — so the shape is yours, not a template.
Assembled from your lowest competencies, in order — not a generic checklist.
Band edges at 40, 60 and 80. Each band carries its own coaching interpretation for that competency.
Built for
- Product, R&D and design managers whose teams are expected to produce new answers
- Operations and process leaders whose improvement efforts keep producing the same fix
- Founders and intrapreneurs protecting exploratory work inside a delivery-focused organisation
- L&D and innovation teams baselining creative-leadership habits before a programme
Your team's best idea is usually the one you did not wait for. Measure how long you wait.
Twenty-four items in about 28 minutes, then four banded competencies, a narrative and a growth plan delivered immediately.
₹999 (incl. GST) · assessment and full report, nothing further to pay
Frequently asked questions
Whether you can generate and pressure-test novel solutions and create the conditions where innovation happens: holding ambiguity open, separating idea generation from selection, reframing stuck problems, making it safe to contribute and protecting exploration from short-term pressure. Four competencies — Adaptability & Ambiguity, Critical Analysis, Empowerment & Delegation and Strategic Thinking — are measured through six situations and 18 behavioural statements. It suits product, R&D, design and process leaders.
Each option is weighted against published research on divergent and convergent thinking, intelligent failure, reframing, psychological safety and the exploration-exploitation balance, with a written rationale per weight. Always choosing the most open option does not help because some situations call for rigorous pressure-testing, and the strongest option depends on where the team is in the process. Reverse-keyed behavioural statements make a uniformly creative self-report read as inconsistent.
Around 22 to 30 minutes within a 28-minute window. You receive a 0–100 score with its band, four banded competencies with coaching interpretations, a radar, a narrative generated from your own responses, a strengths-and-development summary, a growth plan built from your lowest competencies and a full item review with the evidence behind each weight. The report is complete when it arrives; there is nothing further to unlock.
Innovation and L&D teams use it as a baseline before a creative-leadership programme so the content targets real habits rather than assumed ones. Product and R&D leaders use it to see which managers converge early and which never pressure-test, and pair them. Hiring managers use the bands to structure interviews for roles that must produce new answers. Individually, the growth plan is a set of session-level changes; retake after six months.
Yes. The situations are sector-neutral — an ideas session, a failed experiment, a stuck problem, a dominated discussion — and the research base is international. Managers in India, Europe, the Gulf, Southeast Asia and North America sit identical items and receive the same report. The assessment is priced in INR and USD, and the price on this page is the whole price.
Each battery takes one management capability — delegation, coaching, conflict, influence, decision-making, change — and measures it through situational judgement scored against published evidence, with a competency profile, coaching interpretations and a prioritised growth plan. For the level-by-level readiness verdicts, see Leadership & Management Premium.
See the leadership catalogue →Methodology: Original AssessAll scenarios and items operationalising public, well-established innovation constructs: divergent generation separated from convergent selection and deferred judgement; experimentation and learning from intelligent failure; constructive assumption-testing and problem reframing; psychological safety as the enabler of idea contribution and voice (Edmondson); and exploration versus exploitation / protecting innovation from the success trap (March; O'Reilly & Tushman). Situational-judgement scoring is literature-keyed with a documented per-option rationale citing the evidence for each weight. Generic public constructs only; no trademarked instrument names or vendor-coined vocabulary, and no items copied or paraphrased from any branded assessment. Flagship items are tagged for optional human SME validation.