History of the Basadur Profile

In 1981, Dr. Min Basadur received a call from Ford Motor Company. For several business quarters, Ford had suffered heavy losses. Bound and determined to change the way it operated, Ford had launched many initiatives. One of the most important was its decision to turn to its people - involving everyone in using their minds to improve quality and customer satisfaction and to increase innovation. The company heard of Dr. Basadur's work at Procter & Gamble in involving managers in actually "managing the business" rather than just "doing my job."

The company and its union had recently agreed in a letter of understanding to implement a joint program on Employee Involvement (EI) for its unionized employees. They jointly provided resources, including both unionized and salaried employees, which would diagnose important training needs and create strategies and programs to meet those needs. It s first step was to form problem solving groups in plants guided by local and national joint steering committees. To build skills in problem solving, these groups had been taught standard analytical tools borrowed from statistical process control and total quality management programs (such as "cause-and-effect diagramming" and cause-unkown diagnosis").

Ford now wanted to expand Employee Involvement to include salaried employees, and to develop problem solving processes that were better suited for their jobs. Ford hoped that these employees and their managers would take more initiative in identifying new opportunities for improvement and tackling them creatively. During a preconsult, they agreed that the Basadur Applied Creativity process, Simplex, seemed highly appropriate for this purpose. This was confirmed during a preliminary training workshop designed to give several key employees some experience with the process and process skills. They agreed on a strategy to train a number of employees in applying the Simplex process and in training others in the company.

The company asked Dr. Basadur if he could invent a way that participants in the training could easily share their training experience with others at work and at home. Because the training is so heavily experiential (that is participants learn by doing, not watching and listening) it was a real challenge to invent a way for this sharing after the training workshop.

Dr. Basadur considered the challenge and then decided to find a way for training participants to involve their colleagues and families and friends in the learning by giving them a questionnaire they could fill out (doing) and discover their own particular process style and at the same time be exposed to the creative process itself. In addition, the workshop participant leading their colleagues through the Profile would get a chance to enhance their own understanding by explaining the process to others. This avoided the participant having to simply try to explain what they had learned with mere words and eased their ability to transfer the learning back on the job and interest and impart enthusiasm to others to come to future training.

Dr. Basadur had a model of learning in mind and instructed a team of McMaster University MBA students to professionalize his hand-written notes. Fortunately, the first thing he tried worked.

The idea was an instant hit. When Dr. Basadur saw the effect it had on conveying the principles of the process, he decided to validate and improve the instrument in research and give it a name: The Basadur CPSP Inventory.

The instrument has gone through 5 improvements to its accuracy over the past 15 years through extensive research with people from around the world and all walks of life.

As a result, the Profile is available in Chinese (simplified and traditional), Turkish, Dutch, Korean, Spanish, German, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Hungarian.  Please call us at 905-690-4903 or email us at info@basadur.com to get more information on the using the Profile in one of these other languages.