Suppose that you wanted to bring an English-language talent & innovator profiling tool to a community of senior public-sector leaders whose inner voice — the voice they think in, joke in, dream in — is Thai. You could translate the test instructions and trust the rest. Or you could accept that cognitive style is too personal a thing to translate after the fact, and rebuild the test in the language your participants actually think in.

In 2017, Thinkergy faced exactly that question. TRIS Corporation, a Thai management consulting and rating agency that has served state agencies, government bodies, and public enterprises for over three decades, had developed an innovation-focused leadership program for senior managers of Thai state-owned corporations and government agencies. TRIS Academy — the firm’s then-newly launched executive education arm — wanted to open the program with a cognitive profiling tool that would give delegates, their HR teams, and their innovation leads sharper insight into their innovator types and creative styles. After learning about and testing TIPS, TRIS Academy made the call quickly: TIPS would become the self-awareness accelerator that kicked off the two-week curriculum.

For Thinkergy, this was the gateway into a sector our direct delivery footprint doesn’t actively reach. Guided by our TIPS Talent & Innovator Profiling System, our team built the first Thai-language version of the TIPS online test, translating not just the briefings but the test items themselves — because a profile only profiles a person honestly if it speaks the language they actually think in. Together with TRIS Academy, we then designed a bespoke administration process to fit the local delivery conditions: a manual, human-scale choreography for distributing the test, processing the results, and handing each delegate their personalized TIPS Talent & Innovator Profile ahead of the workshop day. The format that emerged became a productized Thinkergy offering in its own right — the TIPS Talent & Innovator Profiling Workshop, a highly energetic, edutaining one-day immersion that opens TRIS Academy’s leadership programs to this day.

Across the initial banking-sector rollout, six workshops brought roughly 240 senior executives — 40 per cohort — through TIPS, including talents from the Government Savings Bank of Thailand and the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC). One pivot point in each workshop was the TIPS Line-Up Games, the live-room exercise where delegates physically arrange themselves along the four cognitive-style spectra — Thinking Style, Work Style, Interaction Style, and Lifestyle — and watch their colleagues land at the opposite end of a line they assumed they shared. More than one delegate recognized, in that moment, why a long-running tension with a colleague had never been about competence or goodwill — it had been about cognitive style all along. The TIPS reframe is the quiet one: the colleague you find hardest to work with is often the one whose strengths most precisely complete your own.

The win was layered. TRIS Academy gained a signature opener for their program. Their public-sector clients gained sharper self-awareness, team awareness, and innovation awareness across delegates, HR managers, and innovation leads. And Thinkergy gained a doorway into a sector our direct delivery wouldn’t have opened on its own — proof that the right partner is sometimes the shortest distance between a method and the people who need it.

So, picture your own leadership program, executive education curriculum, or high-potential talent track. What would change if you opened your next cohort with the kind of self-awareness boost that surfaces why the strongest teams are often the ones whose members are most different from each other? Contact us to find out how the TIPS Talent & Innovator Profiling Workshop could give your leaders clarity on themselves, on each other, and on the unique creative contribution only they can make — together.