What is the Difference Between the Raven’s Progressive and Advanced Progressive Matrices?
Testing lateral thinking in your business - the go-to tools
What is the Difference Between the Raven’s Progressive and Advanced Progressive Matrices?
Lateral Thinking - Which hat do you wear?
The concept of lateral thinking in business is something that many forward-thinking organisations aspire for with their outputs. The origins of lateral thinking stem from Edward de Bono, who wrote ‘Lateral Thinking’ and ‘Six Thinking Hats’. The idea is that lateral thinking forms part of the ‘Creativity Hat’ - the part of the brain that takes problems and creates solutions or ideas for potential solutions through thinking creatively and outside the box.
Lateral thinking plays its part in the creation of new processes, products and communications for businesses. It allows us to look at problems from different angles and derive new viewpoints of a potential problem and solution that can yield insights that we hadn’t thought of in a certain way.
The Raven’s Matrices, an assessment tool used to test an individual's cognitive ability to think laterally, provide two forms of testing to better understand whether an individual has a natural knack for lateral thinking.
Psychological Testing in Business
Psychological testing in business is used widely by high performing companies. In fact, over 60% of mature, well-established businesses within their field use psychological testing when recruiting new talent. Furthermore, research has shown that approximately “80% of Fortune 500 companies use personality tests to assess employees.”
There are of course benefits for psychological testing such as helping to achieve a specific recruitment objective, which informal interview processes can often stray away from. Additionally, these sorts of tests help to remove any form of cognitive bias during the process - a dream for HR professionals, as cognitive bias can occur during the interview process.
Psychological testing looks directly at the specific goal and helps to determine whether or not the individual has the proficiency for learning a skill or utilising cognitive behaviour effectively, without personal or characteristic traits influencing the decision maker's thought process.
The Differences Between the Standard Progressive Matrices and Advanced Progressive Matrices
When it comes to psychological testing for lateral thinking, typically the Raven’s matrices are the go-to testing for many global businesses. However, there are significant differences in both the Standard Progressive Matrices and the Advanced Progressive Matrices in how they are used and why they are used by businesses:
Using the Ravens Matrices Based on Job Roles
The RAVEN’S Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) is used by businesses from junior to mid-weight level roles within a business, while the advanced progressive matrices is used for senior management and to test those with a significantly high level of intelligence to test whether they have a proficiency for lateral or more logical thinking.
Using the Ravens Matrices Based on Cognitive Level
Both tests use three by three grids that show patterns with pieces missing. The idea is that you decipher the missing piece in the trend in order to showcase abstract reasoning skills. For the Advanced Matrices, the difficulty level significantly increases throughout the test in comparison to the standard matrices which maintains a certain level of difficulty. This is used to test proficiency for abstract reasoning with more complex problems, looking to discern whether the individual has the cognitive capabilities to solve complex and new business problems.
Using the Ravens Matrices Based on Career Growth
Because of the differences in difficulty, pattern types and length of the aptitude test, the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices Test (APM III) can be used to understand whether an individual has the cognitive ability to utilise skills senior management require when looking to solve business problems. While Raven’s abstract reasoning test is not the de facto decision-maker in determining whether an individual can move into a new role, it does help with defining the roles and responsibilities of a career path suited to the way in which they think. Additionally, this helps the business to align where the best resources career progression will be maximised for the business, as well as the individual themselves.
Testing Lateral Thinking in Your Business
TalentLens has provided the Raven’s Standard and Advanced Progressive Matrices to local governments, global businesses and educational institutions for over 20 years. For more information please don’t hesitate to get in touch today and learn how you can take your team's professional development to the next level.