Composite Driver Thinking Profile
Lumping drivers together in a group and calling it an average driver thinking brain profile just didn’t sit very well with me.
I have been hard pressed to find the right word to use for what I want to share here and eventually decided on Composite: “aggregate of more than one sampling effort” / “a conceptual whole made up of complicated and related parts”
That sorta comes reasonably close to what I’m dealing with, NOT wanting to describe a group of drivers as “average”. NO driver is average! In fact, every driver is very, very unique, not only in his thinking but also in his view of himself and his reality when interacting with others on the road.
Since March 2009 I have been doing thinking profiles on my learner drivers albeit on a selective basis where clients agreed that the benefit to them would be to cut down on their training time since I would be able to diagnose their challenges easier, custom-fit my communication and training and such, once I had insight to their natural thinking preferences, As of 1 August 2010 I announced that all new clients would need to do one of these profiles and I must say, the response has been overwhelming with positive feedback.
So here I am, 18 months later to give you some brief insight into the driver thinking you deal with on our South African roads…a composite of the profiles I’ve done as a summary of this logitudinal project.
Looking at the composite profile image you’ll note that even though vast differences in thinking preference may exist between drivers tested, the overall dominance is overwhelmingly Left Brain orientated, subject to change as the sample size increases, of course. 
So what does that say and how do you and I use it?
Group 1 may…
Group 2 may…
Group 3 may…
Group 4 may…
Now here’s the implication – ALL of these groups are on the road all at once! ALL of these groups display a combination of these thinking and behaviours differently in different situations.
Now if that isn’t enough, you still have something else in common with other drivers. You all have your own comfort zone on the axes of Control-Identity Type scale. You may want to recap on my posts about driver brain profile and your driving.
So where does that leave you? IN THE MIDDLE…displaying your own unique combo!
Here’s the beauty…
Once you know what the others are up to and that each of us have different reactions, using the same set of potential behaviours, I can train you MUCH better to manage out there…considering that your licence is worth all of 40 minutes of your whole life out on the road.
