Chess teaches you to see the whole board. Wise leaders do the same—before they act, they understand the entire situation.

SMI

Situational Mindsets Indicator

Leader Analysis for Better Decisions

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The Science Behind Better Decisions

  • Awareness must precede decisions and action. You can't choose the right path until you clearly understand the terrain.

  • The Situational Mindsets Indicator (SMI) provides that clarity. It examines the realities surrounding your initiative to reveal opportunities, anticipate risks, and identify the priority that deserves your attention now.

  • Develop your Situational Acumen with an assessment that helps you see more, think more broadly, and act more wisely.

The Six Situational Mindsets

Six distinct perspectives that reveal opportunities, expose risks, and guide wiser decisions.

INVENTING MINDSET

Life Cycle Stage

  • Birth or rebirth

Concern

  • New products/services

Focal Point

  • To improve products and services, gain status as an industry leader, and discover new internal synergies

Activities

  • Review of current products/services for extensions

  • Identify new products and services

  • Utilize new technology

  • Scan current research

  • Identify new synergies

CATALYZING MINDSET

Life Cycle Stage

  • Growth

Concern

  • Sales, market share and position, and customer service and retention

Focal Point

  • To gain and retain customers, surpass the competition, and provide outstanding customer service

Activities

  • Identify key customer audiences

  • Study competitive factors

  • Promote outstanding services

  • Increase market share

  • Increase sales

DEVELOPING MINDSET

Life Cycle Stage

  • Stature

Concern

  • Infrastructure, policy, and accountabilities

Focal Point

  • To develop infrastructure, policies, and systems to ensure accountability, set goals, and deliver high-performance

Activities

  • Determine the right organizational infrastructure and reporting relationships

  • Integrate systems

  • Build a chain of command and accountability to prevent gaps

  • Review and revise policy impact

  • Set goals

  • Allocate resources

PERFORMING MINDSET

Life Cycle Stage

  • Prime

Concern

  • Efficiencies, quality, and profit

Focal Point

  • To improve quality, safety, workflow efficiencies, and remove waste; streamline work processes and improve financial success

Activities

  • Monitor milestones and outcomes

  • Examine workflow barriers, process gaps, and improve cycle time

  • Improve financial results

  • Ensure effective use of resources

  • Improve quality and safety

  • Examine ways to reduce costs

PROTECTING MINDSET

Life Cycle Stage

  • Mature

Concern

  • Culture and talent development

Focal Point

  • To ensure retention of key talent, prepare succession plans; develop talent, and build a high-performing agile culture

Activities

  • Assess current and future talent needs

  • Measure levels of engagement, trust, and commitment

  • Evaluate the effectiveness of the reward
    and promotional practices

  • Support engagement, collaboration, and teaming

  • Sustain a high-performing culture

  • Develop succession plans

  • Develop and retain talent

CHALLENGING MINDSET

Life Cycle Stage

  • Renewal

Concern

  • Opportunities and trends

Focal Point

  • To validate current assumptions, assess current trends; identify potential changes to the business model; discover new niches; and prepare for the future

Activities

  • Identify emerging issues, risks, or ramifications from the environment

  • Check for customer trends and competition

  • Conduct lessons learned from projects and initiatives

  • Identify potential new ventures or niches

  • Recognize potential partners and alliances

  • Project future earnings, market, and regulations

Most leadership assessments explain the leader. The Situational Mindsets Indicator examines the situation

There are many outstanding and helpful leadership assessments such as the MBTI®, DiSC®, the Big Five, and the Leadership Challenge®. All of these explain aspects of the leader. The SMI examines organizational conditions.

Traditional Leadership Assessments

  • Who you are

  • Personality

  • Leadership style

  • Behavioral preferences

  • Competencies

  • Individual strengths

  • How you typically lead

Situational Mindsets

  • What your situation requires

  • Present realities

  • Strategic priorities

  • Organizational conditions

  • Opportunities and risks

  • The next best course of action

  • How you should lead this situation

Who Benefits from the SMI?

Whether you're an executive, manager, project leader, consultant, coach, or HR professional, the SMI helps you identify what matters most, adapt to changing conditions, make wiser decisions, and gain alignment.

Learn more about the Situational Mindsets Indicator and begin your journey to better situational insights today. Whether you are a leader, change agent, coach, project manager, human resources manager, director, incoming leader, sales manager, program manager, or consultant.

  • Make strategic decisions in uncertain environments.

  • Lead organizational change and transformation.

  • Align teams around shared priorities.

  • Manage complex projects and competing demands.

  • Coach and develop leaders.

  • Improve collaboration across functions.

  • Resolve conflict and build alignment.

  • Drive innovation while managing risk.

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How Leaders Have Applied the SMI

Whether leaders make the time or the time makes the leader, what is current counts. Through six powerful Situational Mindsets, leaders learn to navigate complexity, manage competing demands, and avoid common pitfalls. By sharpening their awareness of current realities and practicing mental agility, they elevate their Situational Acumen and identify the best achievable outcomes in rapidly changing conditions.

The SMI:

  • Strengthens leadership

  • Reduces conflict through collaboration

  • Improves teamwork

  • Enhances influencing skills

  • Advances critical thinking

  • Bolsters execution planning

  • Improves coaching

  • Fosters wisdom

Value of Using SMI

The SMI helps decision makers set wise goals using an evidence-based framework. The results are:

  • Clearly connect the dots to craft wise decisions

  • Communicate goals and outcomes effectively

  • Recognize priorities driving others to build alignment

  • Improve collaboration and teamwork

  • Resolve conflict by clarifying priorities, aligning interests, and creating win-win solutions

  • Boost critical thinking

  • Share Situational Acumen to avoid blind spots and deliver results

SMI Application Organizational Results

  • Smart decision making that reduces risks

  • Improves critical and systems thinking

  • Enhances influence and collaboration

  • Demonstrates adaptability and change mastery

  • Recognizes patterns and trends to future-proof decisions

  • Employs situational mindsets to block conflict

  • Maintains a high-performing culture

Get Started Today with a Situational Analysis

Start using the Situational Mindset Indicator today

Reveal your current mindset priority, and focus on what matters most right now.

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Read the Book

Situational Mindsets: Targeting What Matters When it Matters

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Complete the SMI Qualification Program

This self-paced process offers a deeper understanding of the tool and how it supports effective change management, conflict resolution, critical thinking, and influence to gain stakeholder buy-in.

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FAQ

  • Most leaders juggle multiple projects, each shaped by different conditions. The SMI focuses on one specific initiative at a time, helping participants identify their priorities. Applying the framework to a real project gives it immediate relevance and strengthens understanding of how situational mindsets influence action.

  • A Situational Mindset is a filter that collects information. It influences what we notice, what we believe about ourselves, and what we value. Situational Mindsets shape how we respond to the world. They are not fixed. While some mindsets are internal, such as believing you can grow. Others are external – such as customer loyalty, resource availability and talent bench strength.

  • Tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and DiSC measure psychological preferences and communication styles that are internal aspects and relatively stable over time.


    The SMI is different. It examines external realities—changing conditions, challenges, emerging risks, and budding opportunities—and strengthens agility in response. It focuses on current organizational conditions and opportunities or data. Situational Mindsets shift in response to changing conditions. less on personal preferences and more on what the situation requires now.

  • Team leaders, project managers, directors, change agents, executives or those responsible for producing outcomes. It is an effective coaching tool for those striving to improve their effectiveness.

  • Yes. Experience and current responsibilities influence analysis, performance metrics, peers, and incentives. For example, marketing professionals are most often rewarded for using the Catalyzing Situational Mindset, while finance professionals gain praise for the Performing Situational Mindset.

  • No. All are needed and effective. Just as the right response to a fire depends on the type of fire and level of risk, the appropriate Situational Mindset depends on current conditions. Context counts.

  • Organizations move through predictable stages: start-up, rapid growth, stability, maturity, and ultimately renewal or decline. It mirrors in many respects our human life cycle. Recognizing the current stage affects decision making. The priorities in a start-up differ significantly from those of a large established organization.

  • Most participants finish in 14–18 minutes. The report is generated immediately and is available for download for 30 days. Reviewing it carefully increases insight and impact.

  • Yes. The SMI demonstrates strong face and content validity. And, it has a high reliability coefficient of .913.

  • "Enterprise" emphasizes seeing the whole board before acting  It also applies to nonprofit, governmental, volunteer, or for-profit organizations. It can also mean a project team, department or a whole organization. Each segment must consider all risks, resources, and opportunities tied to a goal.

  • Our privacy policy ensures that:

    • Personal information is never retained, sold, traded, or rented.

    • Scores are not linked to names or email addresses.

    • Participants may use a number or identifier instead of a name.

    • Demographic data is collected anonymously for research purposes only.

    • Normative data is available online.