Characteristics
- Investigators are individuals who need to gather as much information as possible before making a decision.
- They are most comfortable when they feel that they have all the information they need to make a decision – trusting in the integrity of the information they have gathered.
- These individuals have a high capacity for taking on a lot of information and processing things quickly.
- In their decision-making, they most likely value logic over emotion, because they perceive emotions as too subjective and unreliable.
- This is not to say that they lack emotion – they just have a stronger preference for objective information that is not clouded by sentiment.
- They are very time-conscious and understand the need for quick decision-making.
Beliefs
- They don’t believe there is such a thing as “too much data” when making a decision.
- To them, people who don’t make an effort to gather information before making decisions are reckless and cannot be trusted.
- They usually believe that anyone who manages to make a decision which turns out to be successful without much information was probably lucky.
Fears
They are afraid of missing any important information that could make a crucial difference to the outcome of a decision.
Justification statement
“With the amount of information available to humanity these days, there’s really no excuse for making uninformed decisions.”
Strategy for growth
Investigators will need to learn that they can never have “all” the information they need for decisions. As people capable of making quick decisions, they need to leverage this aspect of their decision style and learn to start trusting their intuition more.
All human beings have traits of all the decision types, but we all have a dominant type which we use and rely upon more than the others.