TESTS AND PROGRAMS

Diagnostic and Analytical Tools

ADIN offers four interconnected instruments of narrative diagnostics. Each measures a distinct dimension of a person’s or team’s narrative reality. Together they provide a complete picture — from an individual’s narrative profile to the living narrative space of an entire organization.

These instruments do not replace one another — they complement each other. They can be applied sequentially or selectively, depending on the task.

The key distinction between the instruments: TIN™measures how a person interprets the world (a stable trait), while SN — Status Narrative — measures which story they are living in right now (a dynamic state). These are two different dimensions that together produce a complete narrative map.

Test of Narrative Intelligence

What is your narrative profile? TIN™ — the Test of Narrative Intelligence, a methodology developed within the ADIN ecosystem.

The individual TIN™ assessment identifies a person’s type of narrative thinking, level of narrative maturity, and time orientation — three independent dimensions that together provide not a diagnosis but an entry point: not “go develop yourself in general,” but a specific route this particular person should start from. The group version, GTIN, aggregates participants’ individual profiles into a team map: distribution of thinking types, zones of risk and conflict, and hidden resources.

What the Result Shows

The test result is a person’s narrative profile across three independent dimensions, each answering a distinct question.

Type of narrative thinking — how a person works, by default, with the story unfolding around them and with their environment.

Time orientation — which point in time a person builds their narratives from.

Level of narrative maturity — how consciously they manage this.

How It Works

The test is taken entirely online — 51 questions, 18–20 minutes. Participants receive a personal access code by email and take the test in a browser on any device. A concise PDF report arrives by email within minutes of completion. The methodology draws on the convergence of several independent research traditions — those of Jerome Bruner, Martin Seligman, David Kolb, Dan McAdams, and Philip Zimbardo. The test was developed under the auspices of the Association de l’Intelligence Narrative® and is under active scientific development.

Group Report

The GTIN group report is an analytical map of a team’s narrative profiles. It is not a sum of individual reports — it is a diagnosis of the team as a system. GTIN aggregates participants’ individual profiles into a team map: distribution of thinking types, zones of risk and conflict, and hidden resources.

The report is built on three dimensions of each participant’s individual profile — type of narrative thinking, level of maturity, and time orientation — and shows how these dimensions interact at the level of the team as a whole. The distribution of the four types of narrative thinking — who interprets by default and how, which types dominate and which are missing. Team-wide levels of narrative maturity — how consciously participants manage their narrative reactions. The team’s time-orientation profile across the five ZTPI factors — which point in time the team makes decisions from. A radar chart of the five NI competencies — where the team’s collective strength lies and where the systemic gaps are.

Based on these four layers of data, an ADIN specialist identifies three zones: risk zones — systemic vulnerabilities built into the current team composition; conflict zones — pairs or groups of participants with high narrative tension; and hidden resources — capacities the team is not using but already possesses.

The group report shows the team’s systemic patterns as a whole; it does not replace individual diagnostics for each participant and is not used for personnel decisions. It is a tool for development, not for evaluation. The map is the first step — an inventory at the team level. It is followed by ADIN’s four-stage method, applied to the team as a unit of development.

Where to Use TIN™ and GTIN™

Managing change and uncertainty, transformation programs.

Leadership programs and crisis management.

Developing narrative thinking.

Team understanding and cross-cultural communication.

SN™ and GSN™ — Narrative Status

Before making a decision, a person tells themselves a story. About what is happening. About why it is happening. About what is possible and what is not. A separate instrument — the Narrative Status assessment (SN at the individual level, GSN at the group level) — reveals which story a person or team is living in right now: from a narrative of survival and struggle to a narrative of building and mission, regardless of what is stated aloud. Neither result is a verdict: the type does not assess a person’s worth, and the maturity level does not describe a “better” person, only the degree to which they consciously manage their own interpretations. Narrative status is a diagnosis of the stories people are living in right now — the narratives governing their behavior, decisions, and relationship to the future. The group-level narrative status is not a satisfaction survey or a personality test. It is a study of an organization’s living narrative space: the stories that determine how people act, collaborate, and respond to change.

A whole team rarely lives inside just one narrative. The study reveals the narrative landscape — where the fault lines between people run, where the hidden resources are, and where the entry points for change lie.

Most Effective For

Strategic change.

Declining engagement.

Team conflicts.

Foresight preparation.

New team formation / onboarding.

Narrative Leadership

NI for Executives and Management Teams

“A leader’s task is to define reality. Everything else is service” — this formula explains why management begins not with process but with meaning. Between how a leader sees themselves and how their team reads their decisions lies a gap — and it is a gap in narrative, not in competence. The program gives leaders a tool for seeing their own management profile, their blind spots, and the natural points of tension with their team — and for turning that understanding into more precise decisions, role allocation, and conflict management.

Narrative intelligence in management operates simultaneously on three levels: the leader’s personal narrative — the story of who they are and why they lead, which is transmitted through behavior in a crisis more precisely than any psychological test; the team’s narrative — the stories of who the hero here is, what is accepted, and what is feared; and the organizational narrative — what is usually called corporate culture, but is more accurately described as a system of stories that works around the clock and shapes people’s behavior wherever policy has no power.

One of the main causes of an engagement crisis is a crisis of meaning: people don’t know why they are here because no one has told them a story worth believing in. The leader of the future is, above all, a narrative architect: someone who answers the question “why are we doing this” in a way that captivates rather than merely informs, and who sees that behind every team conflict lies a clash of narratives, not a difference of opinion.

For: senior and middle management, functional and project leaders, HR partners to management teams.

NI in Education and Upbringing

There are teachers people remember for a lifetime — not because they knew their subject best, but because after their class something changed, not in the volume of knowledge, but in the way of looking at the world. Real education does not happen when a student memorizes information — it happens when knowledge becomes part of how they think and see themselves. The program teaches exactly this shift — from transmitting information, which today can be obtained faster and more cheaply from a browser, to working with the one thing technology cannot do: creating a living connection between a person and knowledge.

The narrative approach to teaching works on three levels at once. The narrative of the subject — the story of how it came to be, the question around which it was born: physics stops being formulas and becomes the story of people searching for a single law of the world. The narrative of the student — the story they already arrived in class carrying: “I have no talent for math” is most often the result of a single remark from a teacher that became part of their identity, and the teacher’s task is to provide an experience that disproves that story. The narrative of the class — the group’s shared story of who is strong here, who is weak, and what is valued.

Motivation is a consequence, not a cause; the cause is meaning. A student who understands why they are studying a subject does not need a system of rewards — they need challenging problems.

For: teachers, corporate trainers, HR and L&D specialists, facilitators.

NI for HR and PR

The same principle — managing meaning, not just information — operates on two different fronts: inside the company and outside it.

Inside, it is a tool for HR and training: how to make development programs compelling and genuinely behavior-changing, rather than merely “attended.” Outside, it is a tool for PR and marketing, built on a simple observation: people don’t buy what you make, they buy why you make it, and they don’t form attachments to a product — they form attachments to the story the product tells about them. Any strong brand can be broken down as a story: a hero (not the brand, but the customer), their desire, an obstacle, a tool (the brand as a bridge between “who I am” and “who I want to be”), and a transformation — and if there is no transformation, the brand degrades into a commodity distinguishable only by price.

A company’s reputation is built from several overlapping narratives: what society thinks of it, what employees say about its culture from the inside, what its leader says about themselves and whether that matches their actions, and what story the market launches at the moment of crisis. A crisis is not a failure — it is a competition of stories: the winner is not the one who defends themselves the loudest, but the one who is first to offer an honest, well-structured account of what happened.

For: HR departments, PR and marketing teams, communications departments.

Narrative Future

crisis-recovery program

A program for teams stuck in a narrative of survival — when there is no energy left for positivity and the future feels threatening or uncertain. A crisis is not a resource problem but a problem of meaning: a team stuck in the narrative of its past is physically unable to see future opportunities, even when they are obvious from the outside.

This is not about the team’s weakness or a lack of motivation. Even a destructive narrative provides a foothold: it is familiar, predictable, and understandable, and uncertainty frightens people more than pain does — which is exactly why attempts to impose positivity from the outside usually fail and are met with weary skepticism: “we’ve already tried that.” The program does not hand out ready-made answers and does not force optimism. It helps the team first honestly name the crisis narrative out loud — because a crisis that is never declared over continues — then find resourceful stories from its own past: moments when the team already overcame something that seemed impossible. Only after that does it move to a narrative of the future, through an honest bridge: “we went through this, it taught us that, now we can.”

For: management teams in crisis, burnout, or loss of direction.