Background
What kind of tool is the Diversity Icebreaker?
At first glance, the Diversity Icebreaker® may resemble well-known personality assessments such as MBTI or DISC. However, unlike those instruments, the Red, Blue, and Green dimensions are not derived from traditional psychological personality theories. Instead, they are based on how people commonly describe communication styles.
This makes the tool easy to understand, intuitive to use – and at the same time a powerful starting point for reflection, learning, and dialogue in groups. Developed in a Norwegian context, the Diversity Icebreaker has been a market leader in Norway for over a decade. More than 500,000 have completed the questionnaire, and we estimate that around 13,000 seminars have been conducted over the past 20 years.
From Norway to the World
The Diversity Icebreaker has now been used in more than 80 countries and remains the only original Norwegian HR concept to have achieved such international reach. It has been applied by several renowned academic institutions, including Oxford University, Yale University, IMD, INSEAD, and the Centre for Creative Leadership, as well as by global organizations such as the UN Climate Secretariat in Bonn.
A Cross-Disciplinary Foundation
The Diversity Icebreaker concept is best understood as a cross-disciplinary framework, combining insights from sociology, linguistics, and educational theory – beyond traditional personality psychology. Since 2006, the concept has been presented at numerous academic and professional conferences, and it has inspired a range of research studies, journal articles, and books in international contexts.
A Structured and Engaging Seminar Format
The Diversity Icebreaker is typically delivered through a structured seminar format that begins with participants completing the Diversity Icebreaker questionnaire to map their preferences across the Red, Blue, and Green communication styles. These three dimensions are then used in group exercises – sometimes within groups sharing similar preferences, and sometimes in mixed groups.
Each seminar concludes with a collective reflection on how participants have co-created meaning through the experience. Together, they develop a shared language for diversity, with categories that are equal in value and complementary in nature, promoting a culture of inclusion, respect, and learning.
Trait-Based – Not Typological
The Diversity Icebreaker is a trait-based tool that shows individual differences through relative distributions across three dimensions. Each person therefore receives a unique profile, indicating their degree of preference on each dimension.
This approach shares similarities with the Big Five personality model – a widely recognized trait-based framework – and stands in contrast to typological models such as MBTI and DISC, where individuals are classified into a fixed type or category. Trait-based models offer a more nuanced and flexible understanding of human variation, providing a solid foundation for communication, collaboration, and group learning.
Research and New Directions
The internationalization of the Diversity Icebreaker began in 1999, when Bjørn Z. Ekelund of Human Factors AS introduced the concept to help build a shared platform across cultures in connection with OSCE’s democracy development projects in Bosnia.
In recent years, new research and applications have emerged in several countries, exploring how the Diversity Icebreaker can contribute to value creation across cultures. The most recent international research is led by Dr. Rob Elkington at Trent University (Canada), who investigates alternative worldviews rooted in collectivist cultures – perspectives that may be key to a more sustainable and ecologically oriented future.
His studies in Norway have examined how Kwame Dako, a Norwegian-Ghanaian leader in a Norwegian municipality, has integrated South African Ubuntu philosophy into Diversity Icebreaker seminars involving more than 2,500 employees, creating a powerful link between local organizational development and global cultural wisdom.