Q combines psychological analysis tools and coaching techniques in an intuitive, interactive app only available from the Q platform, which is personal to the young person and the unique challenges they face.
Psychology is the science of the mind and behaviour. How someone behaves is fundamental to their success in life and their wellbeing. Behaviour is driven by a complex interaction between who someone is and what life throws at them. Psychology helps them understand this and diagnose what they need to do differently to improve their wellbeing and performance when life gets tricky.
Q provides insight and direction for young people. Knowing who you are and what you need to do is the crucial foundation, but doing it is something altogether different. You often need support. Q’s coaching techniques help the young person articulate and set the goals they want to achieve to improve their wellbeing and performance, and then support them to follow through. It is this combination of the young person both knowing precisely what needs doing and also having the support to actually do it which makes Q so effective. Every sporting champion has a coach behind them.
The tools and techniques Q uses are not new – they are entirely mainstream and have been tried and tested for decades in top level business, professional sport and the military to improve wellbeing and performance. What is new is that Q uses technology for the first time to automate them in an accessible and relevant way specifically for young people.
Because after 30+ minutes of scientific Q&A, Q understands exactly who the young person is – their unique behavioural preferences which were hard-wired into them in their early years and which do not change; what makes them react as they do to situations; the things they prefer to do and they feel natural and comfortable doing. There is nothing good or bad about this, and no judgement. It just shows the young person what makes them uniquely them.
It is this insight and clarity that enables the young person and Q to go on a journey of personal learning and discovery together. Because once Q understands their hard-wiring it can not only predict what situations they will find easy and what situations they will find tricky, but Q can diagnose what they can do to make their life easier and then help them to follow through to make these changes every day. And the natural end result of the young person playing to their strengths and managing their behaviour better will be improved performance and better wellbeing. It’s not rocket science!
Q is delivered, from the Q platform, in the form of an interactive app which young people will be familiar with, but it is so much more because it is personal and bespoke to each young person. Every version of Q is unique because everyone is unique. And Q addresses the ‘hair-on-fire’ issues which young people told us in our research they wanted more support with :
There are dozens of generic self-help apps available which seek to address aspects of what Q deals with, such as confidence building, stress management and mood tracking, and a small number are focused on young people, but the vast majority are designed for adults. And some people may find them of some use some of the time, but they are hit and miss. Because, by nature, generic tools are anything but personal, and do not understand the user or their particular needs. In order to be able to manage the right behaviours you first need to know how you prefer to behave and what it is you need to manage in tricky situations – and if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!
As a personal, bespoke wellbeing and performance self-help technology tool specifically for young people, we are not aware that Q currently has any competitors – but if you think we are wrong, please let us know!
Absolutely not. It is simply enabling parents to equip their child with some tried and tested tools to support them to better manage their own wellbeing and performance as their independence grows. A self-aware child should be more open to, and benefit more from, parental guidance.
Quintillion is run and majority owned by a team of British scientists and business people who came together in 2016 to use technology to repurpose, make relevant and distribute the benefits of psychological analytics, positive psychology and coaching to everyday people. Our wish is to help level the playing field at the meeting point of technology and psychology. You can learn more about the people behind Quintillion and QPathfinder at About Us.
Q uses psychometric profiling to measure specifically, and only, the young person’s unique behavioural ‘predispositions’ (or preferences), which were hard wired into them for life in their early years and do not change. Q measures 18 predispositions, with 10 potential variations of each one – hence there are one billion billion potential combinations of human behavioural predispositions, or a Quintillion. So everyone is unique – or one in a Quintillion. It is OK to feel different and we celebrate that. In fact, the science of success is to play to those differences whilst managing the behavioural blind spots which might otherwise hold you back.
Psychometric assessments are standard and scientific methods used in many walks of life for measuring unobservable psychological phenomena – for example, ability testing at school for verbal and numerical reasoning. Psychometrics are also used extensively for personality assessment by means of a self-report questionnaire, and they range from seemingly fun but worthless online quizzes at one end (which are simply poorly disguised methods of harvesting personal data) to serious, scientifically validated tools at the other. These scientific tools have been used for decades in business, sport and the military for recruitment selection and personal and team development – well known examples include Myers-Briggs, 16 PF, Hogan, OPQ and the California Personality Inventory.
Q uses as its foundation another example of those scientific tools called the GPI, which was developed in the mid-1990’s by our co-founder, Dr Steve Glowinkowski, for use in his consulting business because of his dissatisfaction with the psychometrics commercially available at the time. Dr Glowinkowski has spent the last 25 years developing, testing, norming and refining the GPI, and this has included assessment of, and 1:1 feedback with, around 25,000 senior business people and 12,000 young people.
Using industry-standard validation and reliability measures, the GPI performs exceptionally well against its peer group demonstrating that it, and therefore Q, accurately measures what it purports to measure and that it does this reliably. You can learn more about the science behind Q in The Science.
Q is designed for, and suitable for use by, 12 to early 20 year olds with an English reading age of at least 10 years.
Q is designed to help young people with their everyday challenges. It is not a therapeutic tool and is not designed to help with, or address, mental health issues. That does not mean Q is unsuitable per se for a young person with mental health problems, but each case should be considered on its own merits and therefore Q should only be used by a young person with, or who is showing signs of, mental health problems under the guidance of a qualified mental health professional.
It depends on their level of comprehension and reading ability. Any 12 to early 20 year old with an English reading age of at least 10 years should be able to properly interact with and benefit from Q on their own. And, with the assistance of a trusted adult with reading and comprehension as necessary, most 12 to early 20 year olds with learning disabilities or learning difficulties should also be able to benefit from Q. But each case should be considered on its own merits and therefore we would recommend that Q is only used by a young person with learning disabilities or learning difficulties under the guidance of a qualified professional adviser.
Q’s most active and engaged users tend to be between 13 and 17 years’ old. This reflects how much they are reaching out for support during that period of intense change in particular.
No one – only the young person has access to their Q.
No. Q is a premium and sophisticated personalised pathfinder unlike any other app we know of. Q is available only directly from us through our website and the Q platform.
Q is purchased on a minimum 12 month subscription basis. Thereafter it will run on a per month charged basis unless a request to cancel the subscription is received.
Q is a responsive web app which is accessed over a broadband internet connection – so no internet connection, no Q. Q can be accessed using a mobile internet browser on a touch screen mobile device with a diagonal screen size of at least 4.7 inches. Q is not designed for use on small screens such as wrist wearables. You can find the list of mobile internet browsers currently supported at Technology Required.
The young person will be invited to go through our psychometric questionnaire, which will typically take 30+ minutes. They can save their answers, stop and go back to it at any time. And they can re-do a question if they wish. And once they have finished, their answers will be uploaded to our system and within a minute or two their personal Q will download and away they go. From then on all they will need to do to access Q is enter their username and password. Once the questionnaire has been completed, the young person will never redo it because there is no need – what Q has measured does not change over time.
Our experience is that almost everyone not only finishes the questionnaire but does it in one go. This is because once young people understand what Q is about and the benefits to them, they want to see their outputs from Q as soon as possible. Young people fully appreciate that Q is not a game but deals instead with humankind’s fundamental questions – who am I, why am I here and what is my place in the world. They are also well used to completing questionnaires at school.
If they fake their responses then they are wasting their time and their/your money because Q’s outputs will be inherently flawed – the value of Q’s outputs are entirely dependent on the honesty of the young person’s inputs. But our long experience is that very few users fake, or even try to fake, their responses for two reasons: (1) Because there is no incentive whatever for them to do that because they would be kidding no one but themselves. Q is the opposite of social media – it is private and personal to them and for their benefit, not for another to judge them. Their incentive is to be entirely honest and open. (2) The questions are entirely non-judgemental/non-perjorative and there is no right or wrong answer. Also, the same underlying concept is often investigated on many multiple occasions throughout the questionnaire in quite different ways, and therefore the impact of anomalous answers (deliberate or otherwise) can be smoothed out.
If the young person has issues with understanding questions, yes, but only in so far as is necessary to help their understanding of the questions – the answers to the questions must be their own. No matter how well meaning, answering the questions for the young person would render Q worthless to them – only the young person knows the answers to the questions, and only genuine answers to the questions will produce for them the value in Q.
Everyone is different, and everyone will use Q differently. Our experience is that most young people will spend a reasonable amount of time on Q over the first few weeks as they gradually absorb the insight and understanding, whereas some will just glance at it for a period and then put it down. Some will then engage with it regularly (perhaps several times a week) as part of a continual learning journey, whereas others might only pick it up now and then when they have a hair-on-fire problem they need help to resolve. It depends how interested they are in themselves, the nature of the problems they face from time to time and how important they perceive those problems to be. Q is not a crutch most young people rely on for support all the time and nor is it something most young people look at once and then discard, but sits somewhere in between depending on who they are and what life happens to be throwing at them from time to time. The crux is that Q is there for support when they feel they need it.
Because even though who they are does not change, 12 to early 20 year olds are in a state of continual transition in every other respect. They are not only changing physically, emotionally and socially but life throws very different things at them as they move through various key life stages over that period. Neither they nor their lives stand still, anything but. Q is intended to be there for them when they need it along their journey. But it’s your choice – after the initial 12 months you can cancel your subscription if you think Q is no longer delivering value, and you can always start again entirely afresh if you feel it is necessary.
Q contains interactive coaching tools to keep active users engaged in reaching their particular goals, but the main reason young people will engage with Q from time to time is because they have a problem they want Q’s help to resolve. As one of our users once said ‘It is a wise old owl who knows what is what. It is quiet and just there for you’. We will also be adding new functionality into Q and every existing user will benefit from this.
No. Q emphasises positives and builds potentials – it does not identify shortcomings. Q is wholly positive in tone, sentiment and direction.
No. Although Q is entirely automated and operates without human intervention, it is not a conversational chatbot which throws out artificial intelligence-driven responses to any question it is asked. All enquiries by a user are focused within boundaries which are tightly defined by us and, therefore, Q’s responses are fully and closely controlled by us. And all the connections made and conclusions reached by Q always derive from an enormous database compiled by our human team of expert psychologists.
Yes. And often when young people go through Q it can make them more inclined to share issues and address them because they understand themselves and the situation better.
No, because Q is not a chatbot engaged in a conversation with the young person and so would have no means of knowing if the young person is in difficulty. Q does, however, include flags to users to reach out for help to trusted adults if they are in difficulty and provides contact details for key support agencies such as ChildLine (UK)
We keep the young person’s data entirely private and protected. We and our suppliers only use it ourselves as far as we reasonably need to in order to provide Q to the young person, and we divulge it to no one else.
No, Q is entirely free of advertising.
Q is supported, maintained and hosted in the Cloud in the UK by industry specialists to international standards regarding information security and personal data privacy. All communication is encrypted. Q’s security has been independently penetration tested by industry specialists. User access to Q is governed by the young person’s chosen unique username and password.
Changes of password can be handled by the young person messaging us from within Q. Any other problems can be notified to Customer Services by either the subscriber or the young person by email using the details at Contact us.
You or they should contact Customer Services using the details at Contact us and we will do our very best to resolve things.