# team work tips for ENTP and a Si-Dom



## olonny (Jun 9, 2014)

Hello Si-users.

I've come here for some help and feedback on how to approach this function. Let me explain.
I am a language teacher currently working on practice. My job is to create original and different classes for students to learn a foreign language (English). I am Ne-dom as you can guess from my being an ENTP and I use a lot of Ni and Ti especially when it comes to languages. Thinking outside of the box, looking for things in an original way, trying the unexpected has always been very easy to me (but, yeah, my organizing skills are horrible :laughing: ). 

The thing is, now I need to do work team with this workmate who is some sort of Si-dom and who is at a loss when it comes to using Ne and Ni. Moreover, I'm verbally extroverted, I work better when in a group where I can express my ideas out loud and I'm an auditory learner (meaning, I understand information better when I hear it) whereas he is an introverted who needs to understand things inside his head before expressing them out loud and who's a visual leaner (he understands info better when he reads it or sees some sort of diagrams or pictures). So, as you can see we are totally different and we basically don't understand each other. For the time being there's only the two of us, so there's no way we can switch partners. And I like challenges and I believe he's not a bad guy, so I would really like to give him a try as a coworker. 
For those of you, mainly introverts, with a strong Si and/or lack of Ne/Ni, or who know a lot about this, my questions are the following:
- You tend to rely on your past experiences so, how do you come up with an original idea, something you've never seen before? 
- How would you like to be approached when explaining/sharing totally new and different activities you've never experienced before? 
- From where do you normally start your brainstorming? 

Any other feedback on Si vs. Ne-Ni in a working environment is more than welcome :happy:


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## jcal (Oct 31, 2013)

olonny said:


> You tend to rely on your past experiences so, how do you come up with an original idea, something you've never seen before?


Contrary to the popular (mis)perception, everything we do does not have to come solely from our past experience. We primarily use our past experience as a reference point for navigating the present. Think of it as determining true north before we set out on a journey. Also, don't forget that the "past" is fluid and includes the totality of our experience... even that which we have JUST experienced. 

We come up with new ideas either by brute force (Te crunches through multiple re-arrangements of what we know until we hit a combination that solves the problem at hand), or we do it the same way you do... via Ne. Our issue with Ne is that we don't trust it and will never directly run with a Ne inspiration... we end up taking what Ne comes up with and running it through the Te gauntlet to prove to ourselves that it works.



> How would you like to be approached when explaining/sharing totally new and different activities you've never experienced before?


Explain the root issue objectively, explain why you think your solution will address that problem, then step away. DO NOT expect or press for instant concurrence. If you insist on an instant evaluation, your idea stands a great chance of being rejected out of hand. Give us time/space to evaluate your idea, just as we would do with our own. We might concur, we might not... but if we don't concur with your exact solution we likely will be able to give you specific tweaks that will fix whatever problems we found during our evaluation. 



> From where do you normally start your brainstorming?


There needs to be a specific and well-defined problem to be solved. It takes a lot of effort to solve problems by my preferred brute force data crunching and I don't like wasting it on frivolous issues. 

Once the problem is defined, if it's a group brainstorming session, don't expect me to be throwing out a constant stream of random, unvetted ideas to the group. I don't like to offer ideas I haven't done my due diligence on. Remember... I don't trust my intuition very much at all. It's more likely that I will take in my own ideas and those of the rest of the group and not say much at all until I've crunched all the data and have a fully baked, fully vetted solution to offer.


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