We often relate psychological health to psychological problems, but every solution to a psychological problem also tells the story of a psychological skill or capacity. 

- Moving through depression requires self understanding, self-acceptance and becoming connected to a feeling of purpose and of worth. 

- Conquering anxiety can require a great deal of courage, willingness to move into unknown territory, self-encouragement and a strong belief that it makes sense to work for a better tomorrow. 

- Managing stress requires a good understanding of how the body and the nervous system work and of how our inner psychological experiences change, when met with challenges and adversity. 
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If we want to help employees thrive, prevent work stress, these are the skills and capacities we should support our employees in developing. Now, there are two points worth noticing here.

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1: Psychological skills and capacities are not only pivotal to the prevention of stress and other psychological problems, - they are highly beneficial for the general health and growth of an organization.

Organizations need nothing more than employees that have a good understanding of themselves, that know how to consciously handle difficult work situations, that are self-encouraging, that believe in working towards a better tomorrow, that have the courage to explore unknown opportunities and that are soundly connected to a sense of purpose with their work.

From this perspective, it becomes very clear that preventive work can be viewed as developmental work. Something that has a great purpose in itself and perhaps should be an integral part of any organizational culture.

2: All the psychological skills and capacities mentioned above reside in and relate to the personal inner world of the single individual. Psychological development is a personal journey and not something that can and should be controlled or mechanized. To develop these kinds of skills and capacities we need an experience of autonomy, a feeling that we in ourselves own the sovereignty over our inner psychological experience and development. Because this kind of development can require an experience of autonomy and sometimes anonymity and because it is a long-term project, a weekend course or top-down regulations often will fall short.

Traditionally gathering psychological data on employees have been concerned with describing personality traits and intelligence quotients. The organizational aim of such an endeavor has been to hire the right people and help employees develop in certain areas. Almost all of the interview tools, batteries, tests and examinations are based on question items addressing different psychological constructs from different angles. The design aim of these tests is to be accurate and to precisely describe a trait, tendency or capacity of the individual under scrutiny.

Let us address some of the challenges that this most dominant traditional approach entails.

The purpose of an accurate description of the psychological traits of another human being is to obtain some kind of control. This works for most areas of science, like physics and biology, but it can become problematic when in the field of psychology and human behaviour. When we introduce the idea of control into the field of psychology, we automatically end up treating the free human subject as an object. While this is possible to do, it does not form a supportive environment for psychological development; the pillar on which all preventive interventions should be built. So we must ask: How can we gather actionable data that does not objectify our subjects, but engages them and supports their experience of autonomy and their right to anonymity?

With AVi ARCHIVE we have integrated psychological `data generation´ into our lessons about different psychological topics.

- This approach creates a unique opportunity to support our users in sharing their thoughts, feelings and experiences. When a user is guided through thinking about a psychological concept eg. authority, communication, role ambiguity, experienced justice; they are greatly aided in expressing themselves about these topics. Asking people to learn about a topic and then meditate on their experiences before answering a few questions, would never make sense in an ordinary questionnaire, but because we integrate the survey with the lesson, this approach becomes feasible.

- When we ask our users about their experiences, they have the opportunity to become engaged with the change and development they hope to see in their workplace. With this approach, our users' autonomy is preserved and we avoid treating our users as objects.

- Because the survey module is separated from the app, we collect no personal information/data about our users, other than their workplace or department. In this way, anonymity is preserved which further supports our users in feeling free to share experiences, that might otherwise be difficult to share.