The five parts

1. 01

   Ingredients 15 dimensions

   What we ask about.

2. 02

   Trade-offs 12 tensions

   What the ingredients mean once they interact.

3. 03

   Postures 8 signatures

   How you move through the world.

4. 04

   Flavours 16 in 5 groups

   Who you are most like.

5. 05

   The output Your persona

   All of it, together.

01 · Ingredients

Fifteen things we measure

Each one is scored from 0 to 100. We ask about each in three ways: what you prefer, what you did in a real situation, and what you want to be known for.

The three answers rarely match. The gaps between them are useful. They show us where the story an organisation tells itself is different from the story it is actually living.

No score is good or bad on its own. A high score is a choice, not a win. Fifty is also a choice - usually a sign that the organisation has not decided, or cannot agree.

Try one · Pace

Drag the handle. The caption is not a score or a grade. It describes what living at that setting tends to cost.

All fifteen

02 · Trade-offs

Twelve trade-offs

A single measure alone tells you very little. What matters is how ingredients combine. We look at twelve well-known strategic trade-offs - the kinds of tensions every organisation lives with.

Two ingredients can combine in ways that create a new signal. Fast pace is interesting. Fast pace with a short horizon is extractive. The combination says more than either measure alone.

All twelve

Each trade-off runs between two poles. Most organisations sit somewhere in between.

• Extract

  Exploration vs Exploitation

  Explore
• Max output

  Resilience vs Performance

  Survive shocks
• Say ≠ do

  Coherence

  Say = do
• Rigid

  Adaptability

  Nimble
• Distributed

  Power Concentration

  Concentrated
• Incremental

  Innovation Posture

  Invents
• Restrained

  Market Aggression

  Aggressive
• Thin culture

  Cultural Density

  Thick culture
• Analyse

  Execution Bias

  Ship
• Short-term

  Strategic Patience

  Long-game
• Hardened

  Vulnerability

  Exposed
• Protects core

  Creative Destruction

  Cannibalises

03 · Postures

Eight ways you show up

The trade-offs describe what you are trying to do. The postures describe how you move through the world. Eight relationships every organisation has, whether it notices them or not.

Two organisations can have the same ingredients and still be very different because of how they handle failure, or how they treat outsiders, or what they do when the pressure is on.

04 · Flavours

Sixteen Flavours. Five groups

Flavours are pulls, not boxes. Most organisations sit between two of them, sometimes across two different groups. The pull says more than any single name.

Read the group first. Each group has its own way of winning and its own way of failing. The named Flavour tells you which variant of the group you lean toward.

A note on coherence

Does what you say match what you do?

Most organisations describe themselves in the language of who they want to be. They act in the language of who they are. The distance between those two is the coherence signal.

A high coherence score does not mean you are virtuous. It means your profile can be read at face value. A low score does not mean the profile is wrong - it means you need to read it with care. The diagnostic uses coherence to weight confidence in every other number on the page.

05 · The output

All five parts, together

The diagnostic shows all five parts at once: a ingredients breakdown, a trade-offs map, a posture signature, an Flavour pull, a coherence score. None of them is the answer on its own. The answer is the pattern they make together.

Two organisations can land on the same Flavour and mean very different things by it. One got there through rigour. The other through fear. The persona is what tells them apart.

How to read it

1. 01

   Start with the trade-offs, not the ingredients.

   A measure on its own can mislead you. The same Pace score means different things depending on the Horizon it is paired with. Read the tensions first.

2. 02

   Look at the gap before the score.

   Coherence is the most useful number on the page. A score of 60 with a big gap between what you say and what you do is not really a 60 - it is a blind spot.

3. 03

   Read the group before the Flavour.

   Most organisations sit between two Flavours. The group tells you more about posture than the specific name. Use the name as a variant, not a label.

When to use it

Seven moments when a persona of your organisation earns its place.

• Before a strategy offsite. Everyone walks in with a different picture of the organisation. Start the conversation from a common one.
• During a restructure. Know what you are reshaping before you redraw the lines. Avoid breaking the parts that actually work.
• After a leadership change. Understand the place the new leader is inheriting, not just the place the CV describes.
• In a merger or acquisition. Compare two personas side by side before the integration plan is written. See where the cultures will grind.
• When modelling competitors or partners. Build a persona for another organisation from public signals. See how they tend to decide, where they are rigid, where they will move.
• Before a wargame or scenario exercise. Run your persona against other Flavours under pressure. See how your strategy holds up before the real version arrives.
• When the same patterns keep repeating. Why do we always slow down at the same point? Why do good plans stop shipping? The persona usually explains why.

What you get

The diagnostic takes about 18 minutes. The persona it produces is yours to keep and put to work. Four things you walk away with.

One tool runs on top of the persona: the wargame, for putting your persona against other Flavours under pressure.

None of this is worth much untested, so we tested it and published what broke. What held, what broke, and what we still cannot say is the evidence page, with the four study reports underneath it.