Assessments
A five-minute reflection tool that gives your forum shared language for the inner patterns everyone brings into the room.
Any assessment does two useful things. It gives you words for something you half-knew about yourself, and it gives a group permission to talk about that something without anyone going first. The MBTI is the familiar example. If you have ever read your four-letter type and thought "that's me," you know the first benefit — and if a colleague's type ever explained a friction you couldn't name, you know the second. Both are real. Neither depends on the assessment being scientifically precise, and most popular assessments are not.
The perils are just as real, and the MBTI shows those too. A label hardens into an identity — "I'm an INTJ, this is how I am" instead of "this describes tendencies I can work with." Members start diagnosing each other, which turns a mirror into a weapon. And a rough tool gets treated as measurement, even though a large share of people who retake the MBTI land on a different type within weeks.
So a simple frame: an assessment is a mirror, not a gauge. Look into it, notice what you notice, and hold the categories loosely. Use the language on yourself. Let others use it on themselves.
IIThe Saboteur framework (Chamine 2012) is a practitioner reflection tool that gives groups shared language for common inner patterns. It is not independently validated as a psychometric instrument, and we do not use it as measurement.
Given that caveat — which applies in some form to every popular assessment in the table below — we chose this one for forum use, for three reasons.
It names patterns, not types. Most assessments tell you what kind of person you are. This one names habits of mind that show up under pressure — which fits what forums actually work on. A type is something you have to live with. A pattern is something you can catch in the act.
The names work mid-meeting. "My Hyper-Rational wants to skip past the feelings here" is a sentence a member can say during a presentation. Naming a pattern out loud creates a little distance from it. No other assessment on the list produces language that portable.
It costs almost nothing. Five minutes, free, taken privately. Your individual results stay yours. The forum sees only an anonymous count of which patterns appear in the room.
IIITwo steps, about ten minutes total. First take Chamine's free assessment on the Positive Intelligence site. Then report just your top three patterns here, anonymously — your forum name and three dropdowns. No scores are collected, and nothing is attributed to you.
1 · Take the assessment 2 · Report your top threeMarked complete on this browser.
This page remembers completion on this browser only. If you use another device, it won't know — one submission per person is on the honor system, which is how the whole forum works anyway.
The honest comparison, in three groups. The reflection tools popular in coaching and team settings. The instruments companies use to sort and select people. And the two scientific benchmarks every assessment gets measured against.
| Assessment | What it names | Label behaves as | Evidence status | In a forum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saboteurs | Habits of mind under pressure — ten named patterns | A pattern you catch, not a type you are | Vendor whitepaper only. The one independent analysis found two broad clusters, not ten | Language usable mid-meeting. Aggregates without exposing anyone |
| MBTI | Preference type — sixteen four-letter types | A fixed identity | Poor retest reliability. Large shares of retakers get a different type within weeks | Fun to compare, hard to act on. Types explain rather than change behavior |
| DiSC | Work style — four behavioral tendencies | A style you have | Better internal consistency than MBTI. Still a typology with limited predictive evidence | Useful for how members like to communicate. Little to say about being stuck |
| Enneagram | Core motivation — nine types with wings | A deep identity | Weak. Origins are spiritual-traditional rather than empirical | Rich for members drawn to it. The depth invites the armchair-diagnosis problem |
| CliftonStrengths | Talents — top five of thirty-four themes | An asset list | The strongest vendor research program among the reflection tools. Still proprietary, not independent | Good for what members bring. By design it has no language for what gets in the way |
| What companies use to sort people | ||||
| Hogan | Everyday personality, values, and derailers under stress | A risk and fit profile | A serious validation program. Widely used and defended for executive selection | Its derailers cover similar ground to saboteurs, but it is costly, proprietary, and built for evaluation rather than peer reflection |
| Predictive Index | Behavioral drives — dominance, extraversion, patience, formality | A workplace behavior profile | Validated for hiring and job fit. Long track record in industry | Built to match candidates to roles. Sorting is the opposite of what a peer room of equals is for |
| The scientific benchmarks | ||||
| Big Five | Five continuous personality traits | Scores on spectrums, not a type | The scientific standard. Replicated for decades across cultures | Solid but inert. A trait score gives a member nothing to say in a stuck moment |
| IQ | General cognitive ability | A single ranked score | The strongest psychometric credentials of any assessment, full stop | A ranking, not a language. Comparing scores would corrode the peer equality a forum runs on |
Reading down the last column explains the choice. The validated instruments measure and sort — that is what they are for, and a forum is not for that. Among the reflection tools, saboteur language is the only entry built to name what stuckness looks like from the inside, and to be said out loud, about oneself, in the room.