The Method
Coherence,
made measurable.
Five years of research, distilled into a single rigorous read. Forced-choice, two-stage, and built on twelve archetypes that have turned up in myth, scripture, and film for as long as we have told stories. Here is exactly how it works, and why you can trust what it finds.
Everything tells three stories
A self, a brand, a company. Each tells a stated story, a lived story, and a perceived one. Trust leaks out of the gap between them. The instrument measures all three.
What it says.
The claim, the deck, the campaign, the careers page, the sentence at the all-hands.
What its people believe.
The version that lives in your staff, execs, and frontline, whether you authorized it or not.
What it actually does.
The ground truth, the decisions made on an ordinary Tuesday, at the counter and in the box.
The terrain of identity
52%Coherence · Fractured
Stated: Fighter·Perceived: Maker·Lived: Ally
A sample brand, read three ways. It says Fighter, it’s seen as Maker, it lives as Ally. Widest divergence: Ally.
Coherence is when the three become one thing.
A structured identity system
Every result resolves through one validated structure: archetypes, a model as old as storytelling and understood on sight. Because a leader and their team already recognise these figures, the read needs no decoding. That is exactly what makes the change it points to easy to act on.
3
Need-states
The drives beneath all behaviour: to care, to create, to conquer.
12
Archetypes
The family-level read: twelve timeless figures, from Sage to Warrior.
36
Avatars
Three distinct faces of each archetype: the personal, earned read.
42,840
Codes
Every ordered three-avatar signature: the fingerprint of one identity.
It reads from the broad to the specific: three needs narrow to twelve archetypes, each archetype opens into three avatars, and your top three avatars combine into one of 42,840 Codes. The further down you go, the more precisely it names a single person, or a single company.
The same three drives are also the three phases of any piece of work. Create is where ideas and craft live, Conquer is where things get driven and decided, and Care is where they land with people. It is the arc under every serious model of how teams contribute, which is why your Code shows not just who you are, but where you pull at work.
The Archetype Map
3 Needs, 12 Archetypes, 36 Avatars
Every archetype in one square. Read left to right by appetite for conflict, Care, then Create, then Conquer, and bottom to top by openness. Each one opens into three avatars.
Appetite for Conflict →
The engine
Narrow, then choose
Stage one: Narrow
Pick a need-state, then tap through twelve rapid cards. The engine scores all thirty-six avatars and surfaces the strongest eight. Breadth, exploration, discovery, the field opens before it closes.
Stage two: Choose
Eight avatars enter a single-elimination bracket, seven head-to-head choices across three rounds. Tension, finality, payoff. Nothing in the identity space does this: others hand you a label; we make you earn a champion.
Brackets are the most-engaged format in sport for a reason: every choice is consequential, and the result is a winner, not a description. We borrowed March Madness for self-knowledge.
The six signals
A personality cannot tell you what it is, it leaves traces. Six of them, read together, give the whole game away, in a brand, a company, or the person across the table.
Purpose
the real reason it believes it exists.
Strength
what it is reliably, unmistakably good at.
Voice
how it speaks, the easiest signal to fake.
Enemy
what it has honestly chosen to stand against.
Shadow
the distortion waiting inside the strength.
Mirror
the idealised self it is reaching to become.
Want the evidence beneath it, the research, the validity, the differentiation engine? Read the science.