Five years later, she still remembered.

Not long ago I ran into a former colleague — someone I hadn't worked with in five years. Within a minute she smiled and said,

Ahh, that's right — you're an Owl (Analytical, if you prefer the formal name).

Think about that. Of everything we build in our working lives — the decks, the plans, the reorgs — almost none of it survives five years in anyone's memory. But one shared vocabulary about how we each work did. That's what this tool is.

Where it started

I first learned this framework from Mark Nevins, who came in to facilitate a session with my leadership team. We were, frankly, skeptical — seasoned operators have seen plenty of personality frameworks come and go. That skepticism didn't last the morning. The model gave us plain language for friction we'd all felt but never named, and it changed how we ran our meetings almost immediately.

So we scaled it. Hundreds of employees took the assessment. Everyone got a sticker for their laptop. The styles became emojis in our Slack. What began as a workshop became part of the culture — a shorthand you'd hear in hallways and see in how people opened conversations with each other.

In twenty-five years of leading technology and operations teams, I've watched a lot of tools come through the door. This is the one that people actually embrace — and the one whose impact kept outrunning my expectations.

Why I built this

That experience took a skilled facilitator, executive sponsorship, and a real budget. Most teams will never have those — and they shouldn't have to.

I'd imagined a self-serve version of this for years, ever since watching a room full of people take the assessment and light up comparing results. I'm a technology executive; I haven't written code for a living in a long time. What changed is AI. Working with Claude Code, an idea I'd carried around for years became a working product — built nights and weekends, without a team.

So that's what this is: the team experience I saw work, made simple enough that any team lead can run it — no facilitator required. Take the assessment, see your team on one map, and get practical guidance for every pairing of styles on it.

The model's roots

The framework here builds on the social styles research tradition begun by industrial psychologists David Merrill and Roger Reid in the 1960s — two observable dimensions of behavior, four styles, no good or bad answers. Our assessment items and guidance are original work. This site is independent and not affiliated with any other assessment provider. And a permanent ground rule: results are for self-awareness and teamwork, never for hiring or evaluation.

About me

I've spent my career leading technology and operations teams — and I'm an Owl, which will surprise no one who reads this site's documentation. You can find me on LinkedIn.

With thanks to Mark Nevins, who first showed me what this framework can do for a team.