Why the Throughline
At lunch with a friend she shared she’d taken her personality assessments and put them into Claude to look for the throughline. She got me thinking about what mine might say.
I went looking for the evidence and found a bunch of assessments. CliftonStrengths from a job I left. A Kolbe from a coach. My Enneagram number, which I have said at parties for years without ever having read anything about it beyond the number. Myers-Briggs twice, ten years apart, same result. A Sparketype I took on a Sunday because someone mentioned it on a podcast. All of it accurate, none of it anywhere near anything else.
The instruments are not the problem. They come out of a field with a real finding behind it, that people get further developing what already works than repairing what does not. That is why they exist and why they keep getting bought. Each one is answering its own question, and answering it well. Mine were just scattered across fifteen years and four employers.
So I put them on one page. That was the only thing I did that was different.
I decided early that anything only one instrument said, I would cut. Not because single results are wrong, but because I could not tell the difference between a result and something I had absorbed and started repeating. Two thirds of it went. What was left was much shorter than I expected and I sat with it for a while before I did anything with it.
The first thing that held was that I read the room before I read the plan.
DISC, Myers-Briggs, and VIA all said it. I would have told you that about myself already, but I would have said it as a personality trait, the way you mention that you are bad at directions. Three instruments saying it in three vocabularies made it something else. It is the mechanism. Which means the convening work is not the thing I do around my real work, it is the thing, and for years I have been scheduling it into whatever gaps were left over.
Second, I start easily. Also three instruments. Nothing surprising there.
Third, and this is the one I argued with, I commit slowly and then I do not let go. I would have described myself as fast. I have described myself as fast, to clients, in writing. The instruments said no, and after about a week of being annoyed about it I went back through the last two years of decisions and they were right. I take forever on the yes. Then I keep it, more or less permanently.
Put the second and third together and there it is.
My Kolbe comes back 4-7-7-3, which means I initiate and I finish, a combination most people do not have both halves of. It is genuinely useful. It also means I can accumulate more live commitments than one person should be holding, and finish enough of them that from the outside everything looks fine. For a long time I read that as a discipline failure. It is two strengths meeting at speed, which does not respond to trying harder at all.
One axis would not resolve.
Fast and deliberate came back almost dead center. I wanted that to mean something was wrong with the input. It does not. It means both are available to me, and that I will feel like I am arguing with myself whenever that axis is live. I stopped trying to settle it and decided in advance instead. Scoping gets deliberate. Content gets fast. Now the argument happens once, at the category level.
The reading ended on one thing. Stop working alone for more than two days at a stretch.
My Extroverted Feeling runs far enough out front that isolation shows up as flatness, and I have never once correctly identified the cause of that flatness in the moment. I blame the work. Then I start reorganizing work that was fine.
It became a tool because it is the same move I make on an organization. Read what is already there, keep what a second source confirms, cut the rest, end on something that changes next week. The reading part is easy and everyone likes it. The cutting is where people stop.
Twelve instruments now, all optional, two minimum. No email, nothing captured. Put in what you have already taken. Let me know what you find.
Erin Peshoff is the Founder of Vivid Operational Advisors. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivid around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
