How we map cognitive topology

Validated instruments

We use seven validated psychometric instruments with peer-reviewed publication history: BFI-2 (Big Five), HEXACO-60 (adds Honesty-Humility, the dimension BFI-2 misses), IPIP-NEO-120 (30 facets at deeper resolution), ECR-R (adult attachment — avoidance + anxiety), PERMA (wellbeing across five domains), Ryff Psychological Wellbeing (six eudaimonic dimensions), and PID-5-BF — gated to verified clinical practitioners only. Six are available to every user; PID-5-BF is unlocked only when there’s a licensed interpreter in the loop.

Topological data analysis

Each completed instrument suite produces a vector — a point in a high-dimensional space where each axis is a personality dimension or facet. The traditional move is to average across people and report aggregate scores, which loses everything interesting about how members differ.

Topological data analysis takes the other path. Treat the vectors as a point cloud; ask what its shape looks like. Are there clusters? Where are the gaps? Which points sit between clusters, holding them together? TDA answers those questions with mathematical rigour — persistent homology, clustering over scale, mapper-style projection — and gives them back as readable structure.

For a leadership team that translates into four practical outputs: a Cognitive Diversity Index measuring how much of the available personality space the team occupies, a coverage map showing which regions are represented and which are gaps, bridge connector scores identifying who quietly translates between sub-clusters, and a resilience score measuring how much connectivity survives the removal of any single member.

Lineage

Personality testing on its own gives you traits. It doesn’t tell you what to do with them, or why some combinations of minds produce wisdom and others produce committee. We pair the psychometrics with three other disciplines:

• Cognitive science of meaning — John Vervaeke’s work on relevance realization and 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognition gives a language for why teams with diverse cognitive styles outperform monocultures: they realise different aspects of the same situation as relevant.
• Depth psychology — Jung and the post-Jungian tradition take the long view of individuation: what it means for a person (or a team) to develop along the seams where their shadow material concentrates. Useful framing for the “why is this gap structural and not just a hiring problem” question.
• Contemplative traditions — practices for attention and pattern recognition that long predate psychometrics, mapped onto the same dimensions modern science now measures. They give the lived-experience counterpart to the data.

Validated instruments give us measurement. TDA gives us structure. Interdisciplinary lineage gives us the language to translate the structure back into something a leadership team can act on. None of the three works alone.

What the report produces

For individuals: facet-level personality profile across all instruments you have access to, with narrative interpretation. For teams: Cognitive Diversity Index, coverage map, bridge connector identification, resilience analysis, and recommendations sized to the engagement. See a sample team report or a sample individual report.

Take it with you

A one-page summary suitable for sharing with colleagues or sending alongside a discovery call. Download the methodology brief (PDF) →