Timeline

A single assessment captures a moment. The Timeline captures the arc. Longitudinal tracking, smart retake targeting, and structural diff analysis turn repeated assessments into a living record of how your personality system moves over time.

Personality Is Not a Photograph

A single assessment is a snapshot — one moment in a system that is always moving. Your Coherence score today reflects your current configuration: which Gateways are open, which Traps are active, how your Capacities are distributing energy across the five Domains right now. But “right now” changes. Life events shift the terrain. Therapy opens Gateways. Stress activates Traps. Time passes, and the system reconfigures.

The Icosa Timeline tracks that reconfiguration. Take the assessment more than once, and the system begins building a longitudinal record of your personality architecture — not just what changed, but how it changed, when it changed, and where it is heading.

What the Timeline Captures

Each reassessment adds a new data point to a structural time series. The Timeline engine analyzes that series across six dimensions:

Trend Detection

Which Harmonies are consistently moving in a direction? A single assessment cannot distinguish between signal and noise — maybe your Empathy score was low because you had a bad week. Two assessments start to suggest a pattern. Three or more establish a trend with statistical confidence.

The Timeline tracks directionality and magnitude at the Harmony level, the Capacity level, and the Domain level. It identifies whether your system is broadly improving, broadly declining, or restructuring — shifting energy from one area to another without changing the overall Coherence score.

Changepoint Analysis

Trends are gradual. Changepoints are not. A changepoint is a statistically significant discontinuity in your time series — a moment when your profile shifted enough to suggest that something structural happened between assessments.

The Timeline engine detects changepoints automatically and flags them with context: Your Coherence shifted from 47 to 63 between assessments 3 and 4. This coincides with the opening of two previously closed Gateways (Feeling and Choice) and the deactivation of the Emotional Flooding Trap. The system does not know what happened in your life. But it knows what happened in your grid.

Momentum Projection

Where is your system heading? Based on the trajectory of recent assessments, the Timeline projects your current direction of movement — not as a prediction of the future, but as a description of the present vector.

Momentum is a derived property of the six Dynamics factors (Cascade, Patterning, Inertia, Compensation, Trajectory, Cycling). Positive momentum means the system’s recent movement is self-reinforcing — change is breeding more change in the same direction. Negative momentum means the system is decelerating, either because it is stabilizing at a new configuration or because opposing forces are building.

Stability Tracking

Not all change is desirable. Some areas of your profile should be stable — and knowing which areas are stable matters as much as knowing which are moving.

The Timeline classifies each Harmony, Gateway, Trap, and Basin as stable (consistent across assessments), volatile (fluctuating without clear direction), or transitional (moving consistently toward a new state). A profile with high stability across most centers and transitional movement in one or two Gateways looks very different from a profile with volatility everywhere — even if both produce similar average Coherence scores.

Resilience Measurement

Resilience is not the absence of disruption. It is the speed and completeness of recovery after disruption. The Timeline tracks resilience across nine dimensions, measuring how quickly your system returns to its baseline configuration after being perturbed.

A person whose Coherence drops from 72 to 48 during a crisis and recovers to 68 within three months shows strong resilience. A person whose Coherence drops from 72 to 48 and stabilizes at 51 for a year shows low resilience in that dimension. Both profiles experienced the same disruption. The structural response — and therefore the clinical implication — is different.

Recovery Classification

Closely related to resilience, recovery classification describes the shape of the return trajectory. Does the system bounce back quickly (elastic recovery)? Drift back slowly (viscous recovery)? Stabilize at a new, lower level (partial recovery)? Or reorganize into a qualitatively different configuration that may actually be healthier than the pre-disruption state (transformative recovery)?

The Timeline engine classifies recovery patterns automatically, giving clinicians a structured vocabulary for what they observe in treatment.

Smart Retake

The Timeline is built from reassessments, but reassessing does not mean retaking the entire assessment from scratch every time. Smart Retake uses statistical modeling to target the questions most likely to reveal meaningful change.

How It Works

When you initiate a Smart Retake, the engine estimates which parts of your profile are most likely to have changed since your last assessment. For each of the twenty Harmonies, it computes a change probability — incorporating elapsed time, active Traps (which resist change), active Basins (which resist change even more), life events (which accelerate change), and your Dynamics profile (which predicts how mobile each part of your system is).

The result is a targeted question set. Instead of 32 or 91 questions, Smart Retake typically selects 10 to 15 questions — the ones probing the grid positions where change is most probable. Your answers to those questions are merged with your previous profile to produce an updated assessment.

Three-Phase Flow

Smart Retake runs in three phases:

1. Init + marginal questions: The engine identifies probable-change zones and asks questions that probe the boundaries — the grid positions where a small shift would cross a state threshold (e.g., from Under to Centered).

2. Targeted probes + dynamics: Based on Phase 1 answers, the engine refines its change model and asks follow-up questions that test whether detected changes are real structural shifts or measurement noise. Dynamics questions capture whether the system feels like it is moving.

3. Results with diff: The updated profile is presented alongside a visual diff showing what changed — Coherence movement, band changes, Gateway openings or closings, Trap activations or deactivations, Capacity shifts. You see not just your current profile but the delta from your previous one.

Smart Retake Behavioral Signals

Smart Retake captures its own set of behavioral signals that are distinct from first-assessment signals — and these signals carry unique clinical information about the nature and stability of change.

These signals are layered onto the retake profile as behavioral overlays, refining the engine’s confidence in which changes are structural and which are situational. A change that shows high conviction and fast confirmation is treated as reliable. A change that shows low conviction and slow confirmation is flagged as tentative and watched more closely in subsequent retakes.

The Diff Is the Point

The most clinically useful output of the Timeline is not any single profile. It is the diff. The comparison between two points in time — or across a full series of assessments — reveals the dynamics of your system in a way no static snapshot can.

Coherence rose from 41 to 58 over six months. The Feeling Gateway opened between assessments 2 and 3. The Emotional Flooding Trap deactivated between assessments 3 and 4. The system is now in a Transitional formation, previously it was in a Distressed formation. Momentum is positive. Stability is increasing.

That is a treatment narrative built entirely from structural data. The numbers tell the story.

Building Your Baseline

The Timeline becomes useful with two assessments and becomes powerful with three or more. Your first assessment establishes a structural baseline. Your second reveals what has moved. Your third begins to separate trends from noise.

There is no required frequency. Some users reassess monthly. Some reassess quarterly. Some reassess only when something significant changes in their life. The engine adapts to whatever cadence you set. Smart Retake makes frequent reassessment practical by keeping it short and targeted.

The one recommendation: do not reassess during an acute crisis unless you want to capture the crisis state deliberately. A crisis assessment is valid and useful, but it is a data point of a different kind — a perturbation measurement rather than a baseline measurement. The Timeline engine can handle both, but knowing which is which makes the longitudinal analysis more informative.

Availability

Timeline tracking requires a Consumer Premium subscription or higher. Smart Retake is included with Timeline access. The feature activates automatically after your second assessment — there is no separate setup. Your longitudinal record begins the moment you have two data points.

For clinicians, Timeline data is available for all connected clients (with appropriate consent), and the Clinician Map view includes full access to each client’s trend, changepoint, and resilience data. This turns the Icosa system from a one-time assessment tool into a longitudinal treatment companion.