Icosa Atlas maps leadership personality as a 20-center geometric profile and analyzes working relationships through a 400-pair dyadic tensor — giving executive coaches, HR leaders, and organizational development consultants a structural framework that goes far beyond type-based assessments.
The same interpersonal friction recurs across projects, reorgs, and even personnel changes. Addressing it at the behavioral level — communication training, conflict resolution workshops — produces temporary improvement and eventual regression. The friction is structural: two personality configurations that interact in specific, predictable ways. Without a structural map of the relationship, the intervention targets the surface.
DISC gives four quadrants. MBTI gives sixteen types. Neither was designed to capture the kind of structural detail that explains why a specific leader-direct report pairing works brilliantly and another fails consistently, even when both individuals are high performers by every other measure. The resolution of the instrument limits the precision of the insight.
A team's interpersonal dynamics can be observed, described, and discussed — but they are rarely measured. Without a quantitative model of how personality configurations interact, team development relies on facilitated conversations and consultant impressions. Both have value. Neither produces the kind of repeatable, trackable structural data that an organization can build on.
Culture fit is a real phenomenon. As currently practiced, it is also one of the least rigorous selection criteria in use — often a proxy for similarity bias dressed in organizational language. A structural model of team dynamics — showing what configurations are underrepresented, what interaction patterns are already present, and where new capacity would be genuinely complementary — replaces vague fit with specific structural analysis.
Every leader's assessment resolves into a named geometric formation — one of 75+ structural portraits of how their personality is organized across four Capacities and five Domains. Formations describe actual patterns of activation and suppression: where a leader's energy concentrates, where it is depleted, and what that means for how they show up under pressure, in ambiguity, and in conflict. Not a type — a structural map.
Learn more →The dyadic engine analyzes any two profiles together through a 400-pair tensor and four interaction types — Reinforcing (amplifying), Complementary (balancing), Catalytic (destabilizing-productive), and Neutral. Nine named currents characterize the relationship dynamic. Dyadic coherence and the MVR (Mutual Vulnerability-Resilience) score quantify relational stability. Built for co-founder pairs, boss-direct report, and cross-functional partnerships.
Learn more →Every profile generates a personalized centering plan from its geometry: which centers to develop, which gateway channels to activate, which stability reserves to build on. Seven centering strategies are applied based on what the profile actually shows — not what the leader says they want to work on. Development priorities emerge from the structure, not from self-assessment alone.
Learn more →Nine gateway positions — Body, Grace, Choice, Voice, Belonging, Feeling, Discernment, Identity, Vitality — have elevated cascade potential in the personality grid. For a leader, the closed gateways are the highest-leverage development targets. The Voice gateway in a technically strong leader who struggles with executive presence. The Discernment gateway in a decisive leader who moves too fast. Specific structural targets, not generic leadership competencies.
Learn more →The Compare section maps how Icosa captures what simpler frameworks miss — the within-type variation that MBTI collapses, the domain specificity that DISC ignores, the longitudinal tracking that no type-based system was designed to support. If your organization already uses MBTI or DISC, Icosa runs alongside them with a structural depth that complements rather than replaces your existing data.
Learn more →Team-level dyadic analysis showing the full interaction matrix across every member pair — which relationships are Reinforcing, which are Catalytic, where the structural tensions live, and where the team's coherence centers are concentrated. Organizational coherence heatmaps and team formation classification are planned features building on the dyadic engine that exists today.
Leaders and team members complete their individual assessments — Standard (32 questions, ~5 min) for a team-wide baseline, Comprehensive (91 questions, ~15 min) for individuals in active development. Each receives their own full profile: formation, centering plan, gateway status, coherence score. No group results are shared without explicit individual consent.
With the full set of individual profiles, the OD consultant or executive coach reviews the formation landscape of the team: which structural patterns are represented, where there is natural complementarity, where the structural tensions are. For identified key relationships — co-founders, boss-direct report, cross-functional leads — run the dyadic assessment to map the specific interaction pattern quantitatively.
Each leader's centering plan provides a structural development roadmap: specific centers to develop, specific gateways to activate, specific basins to reinforce under stress. Smart Retake tracks progress between coaching sessions with 10–15 targeted questions. Over a quarter or a year, the timeline accumulates a longitudinal development record that shows structural change, not just behavioral intention.
Organization management with role-based access and admin controls
Individual data ownership — each person controls their profile
SSO integration support (coming soon)
Custom branding for enterprise deployments
Data retention controls configurable at the organization level
End-to-end encryption for all profile data
DISC and MBTI are well-established instruments with decades of organizational use. Their limitation is resolution, not validity. MBTI produces 16 types from a four-dimensional framework. DISC produces 4 quadrants. At that level of granularity, two leaders who are structurally quite different from each other will receive the same label — and the development insights derived from that label will be equally undifferentiated.
The Icosa Atlas model operates at a different resolution. The 20-center profile maps four Capacities — Open, Focus, Bond, Move — across five Domains: Physical, Emotional, Mental, Relational, and Spiritual. Each of the 20 centers has an activation level, a directionality, and a structural relationship to every adjacent center. From that geometry, the system computes over 300 metrics: a coherence score, formation classification, gateway identification, trap detection, basin analysis, and a personalized centering plan.
Two leaders who score as ENTJs or High-D personalities may have substantially different Icosa profiles — one with concentrated Focus-Mental and suppressed Bond-Relational, another with elevated Move across all domains. Those structural differences predict different strengths, different blind spots, different development priorities, and different relational dynamics. The resolution matters because the organizational questions worth asking require it.
If your organization already uses MBTI or DISC, Icosa runs alongside them. The Compare section at /compare/ maps the structural relationship between frameworks in detail.
The most structurally important question in organizational dynamics is often not “what kind of leader is this?” but “how do these two leaders work together?” The dyadic engine was built to answer that question structurally.
Any two Icosa profiles can be analyzed together through a 400-pair interaction tensor. The engine classifies each of the 400 center-pair interactions as one of four types: Reinforcing (both centers amplify each other), Complementary (centers balance each other productively), Catalytic (centers create productive tension), or Neutral. Nine named currents characterize the aggregate dynamic: patterns like Mutual Amplification, Structural Tension, or Asymmetric Pull emerge from the interaction geometry.
Two quantitative outputs summarize the relationship: dyadic coherence (how well the two profiles integrate) and the MVR score (Mutual Vulnerability-Resilience — a measure of relational stability under stress). These are not relationship quality scores. They are structural descriptions of the interaction pattern — information that helps an OD consultant or executive coach understand what they are working with before the first session.
For co-founder pairs, this analysis maps the structural foundation of the founding relationship. For boss-direct report pairs, it identifies where the natural complementarity is and where the structural friction lives. For cross-functional partnerships, it surfaces the interaction pattern that is driving either productive tension or unproductive conflict.
The weakness of many leadership development programs is that they produce behavioral intention without structural tracking. Leaders leave a workshop intending to communicate differently, delegate more effectively, or manage their reactivity under pressure. Six months later, the insight has faded and the structural patterns have reasserted themselves — because the work addressed the behavior without mapping the underlying structure.
Icosa’s approach is different. Every leader has a centering plan derived from their specific profile geometry. That plan identifies the structural priorities — specific centers to develop, specific gateways to activate, specific basins to strengthen. Smart Retake tracks progress with 10–15 targeted questions between coaching sessions, updating the centering plan as the profile evolves. The timeline accumulates a longitudinal development record that shows structural change: formation evolution, coherence trend, gateway activation shifts.
Over a year-long leadership development program, this produces a structural record of what actually changed — which is different from a record of what leaders reported changing. The difference matters for program evaluation, for individual development conversations, and for demonstrating organizational ROI on development investment.
The individual and dyadic capabilities available today are the foundation for team-level analysis on the roadmap:
Team compatibility matrix: A full dyadic analysis across every member pair in a team, showing the complete interaction landscape — where the Reinforcing relationships are, where the structural tensions live, which Catalytic pairs are productive and which are draining.
Organizational coherence heatmaps: Aggregate coherence data across teams, departments, or the full organization — showing where the personality integration is strongest and where the structural fragmentation is concentrated.
Team formation classification: A team-level analog to individual formation classification — characterizing the aggregate structural pattern of the team’s personality landscape.
These features build on the dyadic engine and organization management infrastructure that exist today. Current enterprise customers will receive priority access.