How it works

Five things get measured. Your type is the top two, in that order.

This is the whole method in plain English. What each of the five measures, what your number means, where the model comes from, and what it does not claim about itself.

Start here

It measures how you communicate. It does not measure who you are.

Forty statements, six answers each, no middle option. Every statement describes something somebody could watch you do. You are answering how you behave on a normal week, which is a different question from what kind of person you are, and it is the only question this assessment asks.

The result is five scores. Each one runs from 1.00 to 6.00 and each is the average of eight of the forty statements. The five are measured independently of each other, which matters more than it sounds: scoring high on one does not push another one down. Some people are high on three. Some people sit in the middle on all five, and that is a real result rather than a failure to answer properly.

The five

Everybody has all five of these. The scores say how much of each.

Each one carries three labels and they do different jobs. The dimension name says what is being measured and it is the one this page leads with. The role name is what your own result calls you. The finger is how you remember the set.

The hand came last. The five were settled from the personality research described further down this page, and the fingers were attached afterwards because people who can put the set on one hand still have it a month later. There are five of these for reasons that have nothing to do with how many fingers anybody has.

Connection

Concierge / Thumb

How much you lead with the person. A high score means you read the room, you remember what people told you, and you tend to handle the feeling before the facts.

What a high score gets you

Builds trust and a sense of safety quickly
Reads the feeling in a room that others miss
Takes the heat out of a tense conversation
Makes people feel genuinely heard rather than processed

What it costs

Can put keeping the peace ahead of saying the hard thing
Absorbs other people stress and carries it home
Avoids a confrontation that the situation needed
Lets the task slip while tending to the person

To reach somebody high on this

Open with the person before the business. Ask how they are and wait for the answer. Say what you think rather than only what you concluded. Do not go straight to the agenda.

Under pressure

Withdraws, becomes over accommodating, or takes the conflict inside rather than naming it. Can turn reactive when the care goes unnoticed.

Structure

Analyst / Pointer

How much you bring order. A high score means you turn a mess into a sequence, you write things down, and people leave your meetings knowing who does what by when.

What a high score gets you

Turns chaos into a plan people can act on
Follows through, reliably and visibly
Runs a meeting that ends somewhere
Writes down what was decided while it is still true

What it costs

Goes rigid when the plan gets disrupted
Over structures the part that needed to stay loose
Reads as cold to somebody who is worried
Puts the process ahead of what the person in front of you needs

To reach somebody high on this

Come prepared and say what you want out of the conversation. Be specific about dates and numbers. Respect the system they built rather than routing around it. Send the follow up.

Under pressure

Tightens the grip. More procedure, more control, more attention to the method than to whether it is still producing the right outcome.

Conviction

Strategist / Middle

How readily you take a position. A high score means you say what you think while it still matters, you make the call, and you hold it when somebody pushes.

What a high score gets you

Decides under pressure and without full information
Says the difficult thing while it can still be acted on
Holds people to what they agreed
Gets a group moving

What it costs

Rolls over the quieter voice in the room
Treats the feeling in a conversation as beside the point
Mistakes being certain for being right
Prepares the reply instead of listening to the point

To reach somebody high on this

Get to the point in the first line. Bring the evidence with the position. Do not read the directness as hostility, because it is respect. Push back when you disagree, because they want the argument.

Under pressure

Gets harder rather than louder. More rigid, more dismissive, and inclined to go after whoever is doing the challenging.

Discovery

Visionary / Ring

How much you dig. A high score means you ask the second question, you check the claim before you accept it, and you notice the detail everybody else read past.

What a high score gets you

Finds what everybody else overlooked
Breaks up a room that has stopped thinking
Brings the evidence rather than the impression
Connects things nobody had put together

What it costs

Keeps gathering past the point where a decision was due
Questions land as doubt rather than interest
Brings options when somebody wanted an answer
Misses the weight of a moment while examining it

To reach somebody high on this

Bring data and say where it came from. Welcome the questions, because that is how they think rather than a sign of distrust. Give them room to check before you ask them to conclude.

Under pressure

Stalls. More analysis, less conclusion, and a turn toward cynicism about why people are saying what they are saying.

Meaning

Advocate / Pinkie

How much you reach for the point of it. A high score means you tie the task back to why it matters, and you notice when a decision has drifted from what somebody said they wanted.

What a high score gets you

Gets people moving by connecting work to why it matters
Sees the pattern above the particular
Builds real agreement rather than compliance
Says the thing people still remember a year later

What it costs

Complicates something that was simple
Reads as detached from what has to happen today
Frustrates whoever wanted the next step
Loses people in the layer above the one they are on

To reach somebody high on this

Say why it matters before you say what it costs. Leave room to explore the idea past the immediate task. Ask what significance they see in it. Do not rush the part where they work out what it means.

Under pressure

Goes abstract, and can turn preachy. Retreats into thinking about it rather than doing anything about it.

Connection and Conviction get mixed up, and we know it

Two of the five start with the same three letters, both are abstract nouns, and they sit next to each other in the set. Readers swap them. Here is the correction in one line. Connection is about the person in front of you. Conviction is about the position you take.

We have kept both names, because they are the words that say what the eight statements behind each one are measuring, and every alternative we tried gave up accuracy to fix a spelling coincidence.

It is also why your own result page uses the role names instead. Concierge and Strategist cannot be confused with each other the way Connection and Conviction can. On a page about yourself, where you are least likely to go back and check, the name should be the one that survives a quick read.

Reading your number

What a score of 4.38 tells you

It is an average of eight answers on a six point scale. Higher means you reach for that way of communicating more often. It does not mean you are better at it, and it does not mean the people below you cannot do it.

5.01 to 6.00	This is where you go first, most of the time
4.01 to 5.00	A strong preference. People would name this about you
3.01 to 4.00	You use it when the situation calls for it
2.01 to 3.00	Available to you, rarely your opening move
1.00 to 2.00	You tend to leave this one alone

Small gaps are not findings, and we say so on your result

Any measurement has a margin. This one carries a standard error of about 0.34, which means two scores within roughly that distance of each other are not reliably different. If your top two land inside it, your result page tells you plainly that the order of those two is not something the assessment can settle, and asks you to read both and pick. A quiz that prints a confident type on a gap of 0.05 is overstating what it knows.

The part people ask about

Yes, it gives you a type. No, the type is not the result.

Here is the honest version, because the dishonest version is easy to spot. There are twenty types and you get one of them. They are numbered 1 to 20, and the number is the type.

What the type is: your two highest scores, in that order. Five choices for first place and four for second gives twenty. Connection with a Structure signal is a different type from Structure with a Connection signal, because the order says which one you reach for when the two pull against each other. The first of those is Type 1 and the second is Type 8.

What the type is not: the measurement. The measurement is five continuous scores and your report shows you all five, at the top, before the type is mentioned. Your third, fourth and fifth are on the page with numbers on them. Nothing about you got thrown away to fit you into one of twenty slots, because the twenty numbers are shorthand sitting on top of the scores rather than a set of containers you were sorted into.

That is the difference worth understanding. A model that hands you four letters has thrown away everything except which side of four lines you fell on. This one keeps the whole picture and uses the top two as shorthand for talking about it.

The research corpus is strict about the language for the same reason. It says to write you tend to rather than you are, and it says there are no pure types because everybody scores on all five. We follow that on the result pages.

The part you can teach somebody

Your type number is on your hand

The twenty numbers run around one hand in a fixed rotation. Once you know your top two you can work out your own number with nothing in front of you, and you can show somebody else how to do it in about twenty seconds.

Each finger owns four numbers

Your highest score picks the finger. That finger owns a block of four consecutive numbers, and the blocks start four apart.

Finger	Dimension	Role	Block starts at
Thumb	Connection	Concierge	1
Pointer	Structure	Analyst	5
Middle	Conviction	Strategist	9
Ring	Discovery	Visionary	13
Pinkie	Meaning	Advocate	17

Then count around the hand

Put a finger on your primary and take its start number. Now count around the hand beginning at the next finger, and keep going past the pinkie back to the thumb. Where you land on your second highest is your number.

Worked example: Conviction first, Structure second

Conviction is the middle finger, and that block starts at 9. Count on from the next finger.

9Ring, which is Discovery
10Pinkie, which is Meaning
11Thumb, which is Connection
12Pointer, which is Structure

Structure is the pointer, so this result is Type 12.

The count always begins at the finger beside your primary, which is what makes it the same movement wherever you start. A rule that ran through the other four in a fixed order instead would need you to know where your own finger sits in that order and step over it, and at that point you are reading a chart again. This one you can do on your own hand at a kitchen table.

Your result page walks it for your own pair, so the first time you see the trick it is already about you.

Why there are two assessments

Your core holds. Your signal moves with the situation.

Agent type is the real estate version of Pentatype. Same five dimensions, same scoring, asked about listing appointments, showings and your inbox instead of about your life.

People assume one of the two must be the real one. Neither is. The model separates two things: a Core, which is how you process things and tends to hold steady, and a Signal, which is how that comes out in a particular setting and is shaped by what the setting rewards. An agent who is high on Meaning at home can be high on Structure in a transaction, because a transaction rewards structure and their kitchen table does not.

So the two results are not a contradiction to be resolved. The distance between them is a finding about you, and it is the reason we built two assessments rather than one with the nouns swapped. Take both and read them together.

One caution that follows from the same idea. If you take the same assessment twice in the same setting and get a different answer, that is measurement noise rather than insight. Different setting, different signal is the design. Same setting, different result is just the margin showing.

Where it comes from

Built on the Big Five, then adapted

The five dimensions are grounded in Five-Factor Theory, the model usually shortened to the Big Five, and in Communication Accommodation Theory, which is the work on why people adjust how they speak depending on who they are speaking to.

That anchor was picked on purpose. Most of what circulates in offices as a personality assessment gets laughed at by people who study this for a living. The Big Five is the one that does not. Building on it, narrowing it to communication behaviour, and then changing what had to change is a defensible line of descent, and it is why the correspondence table below is worth printing at all.

The Big Five describes personality broadly. Pentatype narrows to communication behaviour, which is why four of the five map onto it and one does not.

Dimension	Corresponds to	How close
Connection	Agreeableness plus the warmth side of Extraversion	Strong
Structure	Conscientiousness	Strong
Conviction	Low Agreeableness plus high Assertiveness	Moderate
Discovery	Openness to Experience	Strong
Meaning	The values and ideas side of Openness, plus reflection	No clean match

Meaning is the odd one and it is deliberate. The Big Five has no single factor for how much somebody reaches for purpose and significance. Openness gets close on curiosity and misses the reflective part. The people who built this model call that Pentatype’s most interesting claim and also the one with the least evidence behind it. Both halves of that sentence are true and we are not going to print only the first half.

One thing this table settles. The count of five came out of that research and the hand came afterwards. If the fingers had decided it, four of these would not line up with a model nobody here had any hand in building.

What we do not claim

No validation study has been run on this

This section exists because you would rather find it here than find it out later.

The model went through several rounds of statistical development. Those rounds used generated respondents rather than people. The numbers they produced describe the way the data was generated and they do not tell you anything about how people communicate, so you will not find any of them quoted on this site.

Real people have taken it. Around a hundred have taken the real estate version since March 2026 and about a dozen have taken the general one. That is enough to know the assessment runs and that people recognise themselves in the result. It is nowhere near enough to establish that the five dimensions predict anything, and the people who built the model set the bar for that at five hundred respondents.

So here is the line. The theory underneath this is real, published and respectable. The instrument built on top of it has not been tested against real-world outcomes. Anyone who tells you this assessment is validated is telling you something nobody can currently support, including us.

And what it should never be used for

Hiring, promotion or firing anybody. It is not a predictor of job performance and the one time that was tested, it added nothing.
Anything clinical or diagnostic. It is not a health assessment of any kind.
Deciding what somebody is capable of. A low score is a preference and never a ceiling.
Sorting people permanently. Communication norms differ across cultures, and directness that reads as strength in one place reads as rudeness in another.

What it is good for is the everyday version of the same question. Understanding why a conversation keeps going sideways, working out how to say something so the person in front of you can hear it, and seeing where a team is all leaning the same way.

Take one, or take both

Forty statements each, about eight minutes each, free all the way through. Pentatype asks about your life. Agent type asks the same five questions about your work.

Take Pentatype Take agent type

Already have a few results? Put them side by side.