Where we lose, first.

Not usually, and pretending otherwise would cost you more than it costs us.

Predictive Index is built to support decisions about people — selection, with the job analysis and adverse-impact work that requires. We are built to support conversations with them. If you need defensible selection testing, buy that; we have deliberately not built it.

Where we do replace something is the annual workshop whose output nobody opened again.

For measurement, the Big Five has the strongest evidence: better reliability, replication across cultures, and the clearest links to workplace outcomes. MBTI has poor test–retest reliability at the type level — many people are typed differently weeks later — which is why Throughline doesn't use it.

DISC-style working styles are a different kind of tool. They describe behaviour at work in a language a whole team can share, and they map onto Big Five traits in predictable ways. Throughline uses the Big Five to measure and working styles to talk about it — and runs both, so each checks the other.

Because you will find out either way, and finding out in month four is worse for you and worse for us.

Each comparison is written the way we would want one written about us: what the other tool genuinely does better, then the table, then who should buy which. If the honest answer is that you should buy the other one, we would rather say it on the call.

Often you do not have to choose. If your existing results are still trusted, the question is whether anyone is using them week to week — and that is an honest thing to measure before spending anything.

Start with the free plan: one team of up to five people, no card and no expiry. If managers are not reaching for it unprompted by week three, you have your answer at no cost.

Two reasons, and the second is the one people find more persuasive.

Selection testing is a different discipline with a much higher bar — job analysis, criterion validity, adverse-impact monitoring, and defensibility when a rejected candidate challenges the decision. We have not built that, so selling into it would be selling exposure dressed up as insight.

And there is a measurement problem underneath it. When an assessment decides whether someone gets the job, they answer as the person who should get the job, and the data stops describing anyone real.

No — and it's the right question to ask. Paste your scores into an assistant and it will produce something fluent and plausible. It will also invent the parts it doesn't know, treat a two-point gap as a settled fact, and give you advice that would read identically for a colleague with the opposite profile.

Throughline supplies measured scores for real, consenting people, the relationship between any two of them, and rules about what may not be inferred. The assistant then reasons over facts instead of filling gaps with whatever sounds right.

Three. The Big Five, using the public-domain IPIP-50 research items; a working-styles (DISC) assessment; and an Enneagram questionnaire — the last two written by Throughline and scored on scales rather than boxes. The Big Five is the most researched model in personality psychology and carries the measurement weight; the other two add the language teams actually use and the motivation underneath.

All three are read together, so where they agree the guidance gets sharper, and where they differ the profile says so. Every result shows how clear a read it is.