The words, without the jargon.

One of the five Big Five traits, measuring how much a person prioritises harmony and others’ needs relative to their own position. High scorers accommodate and seek consensus; low scorers challenge and are comfortable dissenting.

The five-factor model of personality: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. Each is a continuous scale rather than a category, so a person has a position on all five rather than belonging to a type.

The Big Five trait measuring how organised, deliberate and follow-through-oriented a person is. It is the single most consistent trait predictor of job performance across almost every role studied.

The working style of people who want to be right more than quick. They think before speaking, want time before committing, and their silence in a meeting is usually processing, not agreement.

Explicit, revocable agreement by a person to be assessed and to share a summary of the result with named colleagues. Throughline creates no profile without it, infers nothing about people who decline, and charges nothing for someone who opts out.

A family of four-style behavioural models — Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness — descended from William Moulton Marston’s 1928 book Emotions of Normal People . It describes observable behaviour at work rather than underlying traits.

The working style of people who decide quickly and communicate directly. They want the conclusion first and the reasoning second, and read a long preamble as either padding or bad news being softened.

The Big Five trait measuring how reactive a person is to stress and setbacks. Often published inverted as neuroticism. High stability means an even keel; lower stability means feeling things more sharply and recovering more slowly.

The Big Five trait measuring where a person’s energy comes from and how much external stimulation they seek. High scorers think by talking; low scorers think before talking and spend energy on the same interaction.

The questions Throughline refuses to answer, enforced in the server schema rather than requested in a prompt: ranking colleagues, supporting hiring or promotion decisions, inferring mental health or protected characteristics, and speculating beyond what was measured.

The working style of people who think by talking and are drawn to possibility. They generate options quickly, and their first few versions of an idea are drafts, not proposals.

The International Personality Item Pool: a collection of validated, openly published personality assessment items in the public domain, free of licensing restrictions.

An open protocol that lets an AI assistant call external tools and read external data during a conversation. A client that speaks MCP can connect to any MCP server without bespoke integration work on either side.

Throughline’s rule that visibility runs in both directions: a colleague can see how to work with you only if you can see the same about them. There is no one-way lookup.

The Big Five trait measuring how drawn a person is to novelty, abstraction and the unfamiliar. High scorers want to rethink the approach; low scorers want to apply the one that worked.

Guidance about the working relationship between two specific colleagues rather than about either of them individually: where they will misread each other, what each needs from the other, and which friction is structural, not personal.

A score expressing where a person sits relative to a comparison group, not how much of a trait they possess. Scoring 70 on extraversion means being more extraverted than roughly 70% of the comparison group.

A structured approach to a recurring management situation — critical feedback, delegation, running a disagreement, onboarding, breaking bad news. The playbook supplies the structure; the profiles supply the specifics.

A schema.org property identifying which part of a page is written to be read aloud or quoted by a voice assistant or answer engine.

The working style of people who hold a team together and absorb more than they say. They need warning before change and reconnection after conflict.

The extent to which an assessment gives the same result when the same person takes it again after an interval. It is the most basic requirement of a measurement instrument.

A stable disposition that describes a person’s tendencies across many situations, as distinct from a type, which assigns them to a category. Traits are continuous; types are discrete.

One of four plain-English descriptions of how a person works — Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness. Throughline measures working style with its own 38-item assessment, keeps the score behind the letter, and cross-checks it against the person’s Big Five results.