A disagreement about certainty, mistaken for a disagreement about the work.
A Dominance and Conscientiousness pairing produces the most visible friction of the ten and the most fixable. Dominance is comfortable deciding at seventy per cent confidence and correcting later. Conscientiousness wants closer to ninety-five before committing. Both positions are defensible, and neither person has usually said out loud which one they hold.
- Dominance × Conscientiousness
- Both sides get moves
- Measured, not concatenated
The argument therefore happens about the decision itself, repeatedly, when what is being disputed is the threshold.
Where it works, where it slips.
Where it works
strong when both are respected. Dominance sees the move and forces the timeline; Conscientiousness finds the thing that would have made the move expensive. Teams with this pair working well make fewer costly mistakes than teams without it.
Where it slips
It becomes personal quickly. Dominance experiences the questions as obstruction, Conscientiousness experiences the pace as recklessness, and both stop bringing their real reasoning to the conversation.
The tell
The same objection surfacing in three consecutive meetings without ever being resolved.
What each one concludes about the other.
Dominance reads Conscientiousness as
blocking — finding one more thing to check every time, apparently to avoid ever having to commit.
Conscientiousness reads Dominance as
reckless — deciding without the information, and treating a serious question as an inconvenience.
Four moves, not four adjectives.
Both sides get something to do. Guidance that only asks one person to change is a verdict rather than advice.
- 01Name the threshold explicitly at the start. "We are deciding at seventy per cent on this one" ends most of these arguments before they begin.
- 02Dominance: ask "what would you need to know to be comfortable?" The list is usually short and usually gettable, and you get a faster honest answer than a deadline produces.
- 03Conscientiousness: bring the objection with a proposed way through it. Dominance engages with a solution far better than with a risk.
- 04Get the material to Conscientiousness a day before the meeting. Their view forms after the room, not during it.
Are we disagreeing about the decision, or about how sure we need to be?.
This is the general case. Your two colleagues aren't.
Throughline measures the pair rather than concatenating two type descriptions — so the guidance names the specific people, and changes when you change the names.
All ten pairingsTell us what you’re working on.