Roles
Twelve roles. One taxonomy.
Personality profiles describe how you are. Roles describe how you tend to move the balance of a team. The gap between those two things is where Cèrcol tries to work.
The twelve roles are derived from the AB5C circumplex (Hofstee, De Raad & Goldberg, 1992) and the team composition literature (Bell, 2007). Three OCEAN dimensions require balance in teams — Presence, Bond, and Vision. The twelve roles cover the six intersections of these dimensions at both poles. The names are ours. The structure is from the literature.
Beta
This is a starting hypothesis, not a validated instrument.
Current role assignments use theoretical centroids derived from published research. As real data accumulates — target: 300 Full Moon completions — centroids will be replaced with empirical values from actual profiles. Role scoring is labelled beta in the interface for exactly this reason.
The twelve roles
Dolphin
When you are in the room, people talk. Not because you ask — because you made it easy. The team warms up with you.
Tendency
High Presence and Bond. Warm, outgoing, and easy to be around. People open up in your company.
Contributes to a team
Cohesion. Lowers the social activation energy in the room.
Tends to miss
The productive friction that sharpens ideas. Warmth can smooth over real disagreements.
Wolf
You do not wait for permission. When you see the problem, you say it. The team moves because you do not stay quiet.
Tendency
High Presence, low Bond. Direct, assertive, and action-oriented. Does not wait for consensus.
Contributes to a team
Initiative. Names what needs to be said and gets things moving.
Tends to miss
The relational cost of directness over time. Teams can lose trust if the challenge is constant.
Elephant
You do not take up space — you create it. People explain themselves well beside you because they know you are really listening.
Tendency
Low Presence, high Bond. Quiet and deeply cooperative. Creates space for others to think out loud.
Contributes to a team
Depth of listening. People articulate themselves better in your presence.
Tends to miss
Momentum. The team can think clearly together but still not move.
Owl
You see what others miss because you do not need to be at the centre. The distance is useful to you.
Tendency
Low Presence and Bond. Independent, observant, and precise. Works best with distance.
Contributes to a team
Clarity. Sees structural problems that high-social profiles miss.
Tends to miss
Warmth and easy collaboration. The distance that helps analysis can isolate.
Eagle
You see far and you move there. You bring the team to places it would not have gone alone.
Tendency
High Presence and Vision. Energetic and future-oriented. Pulls the team toward new ground.
Contributes to a team
Direction. Sets ambitious goals the team would not have set alone.
Tends to miss
Execution detail. The horizon is clear; the path can be rough.
Falcon
It is not vision — it is timing. You know exactly when to move, and when you do, the team notices.
Tendency
High Presence, low Vision. Present, decisive, and practical. Knows exactly when to act.
Contributes to a team
Timing. Moves at the right moment and carries people with them.
Tends to miss
Long-horizon thinking. Can miss the strategic layer while executing well at speed.
Octopus
The team's best ideas often passed through you first, in silence. You do not always know it yourself.
Tendency
Low Presence, high Vision. Internally rich and quietly creative. Processes complexity in private.
Contributes to a team
Original thinking. The team's most unusual ideas often come from here.
Tends to miss
Getting ideas into circulation. Works in silence; the ideas can stay there.
Tortoise
You will not make noise. But when you are not there, the team drifts. You are the ground the others build on.
Tendency
Low Presence and Vision. Steady, grounded, and deeply reliable. Holds the ground so others can move.
Contributes to a team
Stability. Others can take risks because this profile holds the ground.
Tends to miss
Adaptability when the situation fundamentally changes.
Bee
Where others see chaos, you see structure. You build bridges between people and ideas no one else would have connected.
Tendency
High Bond and Vision. Collaborative and intellectually generative. Connects people and ideas.
Contributes to a team
Synthesis. Builds bridges between people and between concepts no one else had linked.
Tends to miss
The critical edge needed to test whether the connections hold.
Bear
You do not change under pressure. The team knows you are there, and that knowing frees them to take risks.
Tendency
High Bond, low Vision. Dependable, grounded, and consistent. The team knows where it stands.
Contributes to a team
Trust. People take more risks when a Bear profile is present.
Tends to miss
Openness to change when the current approach is no longer working.
Fox
You see what does not add up — in ideas and in relationships. Your discomfort is productive.
Tendency
Low Bond, high Vision. Intellectually sharp and critically minded. Spots inconsistency fast.
Contributes to a team
Critical distance. Catches what does not add up before it becomes a problem.
Tends to miss
Relational ease. The discomfort can wear on a team that needs cohesion to function.
Badger
You are not interested in what should work. You are interested in what works. The team needs you to stop fooling itself.
Tendency
Low Bond and Vision. Pragmatic, direct, and unsentimental. What works matters; what should work does not.
Contributes to a team
Ground truth. Stops the team fooling itself with optimism or complexity.
Tends to miss
Buy-in. The directness that surfaces truth can also create resistance.
What about profiles near the centre?
There is no centre role. A profile with low scores on Presence, Bond, and Vision is better described by its Discipline and Depth values than assigned a role label with no functional content. The role result will show the closest centroid by distance, with a low maximum probability indicating a diffuse profile.
Personal arc
Most role results include an arc — secondary roles that scored close to the primary in probability space. A Wolf with a Falcon arc brings initiative and decisive timing. A Bee with an Elephant arc brings synthesis and deep listening. The arc gives the result texture that a single label can't.
Roles are not destinies
The same person can function differently in different team compositions. A Wolf in a team that already confronts everything may pull back. A Tortoise in a team that needs movement may accelerate. These are tendencies in context — not fixed identities. Don't use a role result as a ceiling.
See a problem with this model?
This taxonomy is a hypothesis. If you have background in psychometrics, organisational psychology, or team dynamics and see a flaw — in the centroids, the naming, the forced-choice design, anything — open an issue.
Open an issue on GitHub