the
Complexity
Management
Profile™
Using AI to answer the question:
“What type of complexity can this person handle today, and what might they handle in the future?!”
Why
Complexity has become an unavoidable aspect of organisational life, amplified by factors such as technological advancement, globalisation, and shifting societal expectations. The ability to navigate complexity is therefore critical for organisational success.
LBVC defines complexity as the interaction of multiple, interdependent factors - such as ambiguity, uncertainty, and competing demands - that require individuals to make sense of unfamiliar and changing situations. It encompasses not just the quantity of information but also the dynamic, often unpredictable relationships between elements and actors within a system.
What it does
The Complexity Management Profile (CMP) is designed as a comprehensive assessment that evaluates how a candidate engages with various forms of complexity. It does so by integrating assessments of cognition (how a person processes and engages with information), personality (how they typically behave and interact), and motivation (what drives their behaviour). Together, these elements offer a nuanced understanding of an individual’s potential to perform and thrive across different types of complexity in the workplace.
The CMP integrates artificial intelligence as a structured tool to operationalise the transformation of rich, qualitative scenario-based responses into standardised quantitative scores. Unlike conventional psychometric assessments, which often rely on highly standardised, decontextualised items such as Likert-scale questionnaires or abstract problem-solving tasks, the CMP is designed to capture nuanced, context-sensitive data. By presenting respondents with realistic, complex scenarios and collecting primary qualitative data on their thought processes, personality and motivation, the CMP preserves the richness and depth of real-world decision-making. AI is then employed as a means to systematically extract theoretically aligned quantitative insights from these data, bridging the gap between naturalistic assessment and structured measurement.
The CMP uses a system of 1,366 standardised AI prompts, each designed to score specific constructs within cognition, personality, and motivation frameworks. These prompts are directly mapped to well-defined scales and sub-scales within the CMP’s theoretical architecture
Sample
report
Pricing
More about the Complexity Management Profile™
Stratified Systems Theory
The CMP is grounded in Stratified Systems Theory (SST), originally developed by Elliott Jaques, which links human cognitive capacity to the “levels of work” in an organisation. SST proposes that work in organisations can be stratified into distinct levels, based on the complexity of problems, uncertainty and time horizons that must be dealt with at each level. Jacques’s original conceptualisation of SST had seven levels, which has since been reformulated for various purposes by numerous scholars and practitioners. The CMP posits that the future of work is too complex and dynamic for any one person to be bound to one single “level” of work and thus, instead, maps cognitive functioning, personality and motivation onto a spectrum with two poles, one being purely operational work and the other being purely strategic work. This spectrum then, in turn, contains five strata, namely Operational, Analytical, Tactical, Systemic, and Strategic.
Cognition
Cognition includes abilities like reasoning, problem-solving, attention, and verbal and numerical skills. Cognitive ability refers to how people think, and their capacity to process information, learn, and solve problems. It predicts how quickly and effectively someone can acquire job knowledge and engage with complexity in tasks. This also means that cognition can be trained and improved through deliberate intervention, over time.
Cognitive profiling offers substantial value to organisations by illuminating how a person thinks and solves problems, which is a strong predictor of their potential job performance and growth. Decades of psychological research have demonstrated that general cognitive ability is one of the best predictors of work performance. For example, the late management theorist Elliott Jaques, and creator of SST, argued that assessing individuals’ capability for complex thinking can even help predict which junior managers could become successful CEOs 20 years in the future. By using a tool like the CMP to profile cognitive processes, HR professionals gain insight into an individual’s problem-solving approach, learning potential and reasoning complexity, enabling better-informed talent decisions
Personality
Personality represents stable traits that shape how people typically behave, think, and feel. Personality is about what underlies a person’s typical patterns of behaviour, rather than their mental abilities. Knowledge about personality can provide insights into interaction styles and tendencies: It can predict interpersonal fit, work style, and reactions under stress. Unlike cognition that can be developed, personality is stable over time.
Personality profiling offers a distinct and complementary perspective in providing valuable insights into how individuals are likely to behave, interact, and respond to their work environments. Decades of research in organisational psychology have established that personality traits are robust predictors of workplace behaviour, influencing a wide range of outcomes from job performance and leadership effectiveness to teamwork, engagement, and retention.
Motivation
Work motivation represents a person’s drive and willingness to exert effort in a specific work context. It reflects the direction, intensity, and persistence of effort toward achieving work goals. Unlike cognitive ability or personality, motivation is more fluid and sensitive to contextual factors. It helps explain why two people with similar abilities and personalities might differ in how much effort they apply or how committed they feel toward a task or role.
Work motivation is a foundational construct in psychology. In the context of work, it offers an explanation as to why individuals engage in work activities at a particular level of intensity. Decades of research - spanning classical theories such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Herzberg’s two-factor theory, and Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory - have demonstrated that motivation is a critical driver of work behaviour. It shapes goal-directed action, influencing not only the quantity of effort exerted, but also its quality, focus, and persistence over time. Motivation profiles capture the unique constellation of needs, values, and goals that direct an individual’s behaviour in the workplace, offering insight into what people strive for and how they prioritise competing demands in complex work environments.