Decision Axes

This determines your Strength–Shadow axis in relation to Carl Gustav Jung’s mental “iceberg” compass. Your greatest strengths and your most vulnerable traits are two sides of the same axe. Both are part of who you are, shaped by genetic and temperamental factors that we can describe — but not change.

Leadership is the sum of all individual decisions and processes that are aligned toward a shared goal.

From our experience, we’ve seen a strong connection between a person’s temperament and their decision-making behaviour. Recognising and accepting how people make decisions is key to understanding both your own and others’ roles in a group — what we often call “people chemistry”. In knowledge-based work and teamwork, the ability to see the link between behaviour and decision style is often the key to success. Whether it’s total quality management (TQM) or everyday collaboration, knowing each person’s decision strengths helps place the right person in the right role at the right time.

The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) described two axes and four archetypes, which in turn drew their inspiration from ancient Hindu thinking from about 1000 years before Christ. These four functions SGL has illustrated as an iceberg, with the Strength above the water and the Shadow below the ocean surface.

Carl Jung described four key ways people tend to experience the world and make decisions — Thinking, Feeling, Sensing, and Intuition. Jung grouped these four styles into two main axes, similar to the cardinal directions of a compass, called TF / Judging Functions and SI / Perceiving or Stimuli Functions.

Choose the statement that fits you best — this saves to your report, and nowhere else.

Are you driven by logical structure and certainty, or by stimuli and new experience?

We asked ChatGPT about the decision profile of Barack Obama, and it answered:

“IF / Purple/Yellow – Strength: Intuitive – Help function: Feeling. A values-orientated and stimuli driven Decision-Profile. Shadow side: Sensing.”

ChatGPT

Leading means making choices — even when the path is unclear. Some challenges feel familiar. Others are completely new. The way people respond depends on their temperament and on how they handle risk. Our experience shows that people tend to sit along one of the two axes: Logical Judging, which SGL calls (L), or Stimuli-seeking Change Makers, which SGL calls (S).

By observing colleagues and working together, many people gain an unconscious sense of others’ decision styles. Over time, this recognition becomes a valuable guide to understanding the dynamics of a team. With practice, we can make these patterns visible — and use them to lead better, collaborate more effectively, and make smarter decisions under pressure.

Decision-making is never just a rational act — it’s a leap into the unknown. While facts, analysis, and experience can guide us step by step toward the “Decision Gate”, they can take us no further than the final jump — what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called “the 70,000 fathoms deep”. This final moment, where logic ends and choice begins, often feels like a gut instinct, a cognitive breakthrough, or even a form of rebirth, revelation, or salvation. Many names have been given to it, but the truth remains: truly new and uncertain decisions emerge from the deepest layers of the self — shaped not just by reason, but by who we are.

When you must make a difficult and “dangerous” decision — who are you most in this situation: Warrior / Fighter, or Helper? More on this in Secret 4,3.