I’ve been experiencing friction with a peer of mine at work. We’re both good at what we do, but sometimes we clash. I often reflect on these events, on my leadership style or some decision I made and try to deconstruct things in my head. To help me navigate these conflicts I started creating an alignment matrix in my mind, that can describe others based on their behavior, helping me understand and predict friction.

There’s this thing I’ve been observing. In a professional setting (=work) one can observe the people and their actions, and based on those determine which of The Four a person belongs to. How?

Draw a 2 by 2 matrix - on the X axis you have the Core, on the Y axis you have the Shell and the scales go from liquid to solid on both axes.

It would look like this:

  ┌─────────────┬─────────────┬──────────────┐
  │             │ Solid Shell │ Liquid Shell │
  ├─────────────┼─────────────┼──────────────┤
  │ Solid Core  │ The Mountain│ The River    │
  ├─────────────┼─────────────┼──────────────┤
  │ Liquid Core │ The Glacier │ The Mist     │
  └─────────────┴─────────────┴──────────────┘

The Core is this intrinsic set of rules that are deeply embedded in a person — this can be a set of values of personal principles one follows and won’t break, maybe coming from upbringing or spiritual or religious practice. The Shell on the other hand is how a person reacts to a changing environment, how adaptable they are.

If you are a Mountain, you are very hard to change, but also you are dependable, principled (and struggle with change). If you are a River, you have a riverbed that guides your general flow, you are principled but flow around obstacles. If you are a Glacier, you may look like a mountain at first glance, but you are frozen water. You look rigid but have no anchor. If you are a Mist, you’re a pure shapeshifter, you fit anywhere & stand for nothing specific.

None of these are necessarily better than the other, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. If anything, knowledge of where you fit shouldn’t be a blocker, but an enabler. Also, each quadrant is a spectrum — you can have a more solid or a less solid Core, and still be in the “solid core” space. I also believe it’s possible to change, especially once you know where you are and accept this framework, but changing Core is much harder than modifying the Shell.

Now what does it mean, and why does the mountain sometimes clash with the mist? I posit that opposite quadrants are more poised to clash since their approach to many things is so different. A mountain resisting change will find it hard to accept a new, untested and maybe experimental approach a mist is excited about. Similarly a glacier, with its soft Core, may have a hard time understanding why a River is so adamant on a set of rules that seem like an obstacle. It’s not that they disagree. I mean they do, or they think they do, but really – they just misread each other’s motivations. The Mountain thinks the Mist is unreliable while the Mist thinks the Mountain is stuck. And neither is right. The silly geese are just looking at each other through their own (quadrant) lens.

Now this is just a lens I look at things through, not a verdict. I did speak about this to a few people, and they generally liked the idea. Maybe they are just nice to me, or maybe there’s something here – either way it works for me :)

PS I am a River. The colleague I mentioned in the intro is a Glacier.