The Motive Matrix: An Interactive Explorer
Personality tells you what drives someone. It does not tell you what they do with that drive.
Two people can share the same underlying motivation and build radically different lives around it. One may turn a need for security into dependable institutions. Another may turn it into ideological certainty. A desire for significance can become meaningful creative work, or an increasingly elaborate project of self-definition. A drive for power can create capacity for others, simply secure personal independence, or become domination.
The Motive Matrix explores that difference across three dimensions:
Drivers
Describe the underlying motivational methodology, using the nine Enneagram types as a starting framework.
Life Anchors
Describe where that motivation becomes concentrated: work, relationships, causes, identity, or lifestyle.
Contribution Levels
Describe how far the resulting energy travels beyond the self, from creating new capacity for other people, through ordinary participation, to orientations where most of the benefit terminates with the individual.
Together, those dimensions create 270 distinct expressions of human motivation.
The point is not to assign everyone a single box. People can occupy very different parts of the model across different areas of their lives. Someone might be generative through their work, a steward within their family, merely participatory in their community, and highly self-focused in lifestyle or identity.
Explore the model
Choose a Driver, Life Anchor, or Contribution Level below. The remaining two dimensions will cross against one another, allowing you to examine the same motivational system from different angles.
What do you want to hold steady?
Choose the lens you want to explore. The other two dimensions will form the matrix.