A diagnostic for decision-makers

The way you see risk shapes every decision — whether you know it or not.

The Risk Type Compass^® makes the human dynamics of risk visible — so individuals and teams can make better decisions when the evidence is incomplete, the stakes are high, and reasonable people disagree.

Developed by Psychological Consultancy Ltd and registered with the British Psychological Society, the Risk Type Compass reveals the deeply rooted dispositions that influence how people perceive uncertainty, respond to pressure, and approach consequential decisions.

Choose Your Starting Point Talk to an Advisor

Risk Type Compass® was developed and is published by Psychological Consultancy Ltd. Executive Assessments, LLC provides assessments and practitioner certification. Consulting and advisory engagements are delivered by experienced professionals from Crescente Advisors and Contemporary Leadership Advisors.

Senior executive considering a high-stakes decision

Three ways to engage

Choose the right starting point.

Purchase assessments for your practice, become certified to administer the Risk Type Compass, or engage our advisors to apply the framework to a consequential individual, team, or organizational challenge.

Purchase Assessments

For qualified practitioners and organizations already equipped to administer and interpret the Risk Type Compass. Order individual assessments and select the report that best fits your application.

Individual Risk Type assessment
Personalized written report
Multiple report options
Volume purchasing for teams and organizations

Order Assessments View Sample Reports

Become a Certified Practitioner

Gain the knowledge and credentials required to administer the Risk Type Compass, interpret reports, deliver individual feedback, and use the framework with teams and organizations.

Understanding the Risk Type model
Interpreting individual profiles and indices
Conducting effective feedback sessions
Applying the framework to teams and organizations
Practitioner certification upon successful completion

Explore Certification

Apply It to a Real Challenge

Work with experienced consulting psychologists to apply Risk Type Compass insights to an important decision, leadership challenge, team dynamic, hiring question, or organizational risk culture.

Executive assessment and debrief
Decision-calibration coaching
Leadership and investment-team workshops
Selection and succession applications
Organizational risk-culture mapping

Discuss an Engagement

The Instrument

Eight Risk Types. One coherent framework.

The Risk Type Compass: eight Risk Types arranged around the Emotion and Cognition axes

The Risk Type Compass^® is a psychometric personality assessment developed by Psychological Consultancy Ltd and registered with the British Psychological Society. Supported by a large international normative sample spanning numerous industries, it reveals the deeply rooted dispositions that influence how people perceive, react to, and manage risk and uncertainty.

The model maps individuals across a continuous 360-degree spectrum encompassing eight distinctive Risk Types. Individuals whose profiles fall near the center of the Compass may be classified as Axial. Each profile is shaped by two independent dimensions: Emotion, reflecting sensitivity and emotional reactions to risk, and Cognition, reflecting the need for certainty, structure, and understanding when confronting ambiguity.

Every Risk Type brings characteristic strengths and potential limitations. The purpose is not to identify an ideal type or to change someone's underlying disposition. It is to make that disposition visible so people can take greater responsibility for how they make decisions.

Unlike a broad personality inventory, the Risk Type Compass focuses specifically on the risk-related dimensions of personality — the dispositions that shape how people approach uncertainty, opportunity, pressure, and consequential decisions.

What the assessment reveals

More than a Risk Type label.

The assessment provides a multidimensional picture of how an individual approaches risk. It distinguishes relatively stable personality dispositions from the attitudes shaped by experience and circumstances.

Risk Type

Your underlying, relatively stable disposition toward risk and uncertainty, expressed through one of eight Risk Types or the central Axial classification.

Risk Tolerance Index

An overall indication of a person's comfort with risk, derived from the interaction of the assessment's Emotion and Cognition dimensions.

Risk Stability Index

An indication of how consistent and predictable a person's approach to risk and decision-making is likely to be.

Risk Attitude

A view of how experience and circumstances may affect a person's willingness to take risks across financial, health and safety, recreational, reputational, and social domains.

Available report components vary by report type.

Research and credibility

A serious instrument with a strong research foundation.

The Risk Type Compass is grounded in established personality research and supported by psychometric evaluation, peer review, international norm data, and strong test-retest reliability. Its two principal dimensions and overall Risk Tolerance Index have demonstrated high stability over time.

Registered with the British Psychological Society
Large international normative sample
Applicable across multiple industries
Strong test-retest reliability
Individual, team, and organizational applications
Built-in consistency indicator

Publisher technical and research information →

Why it matters

Risk perception is highly individual — and hardest to see at exactly the moment it matters most.

Without insight

Differences in risk perception remain unspoken
Caution can be mistaken for resistance
Confidence can be mistaken for sound judgment
Teams debate conclusions without examining their underlying assumptions
Important perspectives may be overlooked
Hiring decisions may ignore the risk demands of the role

With Risk Type insight

Surface hidden differences in risk perception
Improve the quality of challenge and debate
Distinguish productive caution from avoidable delay
Recognize both the strengths and limitations of confidence
Build decision practices around known team tendencies
Consider role demands and team composition more deliberately

Three levels of application

Individual, team, and organization.

For the individual

Understand the instincts behind your decisions.

Identify the stable dispositions, triggers, strengths, and potential blind spots that shape your reactions to risk and uncertainty. Use the insight to approach high-stakes decisions more deliberately.

For the team

Make differences in risk perception discussable.

Reveal how team members naturally approach uncertainty, preparation, opportunity, downside, and pressure. Create a shared, nonjudgmental language that improves debate, collaboration, and decision quality.

For the organization

Make the human dimensions of risk culture visible.

Map how Risk Types are distributed across teams and functions, examine whether that distribution fits the organization's mandate, and identify potential concentrations, gaps, and vulnerabilities.

Risk Type Landscape

See the risk culture you actually have.

Policies describe how an organization intends to manage risk. The Risk Type Landscape reveals how its people are naturally inclined to approach it.

By mapping the distribution of Risk Types across teams, functions, business units, and leadership levels, organizations can see where caution, optimism, emotional intensity, preparation, and comfort with uncertainty are concentrated. This can reveal potential groupthink, missing perspectives, team-composition issues, and mismatches between a function's mandate and its prevailing risk orientation.

Map Risk Types across teams and functions
Identify concentrations and missing perspectives
Examine the human dynamics underlying risk culture
Compare team composition with the team's mandate
Explore potential team configurations
Support organizational change and governance
Improve the quality of challenge and debate

Discuss Organizational Mapping

Consultants mapping Risk Types across a leadership team

Assessments and certification

Access the instrument, or qualify to deliver it.

Risk Type Compass assessment

$95

Per individual

Risk Type Compass assessment
Selected personalized report
Appropriate for certified practitioners and organizations with qualified internal users
Volume ordering available

Order Assessments →

Practitioner certification

See certification page

Scheduled programs, delivered with Psychological Consultancy Ltd

Qualification to administer and interpret the instrument
Individual feedback guidance
Team and organizational applications
Practitioner resources
Certification following successful completion

View Certification →

Advisory and consulting

Applied to a real decision.

Advisory engagements are delivered by experienced consulting psychologists from Crescente Advisors and Contemporary Leadership Advisors, who interpret Risk Type Compass findings in the context of your decision, role, team, or organization.

Executive Decision Profile

$2,500

Advisory package for one leader

Risk Type Compass assessment and report
Brief intake focused on a consequential decision or leadership challenge
Advisor review and interpretation
75-minute executive debrief
Written summary of decision-making strengths, risks, and calibration priorities
Practical recommendations for applying the insight
Brief follow-up conversation

Request an Executive Debrief →

Decision Calibration Engagement

$15,000

Six to eight weeks

Risk Type Compass assessment and report
Executive interview
Review of two or three consequential decisions or recurring decision situations
Three advisory sessions over six to eight weeks
Identification of triggers, blind spots, and compensating practices
Customized decision protocols
Written action plan
Follow-up after implementation

Discuss Decision Calibration →

Team and Organizational Consulting

Custom engagement

Scoped to mandate and timeline

Whole-team assessment and mapping
Facilitated team interpretation
Application to real decisions and operating challenges
Leadership-team and investment-team specialization
Selection and succession applications
Team-composition analysis
Risk Type Landscape and organizational mapping
Customized decision protocols and follow-through

Discuss Your Team or Organization →

When used in selection or succession, our consultants interpret Risk Type Compass findings in relation to the demands of the role, the composition of the existing team, and the decision environment. The assessment should be used as one source of information within a broader, job-related evaluation process — not as a standalone pass-or-fail screen.

In practice

Three engagements. Three conversations that changed.

Case 01 · Asset management

Illustrative composite based on client work

An investment team that kept stalling at position sizing.

A long-only equity team at a multi-strategy fund. Six PMs, twelve analysts. Persistent friction at the position-sizing stage.

Situation: Discussions stalled at conviction-to-size translation. PMs described analysts as too cautious; analysts felt their work was being discounted.
Approach: Full-team Risk Type Compass®, mapped against role and decision authority.
Insight: The PMs shared similar risk dispositions; the analysts were more varied. Much of the friction reflected differences in risk disposition rather than analysis.

Outcome

A shared language for the disagreement. The team gained a shared language for distinguishing analytical disagreement from differences in risk disposition and redesigned its position-sizing discussions accordingly.

“Our analysts learned how to tailor investment pitches based on the risk profile of the portfolio manager they were pitching to. Our PMs started asking better questions of the analysts.”
— CIO, equities fund

Case 02 · Private equity portfolio company

Illustrative application

Hiring a growth-line leader into an already cautious team.

PE-backed industrials company. New business line requiring entrepreneurial momentum and disciplined execution.

Situation: The leading candidate looked strong on paper, but the existing team was already weighted toward caution.
Approach: Final-round candidates assessed as one input alongside interviews and references, interpreted against role demands and team composition.
Insight: The frontrunner's disposition closely mirrored the existing team, raising questions about whether the role's demands would be met.

Outcome

A more deliberate selection discussion. The hiring committee reframed its debate around the risk demands of the role and the composition of the team, and documented the reasoning behind its final decision.

Case 03 · Life sciences leadership team

Illustrative application

A leadership team that converged under time pressure.

Senior leadership team, large pharma division. Strategic pivot under regulatory pressure.

Situation: The team valued diversity of thought but repeatedly reached consensus quickly when deadlines tightened.
Approach: Whole-team assessment plus a facilitated session pairing the data with three real recent decisions.
Insight: The distribution of Risk Types helped explain a tendency toward optimism under time pressure that was difficult to see from the inside.

Outcome

Decision practices redesigned. The team introduced explicit downside framing before final votes and now revisits its assumptions before committing under deadline pressure.

See what you get

Sample reports. Read them before you order.

Personal Report

Risk Type Compass Personal Report

A comprehensive individual report covering Risk Type, characteristic strengths and potential limitations, neighboring and opposite types, underlying subthemes, Emotion and Cognition scales, Risk Tolerance Index, Risk Stability Index, Risk Attitude, and an overall summary.

Approximately 12 pages · PDF

Download Personal Report Sample →

Risk Type Report

Risk Type Compass Risk Type Report

A focused report covering the individual's Risk Type, characteristic strengths and potential limitations, neighboring and opposite types, underlying subthemes, Emotion and Cognition scales, Risk Tolerance Index, Risk Stability Index, and overall summary.

Approximately 11 pages · PDF

Download Risk Type Report Sample →

Team Report

Risk Type Compass Team Report

A group-level view of how Risk Types are distributed across a team, the influences different members may exert, potential sources of compatibility or tension, and the implications for collaboration and decision-making.

PDF

Download Team Report Sample →

Who you'll work with

A small bench, deeply credentialed.

Christine A. Scordato, Ed.M

Founder, Crescente Advisors

Former executive at Wellington Management and Putnam Investments, working with discretionary investors to identify and develop investment skill. Her practice at Crescente Advisors also includes venture capital firms, hedge funds, and allocators. Certified executive coach (Columbia) and International Systemic Team Coach (AoEC London). Harvard and Smith College. Long-time Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Coaching.

Dan Fisher, PhD

Managing Partner, Contemporary Leadership Advisors

Consulting psychologist advising C-suite executives, boards, and investors on leadership and organizational challenges. Co-founder of Contemporary Leadership Advisors, formerly a founding member of AlixPartners' Leadership & Organizational Effectiveness practice. PhD in Clinical Psychology, UC Santa Barbara; postdoctoral training at Weill Cornell. Co-author of The End of Leadership As We Know It (Wiley, 2023).

Alessa Natale, PhD

Senior Consultant, Contemporary Leadership Advisors

Industrial-organizational psychologist with prior roles in Talent Management at Johnson & Johnson and Learning & Development at Pfizer. Has taught I-O Psychology and Career Development at CUNY, where she earned her MS and PhD. Research focuses on the integration of leadership, development, and inclusion.

Liz Weglarz, MA, MBA

Senior Consultant, Contemporary Leadership Advisors

Coaches leaders and teams through complex change, with a decade of experience across technology, consulting, healthcare, and non-profit sectors. Teaches motivation and leadership at Baruch College. PhD candidate in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. MBA, Stony Brook.

Common questions

Questions we hear most often.

How long does the assessment take?

Completion time varies by individual. We share the publisher's current guidance on completion time when you order or begin an engagement, so you can plan accordingly.

Do I need to be certified to use the Risk Type Compass?

Practitioners responsible for administering the assessment, interpreting results, and delivering feedback must be appropriately qualified. Individuals and teams may complete the assessment through Executive Assessments and receive support from our qualified practitioners.

Is one Risk Type better than another?

No. Every Risk Type brings characteristic strengths and potential limitations. Effectiveness depends on the situation, the demands of the role, the composition of the team, and how self-awarely people manage their natural dispositions.

Can someone's Risk Type change?

Risk Type reflects relatively stable, temperament-based dispositions. Experience and circumstances can broaden a person's comfort with particular kinds of risk, reflected in Risk Attitude, without fundamentally changing the underlying Risk Type.

Can the assessment be used in hiring?

Yes, when used appropriately as one source of job-related information within a broader selection process. It should not be used as a standalone pass-or-fail screen.

What is the difference between purchasing assessments and engaging a consultant?

Assessment purchasing provides access to the instrument and its reports. Consulting engagements add expert interpretation and application to a particular decision, role, team, or organizational challenge.

Read it on your own time

The full brochure. No contact required.

Methodology, the eight Risk Types, what each report contains, how engagements are structured, and the questions clients ask before they buy.

Download the brochure

Questions? info@riskcompass.report

Take the next step

Start with the question you are trying to answer.

Whether you want to purchase assessments, become certified, understand your own decision-making, strengthen a team, or examine risk culture across an organization, we can help you identify the right starting point.

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