My "Integrity x Conscientiousness" Matrix

As you build things with people in the real world you experience first-hand that people’s differences in personality traits really matter. Today, at Kilometre Zero, we find ourselves in a situation in which there aren’t any monetary incentives in place that could motivate people to contribute in a specific way, which also means that the level of control and power to enforce things is very low. Everything we do is based on mutual agreements and a big portion of trust. It allows us to coordinate and collaborate and to actually advance together towards a common goal.

This situation, while not being optimal, is a very interesting one, because it exposes some fundamental personality traits in people. Two of them that I want to talk about in this post are: integrity and conscientiousness.

A highly conscientious person is someone who is reliable, they keep their promises and do what they say they will do. They have self-discipline, manage to resist distractions and stick to plans. They are organized, meaning they know how to structure their environments and tasks efficiently. They pay attention to detail and quality. And finally, they are extremely goal-oriented, meaning they work persistently toward long-term goals. In other words, they do whatever needs to be done to achieve the things they said they wanted to achieve.

A person with high integrity is someone who does the right thing. There is an alignment between their strong moral and ethical principles and values, what they say they want to achieve, and the actions they take to achieve it. Basically, it’s someone whose actions are guided by strong moral and ethical principles and values.

Now, when we put integrity and conscientiousness together in a matrix we get 4 types of operators:

The idealistic dreamer - low conscientiousness, high integrity

This person knows what the right thing to do is, might even say that they are going to do it, but time after time fails to execute. In the US this type of behaviour is more and more common as you can see on the chart below. This results in a cohort which talks a lot, has a lot of the right opinions, and good intentions, but doesn’t do much about it. This makes life quite a lot harder for these people because a lot of the time life is about following through.

Below we zoom in on some sub-categories that make up the conscientiousness personality trait. As you can see they all get worse.

Unfortunately, even if a person has a good heart with the right values (high integrity) but is low on conscientiousness, there is a good chance that they will be seen as someone with low integrity. In fact, low conscientiousness increases integrity risk because it creates a lack of trust, and if you trust someone less, smaller inconsistencies can lead to larger decreases in perceived integrity.

That’s how quickly we find ourselves in the most “useless“ quadrant of the matrix: the slacker/con artist.

The slacker/con artist - low conscientiousness, low integrity

While being the most useless one it’s not the worst for society in my opinion. This person doesn’t operate based on good values and principles but they are also not doing much. So they only cause minimal direct harm. However, they indirectly cause a lot of harm, mostly because they leave a lot of space and make it acceptable for the Machiavellian operators to do their thing. The latter, being the worst and most dangerous one.

The Machiavellian operator - high conscientiousness, low integrity

The one liner that applies to this person is: the ends justify the means. They will do what’s necessary to reach their goal. For them it doesn’t matter whether their actions are morally and ethically sound and whether anyone gets hurt on the way.

Another bad thing here is that highly conscientious people are very good at learning and figuring things out on the fly, so this person will acquire the skills necessary to execute, no matter what.

The good news is that people’s personality is malleable. Integrity and conscientiousness can be learned. And so what we have to aim for and work towards, is the virtuous achiever.

The virtuous achiever - high conscientiousness, high integrity

This person achieves things while making sure that the actions they take to get there are the right ones. This is necessary for creating long-term value. Getting things done, guided by strong values and principles. Virtuous achievers are rare but they exist. We want them and we can “make them”.