3 Brains Intelligence
How does 3 Brains Intelligence connect with DISC, the Enneagram, MBTI, Hogan or the Big Five?
Probably you have done one or two of these tests before. So let us look at how they connect, and where they differ.
The difference is the depth. What we observe is that all of these tests may be resting on the same layer underneath them — and that layer is the three Brains.
Coaching and personality assessments look at different layers of the same person.
The difference is the depth
Put enough of these side by side and something similar seems to be happening in each of them. One takes a pile of behaviour, notices that certain behaviours keep turning up together, draws a circle around the cluster and gives the cluster a name. Dominance. The Achiever. Cool Blue.
Good names, and useful ones - and every behaviour inside that circle could be read as a strategy, and every strategy may be serving a responsibility. And there may be only three responsibilities, because we have three Brains.
What it is responsible for
The question it asks
The Gut Brain — me
Survival, safety, gain
Do I win, and am I safe?
The Heart Brain — us
Belonging, bonding, connection
Do I belong?
The Head Brain — what happens next
Predicting, understanding, being right
Can I predict this?
Three responsibilities, and a handful of strategies each. Cluster those strategies by how they look from outside, and I dare to suggest you could almost rebuild any of these instruments from scratch.
Nobody designed them that way, of course. They started at the top, with behaviour, and worked upwards into categories. And they keep landing in the same three places, which is more or less what we might expect if the biology were doing the work underneath. The Enneagram may be the clearest case — nine types in three centres, and it calls them Head, Heart and Body, with no biology anywhere in its history.
Which one might be yours?
Two steps, and about ten seconds. Nothing is stored, and nothing is sent anywhere.
DISC, as four animals
The colours are easier to hold as animals. And the four of them sit on two axes — the vertical one is the ordinary one, with task at the top and people at the bottom. The horizontal one is about power, and that may be the one that connects all of this to the three Brains.
Left — the other is stronger than me
Right — I am stronger
Task · achieve
People · connection
Blue — the owl
They are stronger, so I may be safest knowing more and being right. If I am never wrong, I cannot be caught out.
HEAD RECRUITED
Red — the lion
I am stronger, and the way through is straight at it. If I am strong enough, nothing can be taken from me.
GUT - LION
Green — the rabbit
They are stronger, so I may be safest not being a threat. If I am no threat to anyone, nothing comes at me.
GUT - RABBIT
Yellow — the dog
I am safe, and what I need comes through people. If people are glad to see me, I am fine.
HEART LEADS
Read that way, the horizontal axis could be the Gut axis. The lion and the rabbit, and both of them Gut Brain — one safe by winning, the other safe by not being worth attacking. The vertical axis might then say which of the other two Brains the Gut recruits to carry out its position.
Four colours, perhaps, because the Gut has two positions.
Red and green sit in opposite corners of the model, and they may be the same Brain running opposite strategies. Which could explain something the colours do not explain by themselves — why red and yellow often feel confident from the inside, while blue and green often feel careful, at equal capability.
And there is a consequence you can use tomorrow. Blue and green can each be produced by two different Brains. Somebody might be blue because they love precision, which is the Head, and a pleasure. Or blue because being wrong once cost them badly, which is the Gut, and a defence. From outside the colour looks identical. Only the motive separates them — and one question can ask it.
The Enneagram, and the Three
The Enneagram already uses the three words: Body or Gut, Heart, and Head, each organised around a core emotion — anger, shame, fear. Which may make the Three the example worth having, because it looks like a contradiction and it might not be one.
A Three focuses on winning and achieving, so the biology says Gut. The Enneagram places the Three in the Heart centre, driven by shame. Both readings can be right at the same time — a Heart driver, running a Gut strategy. Win, so that I am seen.
A system of nine types has to file that person in one box. Reading for the three Brains, the driver and the strategy can be named separately — which may be why achievement looks ambiguous in one system and not in the other.
“But Hogan and the Enneagram do assess values”
Fair, and true. Hogan’s Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory is explicitly about values and motives, and the Enneagram’s whole case is that it reaches for core motivation, basic fear and basic desire rather than for behaviour. So they are not only describing the surface, and it would not be honest to suggest otherwise.
The distinction may not be the topic, then. It may be how the information was obtained.
All of these are self-report questionnaires. A person answers, consciously, about themselves. So what comes back at that band is a person’s declared values — the ones they can name, recognise and endorse.
What the three Brains work with is what the body does when a declared value comes under pressure, and the two are often not the same thing. Somebody might report achievement as a top value while the Gut is running do not be caught out. Somebody might report affiliation while the Heart is quiet and the Gut is using people as cover. Both reports are honest. Neither is false. They are answers to a different question from the one the body is answering.
Declared, and enacted. And there is a second line worth having: naming is not changing. A values inventory may tell you that you value security. It might not tell you where that value was installed, who installed it, or whether it is still yours to keep.
Worth saying plainly, because it is also true: the two instruments that reach furthest down are the two that land closest to this. The Enneagram reaches for motive and arrives at Head, Heart and Body. Hogan reaches for what happens under pressure. That they reach down may be evidence for the model rather than against it.
“That is just who I am.”
“That is how I have tended to decide, so far.”
One risk that arrives with every instrument, including ours
“You are a Six.” “You are a Red.” “You are a high D.”
What may have happened in each of those sentences is that a description of a pattern has quietly become a description of a person. And once that has happened there is not much left to work with — because a pattern can move, and a person who has become their pattern cannot.
I want to call it identity labelling, because it is easy to recognise. Technically it is a few things at once. Reification, where an abstract construct gets treated as a concrete thing: a DISC category is a model, and “you are a Red” makes the model sound like a property that exists inside somebody. Psychological essentialism, where the label is taken to reflect a stable essence — that is just who you are. Labelling, where a whole person is reduced to a category. And overgeneralisation, where one score is applied across a whole life.
The grammar is where it happens, which means the grammar is also where it can be caught.
Instead of
Something closer to
“You are a Gut Brain.”
“Your Gut tends to answer first.”
“She is a Six.”
“She scores as a Six on that instrument.”
“I am a Red, so I…”
“In that situation I showed a strong preference for…”
Every sentence on the right leaves room for context, for learning, for state, for the relationship and for change. Every sentence on the left closes all five.
There is a metaphor worth keeping here. The map is wrong, and we trust the map over the road. An assessment is a map — and it may become a problem at the moment it quietly declares itself the territory.
Which includes our own
Worth saying plainly, because the moment we exempt ourselves we have lost the argument. So the 3 Brains Preference Test report says this, in these words:
This score does not mean that you are a specific Brain type — it means you prefer to decide from certain Brains more than others.
The scores add up to 105 rather than 100, on purpose, because the intention is not to give a percentage. It is to show which Brain may be most dominant in somebody’s decision-making. And even with a preference, the work is to align the three Brains before a decision gets carried out — because when decisions are made from one or two Brains rather than three, the more dominant ones can stay reflexively loyal to old behaviours or beliefs, even where that loyalty produces failure, or pain.
What a result may be, including ours
A 3 Brains assessment, a colour, four letters, a number — each of them offers a description. Like a photograph. None of them is a video of you.
What the three Brains may add is this. If somebody hears that they are talking from their Gut right now, they already know they have a Heart and a Head to go to. Not a trait to be sorted into. A wisdom centre — and a wisdom centre can be trained, rather as you might train a muscle, until it has a louder voice inside you and steps up a little sooner when it is needed.
The 3 Brains do not replace personality assessments. They complete the picture.
Same person. Different layer. And perhaps a question that has not yet been asked: is this still what you want to be protecting?
Christoffel G. Sneijders MCC is the author of Relationships?! Which Brain is Talking? and the founder of 3 Brains Intelligence.
A note on the mapping on this page: it is a structural argument and a clinical observation, not a measured correlation between instruments. That study is planned and not yet done.