About the Book
The vocabulary most companies are missing
Every organisation has a strategy. Most have values on the wall. Very few have a shared language for the thing that determines whether either of those things works: human behavior.
Disorganism is written for anyone who has worked inside a dysfunctional organisation and wanted to understand why. It argues that behavior is not a soft topic - it is the most measurable, predictable, and commercially significant variable in any organisation. And it provides the tools to act on that argument.
Act I is a business narrative: the anatomy of a dysfunctional company, the SHAPE model of human behavior, and the Talent Genome as the periodic table of behavioral science applied to work. Act II is the reference manual: all 60 competencies, defined, calibrated, and ready to use.
Research Foundation
Built on science. Validated in practice.
The Talent Genome is not a proprietary opinion framework. It is grounded in peer-reviewed research and validated across thousands of real-world assessments. Translations are available to the most widely used frameworks in behavioural science — not because those frameworks are the same, but because no single model has all the answers.
98-Study Meta-Analysis
The Talent Genome was built on a systematic meta-analysis of 98 peer-reviewed academic studies, drawing on more than 647 individual research citations. The 60 competencies were identified by mapping the behavioral constructs that appear consistently across the leadership and performance literature, then tested for predictive validity across role types and levels.
Empirical Validation
The 60 competencies and 18 Characteristics have been validated across thousands of assessments in 47 countries. The forced-ranking methodology of the Talentprint assessment eliminates social desirability bias and produces data that correlates reliably with performance outcomes across role types and levels.
The SHAPE Model
The original R-Squared framework has been reframed through the SHAPE model - Stress, Habits, Assumptions, Personality, and Education - which explains why people behave the way they do. SHAPE provides the explanatory layer that transforms a competency dictionary into a diagnostic tool.
Organisational Application
The framework has been applied in succession planning, executive assessment, job profiling, leadership development, and large-scale talent data collection. The Organisational Genome extends the model from individual competencies to enterprise capability, linking behavioral strategy to business strategy.
Translations to Popular Reference Frameworks
17 Years of Application
Tested across industries, cultures, and levels of work
The Talent Genome was first published in 2009 as a book about adaptive leadership and a playbook for coaching, under the title R-Squared, authored by Martin Sutherland and Yolanda Lacoma. Over the following 17 years, Peopletree Group deployed the framework across thousands of engagements in 47 countries, spanning nine major industry sectors.
That body of application data is what makes this rewrite different from a theoretical update. Every competency definition, every behavioral descriptor, and every application guideline in this book has been stress-tested against real hiring decisions, real performance conversations, and real succession outcomes.
The Talentprint assessment - available in both 18-Characteristic and 60-competency versions - has been administered across all levels of work, from entry-level roles to board appointments, and across all major functional domains.
Sectors
Primary Use Cases
The Talent Genome
Three levels of resolution. One framework.
The framework is designed to work at different levels of precision depending on the application. The right level is determined by the role, the purpose, and the scale of the assessment.
The Organisational Genome extends this model to the enterprise level — translating business strategy into organisational capabilities, and capabilities into the behavioral competencies required to execute them. It is the macro-level complement to the individual-level Talent Genome.
Get Involved
Follow the project
Disorganism is currently in active development. The Talent Genome framework, the Talentprint assessment, and the Organisational Genome are all live products available through Peopletree Group.