David Foggin
What makes people do their best work? I have chased that question through advertising, consulting, headhunting and a good many contact-centre floors. Sariio is the answer I kept arriving at: measure how people prefer to work, and build the work around the evidence.
I studied organisational leadership at Harvard Business School, where John Kotter, author of Leading Change, was my tutor and mentor. I built the first version of the survey, Saviio, in 2007; by 2016 it had run across forty organisations and more than twelve thousand people, and SAM Headhunting in Copenhagen made it the working tool of its consultants across sixteen countries.
The map on the right is mine. It is the same report every person who takes the survey receives, and it says more about how I work than a biography would.
Twelve preference pairs at a glance. The live version expands each one and includes the AI commentary. Open the live report (opens in new tab)
The idea the career kept proving
Every chapter taught the same lesson from a different angle. The agency years showed that talented people fail in roles that fight their nature. The headhunting years showed that CVs describe the past and predict very little. The contact-centre floors showed both at industrial scale, and what the pattern costs once attrition passes 30 per cent a year.
We do our best work when we play to our preferences. Sariio exists to make that visible, one map at a time.
How the mapping worksTen things we believe about ourselves and work
We do our best work when we play to our preferences. Nine more beliefs follow from the first: that we are more than our personality type, that context changes things including us, that our preferences can change and do change, that understanding creates agency, that culture is what becomes normal between us. Each is on one page, in two sentences, with the full narrative underneath.
What we believeSariio Limited
Sariio Limited is registered in England and Wales, company number 15760535, at Suite 5, 5th Floor, City Reach, 5 Greenwich View Place, London E14 9NN. Platform data is hosted in Frankfurt on European infrastructure, encrypted in transit and at rest - the complete governance position, written for DPOs and procurement teams, is published in the trust & AI governance declaration.
Happy to talk it through
If any of this sounds like something you are dealing with - attrition, engagement, a team that should work and doesn't - drop me a line. If Sariio is a fit I will say so, and if it is not I will say that too.