Over a century ago, Alfred Adler broke from Freud and Jung to argue that people are not prisoners of their past but purposeful, social beings striving toward self-created goals. His ideas align remarkably with how Sariio measures dynamic work preferences - and challenge the deterministic assumptions underpinning most legacy personality tests.
When most people think about personality psychology, names like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung come to mind first. Their theories - the id and the superego, the introvert and the extravert, the shadow and the archetype - have become cultural furniture. But there is a third figure from that extraordinary period in early twentieth-century Vienna whose influence has arguably done more to shape the way we actually help people than either of his more famous contemporaries. His name is Alfred Adler, and the framework he built over a century ago maps onto the challenges of the modern workplace with a precision that the more celebrated theories simply cannot match.
At Sariio, we did not set out to build a platform rooted in Adlerian psychology. We set out to solve a practical problem: how do you help people, teams, and organisations understand dynamic work preferences - the motivations, social orientations, decision-making habits, and execution styles that shape how someone actually shows up at work - without reducing them to a fixed label? It was only as the MAPS framework matured that the alignment with Adler's Individual Psychology became unmistakable. The emphasis on purpose over pathology, on social context over biological destiny, and above all on the capacity for change - these are not incidental parallels. They reflect a shared conviction that people are creative agents, not predetermined types.
The Vienna Split: Where Personality Psychology Took Two Roads
To understand why this matters for anyone working with people today - coaches, recruiters, team leaders, HR professionals - it helps to revisit the moment when personality psychology split into two fundamentally different philosophies.
Alfred Adler was born in a suburb of Vienna in 1870. After qualifying as a physician, he spent his early career treating working-class patients and circus performers - people whose physical vulnerabilities had driven them to develop extraordinary compensating strengths. In 1902, Freud invited Adler to join the Wednesday Psychological Society, the nucleus of what would become the psychoanalytic movement. But Adler was never Freud's student. He was a colleague, and an increasingly dissenting one. By 1911, the disagreement had become irreconcilable. Freud insisted that human behaviour was driven by unconscious sexual and aggressive instincts - biological forces that operated beneath conscious awareness and largely determined who a person would become. Adler rejected this entirely. He argued that the primary human motivation is not sexual energy but the striving for mastery: an innate, forward-looking drive to move from a felt sense of inadequacy toward competence, belonging, and contribution. Crucially, Adler saw this striving as fundamentally social. People do not develop in isolation; they develop through their relationships, their communities, and their pursuit of goals they create themselves.
After the split, Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912. The name itself was a statement of intent: individuum, from the Latin, meaning "undivided." Where Freud fragmented the psyche into warring parts - the id, the ego, the superego - Adler insisted on treating the person as a unified whole, a coherent "style of life" moving toward a self-chosen destination.
Adler's most radical insight was deceptively simple: behaviour is better understood by looking at where a person is going than by looking at where they came from. Purpose, not pathology, drives the human story.
Determinism versus Agency: The Fork That Still Divides the Industry
The philosophical divide that separated Adler from Freud and Jung is not merely an academic curiosity. It is the same divide that separates most legacy personality assessments from Sariio's approach to MAPS.
Freud's framework was deterministic. Early childhood experiences - particularly traumatic ones - were held to fix the personality. The past shaped the present, and therapy was essentially an exercise in excavating buried memories to understand why someone behaved as they did. Jung broadened this determinism by adding a collective layer: universal archetypes inherited from ancestral experience, operating through the collective unconscious to shape personality in ways that were, by definition, beyond individual control.
The personality testing industry that emerged in the twentieth century drew heavily from this Jungian tradition. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the most widely recognised personality assessment in the world, was explicitly built on Jung's theory of psychological types. Its core premise - that people have innate, relatively fixed preferences along four dichotomies - reflects the Jungian conviction that personality is something you are, not something you do. The same deterministic inheritance runs through many popular psychometric tools: the assumption that personality is stable, that it can be sorted into types or categories, and that these categories are essentially permanent features of an individual's psychological architecture.
Adler took the opposite view. He introduced a teleological perspective - the idea that behaviour is best understood by its purpose, by the goals an individual is pursuing, rather than by the causes in their past. People are not pushed by their history; they are pulled by their aspirations. They create what Adler called a "fictional final goal" in early childhood, a guiding vision of who they want to become, and their entire style of life organises around this forward-looking purpose. Critically, because these goals are self-created, they can also be re-examined, revised, and changed.
This is the philosophical foundation that Sariio shares. The MAPS framework does not measure personality traits as fixed properties. It measures dynamic work preferences: the motivations and behavioural tendencies that shape how someone connects with others, thinks through problems, makes decisions, and implements tasks in the context of their work. These preferences are real and measurable, but they are not immutable. They respond to experience, coaching, deliberate development, and changes in role and environment. Sariio stores every MAPS assessment as a time-stamped snapshot precisely because preferences evolve - and tracking that evolution is where the real value lies for coaches, managers, and individuals seeking to grow.
Social Interest: The Dimension Legacy Tests Overlook
Perhaps Adler's most significant contribution to psychology was his concept of Gemeinschaftsgefuhl - usually translated as "social interest" or "community feeling." While Freud viewed society as a source of repression and Jung saw social life through the lens of the persona (a mask worn to satisfy social expectations), Adler believed that a genuine sense of belonging and contribution to the common good was the single most reliable indicator of psychological health.
Adler identified three unavoidable life tasks that every person must navigate: work, friendship, and love. Success in any of these requires what he called social interest - the willingness to cooperate, to consider the needs of others, and to find one's significance through contribution rather than competition. Individuals with high social interest approach challenges with empathy and collaborative energy. Those with low social interest pursue what Adler termed "socially useless" goals: seeking personal significance at the expense of others, which he identified as the root of both neurosis and antisocial behaviour.
Most legacy personality assessments have little to say about this dimension. They can tell you whether someone is introverted or extraverted, conscientious or spontaneous, but they struggle to capture the social dynamics of how people actually work together - how they connect, where they create friction, and how their preferences interact within a team. The MAPS framework addresses this directly. The Relationships factor, the first of MAPS' four dimensions, explicitly measures an individual's orientation toward social interaction at work: from the more cautious and boundary-conscious Cautious archetype, through the balanced Diplomatic position, to the open and inclusive Inclusive archetype. But social dynamics do not stop at the Relationships factor. The interplay of all four factors - Relationships, Thinking & Planning, Making Decisions, and Getting Things Done - determines how an individual's preferences create alignment or tension with colleagues, managers, and team cultures. This is why MAPS produces 81 distinct archetype combinations rather than a handful of broad types. It is also why Sariio's comparison and VMC tools (comparison reports, collaboration analysis, and role matching) exist: because understanding individuals in isolation is only half the picture. Understanding them in relation to others is where Adler's social interest comes alive.
Adler believed that the work task - finding meaning through occupation - is inseparable from social interest. You cannot understand a worker without understanding the relationships they work within. Sariio's MAPS framework is built on precisely this principle.
The Creative Self and the 21st-Century Worker
There is a reason why Adler's ideas feel remarkably modern, even though they were articulated over a century ago. The world of work he anticipated - one in which individuals must navigate complexity, adapt to changing circumstances, and find purpose through social contribution - is the world of work that has actually arrived.
Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report confirms that only 21% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. The remaining 79% are either quietly disengaged or actively suffering in roles that do not align with their motivations, values, or preferred ways of working. This is not a crisis of personality type. It is a crisis of purpose and belonging - precisely the territory Adler mapped.
The modern worker does not need to be told what type they are. They need to understand what drives them, how their preferences interact with those of the people around them, and how they can deliberately develop the areas that matter most to their goals. They need a framework that respects their agency - that treats them as creative, self-directing individuals capable of growth - rather than slotting them into a category and telling them to "leverage their strengths" within it.
Adler called this agency the "creative self" - the capacity of every individual to interpret their circumstances and choose their response. He was the first major psychologist to insist that people are not passive victims of their biology, their upbringing, or their unconscious. They are active architects of their own style of life. This is the conviction that underpins Sariio's self-evolution coaching reports, its development planning tools, and its time-stamped MAPS history: the conviction that preferences are dynamic, that growth is possible, and that the most useful thing you can do for someone is show them where they are, where they want to go, and what the journey between those two points looks like.
Why Legacy Tests Struggle with the Modern Workplace
The Jungian inheritance that shapes most popular personality assessments was designed for a different era of work. When the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed in the 1940s, the dominant model of employment was hierarchical, stable, and long-term. Workers joined organisations, accepted their position in the structure, and stayed. In this context, a fixed personality type had a certain utility: it could help match individuals to roles within a predictable system.
The 21st-century workplace looks nothing like this. Careers are non-linear. Teams are fluid. Remote and hybrid working have fundamentally altered how people connect and collaborate. The skills and preferences that matter most - adaptability, social intelligence, the ability to work across cultures and disciplines - are precisely the qualities that fixed-type models struggle to capture. When an assessment tells someone they are an "INTJ" or a "Type 4," it offers a moment of recognition but very little guidance on what to do next. It certainly does not tell them how to work more effectively with the "ESFP" sitting across the table, or how to develop the decision-making confidence their new leadership role demands.
Adler anticipated this limitation. He warned against rigid labelling, noting that birth order patterns - one of his own contributions to psychology - should be understood as tendencies, not deterministic categories. He insisted that the value of any psychological framework lies not in its ability to classify but in its ability to encourage: to help people see their current patterns clearly and to support them in moving toward more effective, more socially connected ways of living and working.
Adler Got It Right
There is a quiet irony in the history of personality psychology. Adler's name is less famous than Freud's or Jung's, yet his ideas have "quietly permeated" - as the academic literature puts it - nearly every branch of modern applied psychology. He is acknowledged as the grandfather of the humanistic movement that produced Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. His concept of "private logic" and "mistaken notions" is the direct ancestor of cognitive behavioural therapy. His insistence on social interest as the benchmark of health anticipated positive psychology by half a century. And his collaborative, egalitarian approach to therapy - sitting face to face with clients, focusing on strengths and encouragement rather than diagnosis and pathology - is now the default model for coaching, counselling, and organisational development.
What Adler understood, and what the workplace is only now beginning to accept, is that the most useful question you can ask about a person is not "what type are they?" but "what are they striving toward, and how are they going about it?" That question is inherently dynamic. It invites development, coaching, and self-reflection. It respects the individual's agency while acknowledging the social context in which they operate. And it is the question that Sariio is designed to answer - not once, with a permanent label, but repeatedly, across time, as people grow and their circumstances change.
Sariio's tagline is "make your worklife better." It is a deliberately simple statement for a deliberately complex problem. But the philosophy behind it - that people are whole, social, purposeful beings who can understand their preferences, develop their capabilities, and build better working relationships through self-awareness and coached reflection - is not new. Alfred Adler articulated it in 1912. What is new is the technology, the data, and the AI-orchestrated coaching tools that make it possible to deliver that philosophy at scale to every individual, team, and organisation that takes engagement, collaboration, and human development seriously.
Adler got it right. The question for the 21st-century workplace is whether we are finally ready to listen.
David Foggin, Founder, Sariio.
6 Feb 2026