What do you do with a new idea?
How much you enjoy ideas, theories, and imagining things. Sometimes called Intellect or Imagination.
Openness to Ideas is the Big Five trait about how much a person enjoys ideas, theories, and imagining things. It is not a measure of how clever anybody is.
The question underneath this trait is what happens in somebody's head when a new idea turns up. Some people want to know what it would look like in practice before spending time on it. Others enjoy turning it over whether or not it goes anywhere. Neither one is the smarter answer.
It shows up at work more than anywhere else. A new approach in a Monday meeting lands as interesting to one person and as a disruption to something that was working to another. Both of those reactions are this trait.
This is the trait most often confused with ability, so every report we produce says plainly that it is not one. It describes what a person enjoys thinking about, not how well they think. Somebody can be very good at their job and want nothing to do with theory.
It also shows up in how a person talks. One person explains a plan in the fewest concrete steps that will get it done. Another keeps asking what would happen if the whole thing were done a different way.
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Start your free assessmentEvery one of the five is a range between two named ends, and neither end is the one to aim for. Both belong to people doing perfectly well, and each buys something the other pays for.
Attention goes to what is in front of somebody and what is known to work. Somebody at this end wants to know what an idea would look like in practice before spending time on it. They prefer a method with a track record, and a conversation that never lands on anything real gets tiring fast. They are usually the person who asks what this would mean on Monday morning. That question is what turns an idea into something that happens.
Attention goes toward ideas, including the ones with no use yet. Somebody at this end follows a side thought to see where it ends up, keeps several unrelated interests running, and gets restless with a method that is working fine. This is where new approaches come from. The cost is a folder of half-finished starts, and a pull toward the interesting version of a problem instead of the one that needs solving.
The middle is the most common place to land. It usually looks like being interested in a new idea and still wanting to see it work before anything changes. New ideas are welcome, and they get asked to prove themselves first. That combination is why so much of the middle of this trait ends up running things.
Worth saying plainly, because this trait gets misread: it measures what you enjoy thinking about, not how capable you are. It isn't an intelligence score.
| Band | Share of people |
|---|---|
| Strongly concrete | 11.3% |
| Practical-leaning | 19.5% |
| Grounded-curious | 41% |
| Idea-leaning | 19.2% |
| Strongly exploratory | 9% |
The common misreading is that this trait is a proxy for intelligence. It is sometimes called Intellect, which does not help. It is not an intelligence score, and nothing here measures ability. The second misreading is that the practical end is closed-minded. Wanting evidence before changing a system that works is not a closed mind. It is the reason systems that work keep working.
Both show up at the start of something new. Openness to Ideas is about how interesting the idea is to somebody; Conscientiousness is about how the work gets done once it has begun.
Both can read as energy in a room. Extraversion is about where somebody recharges; Openness to Ideas is about how much they enjoy thinking about something new. Plenty of people full of ideas work through them alone.
A trait is a tendency across many days, not a rule about any one of them. Somebody near one end of a trait does the other thing regularly; they just do it less often, and it costs them more.
Where somebody sits also says nothing about how good they are at anything. Both ends of every one of the five belong to people doing well, and the useful question is not which end is better but what each one costs and what it buys.
Or start with what the Big Five are.
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