Q7-Lite: The One-Minute Tool That Reveals What Drives People

… and Unlocks Millions in Lost Productivity.

Every company on Earth keeps pouring money into “culture initiatives,” “alignment workshops,” and the usual parade of buzzwords. And yet the underlying problem never changes:

People don’t understand what truly motivates them – or anyone else.

They think they know. Everyone swears they know. But when you put them in a room together and watch how they make decisions, it becomes painfully obvious that they don’t. And this is the blind spot that costs companies billions every year.

That’s the point of the new web application Q7-Lite, a stripped-down version of the full Q7-Pro (the full Culture Compass by Collectiver). Q7-Lite is not a personality quiz, and not another “Which Hogwarts House Is Your CFO?” distraction. It’s a compact, scientifically grounded measure of the fundamental motivational priorities that govern how people behave – professionally, socially, and personally.

The surprising part? With Q7, you can map what really drives someone – including yourself! – in under a minute – and yes, it’s free.

Before You Open the Q7 App: Focus on This

This is the part people usually skip – then regret skipping.

Your answers to the Q7 questions must reflect one specific person: your Best Mate. Think of the person whose company you consistently enjoy. Someone you would choose again for an important project, a long road trip, or a late-night conversation. This mental anchor matters because without it, the tool will pull in fragments of your “work-self,” your “parent-self,” your “aspiring-self,” and your “I-should-really-go-to-the-gym-self.” That creates noise – and weakens the accuracy.

You’ll answer as if you ARE this Best Mate – and the resulting profile will reflect YOUR values as seen through this consistent lens.

The clearer your focus on that one person, the clearer the resulting Values Profile.

The text box below will help you focus on the BEST MATE – don’t skip it. You have only one attempt to open your window.

Now you are ready to open the Q7 app. To answer a question, move the slider between the two options, A and B, depending on which one feels closer, then click “Next.”

How Q7-Lite Works

The Q7 Culture Compass has been used for years in leadership teams, boardrooms, and cross-functional groups that struggle with alignment or want to estimate their team’s potential. Refined through a decade of field research with leadership teams and organizations across private and public sectors, Q7 has consistently revealed that high-performing teams demonstrate strong congruence, while underperforming groups show values scattered across the map.

The Q7 is built on the well-established Theory of Basic Human Values. If you want to explore the science behind your results, you’ll follow these links to deeper insights: Maslow Revisited, Part 2, Maslow Revisited, Part 3.

Q7-Lite gives you instant access to the core layer of the Q7 Culture Compass: seven forced-choice questions, selected and refined based on participants’ feedback over a decade of applied field research, allow you to generate a visual map of your internal drivers – your values.

If you have no time to read the articles linked above, you need to understand at least the basics. The Schwartz Theory organizes the 10 basic values into four higher-order “mega” categories (also called higher-order values):

• Openness to Change – Values emphasizing independence, action, and readiness for new experiences (includes Self-Direction, Stimulation, and sometimes Hedonism)
• Conservation – Values emphasizing order, self-restriction, preservation of the past, and resistance to change (includes Security, Conformity, and Tradition)
• Self-Enhancement – Values emphasizing the pursuit of one’s own interests and relative success (includes Achievement, Power, and sometimes Hedonism)
• Self-Transcendence – Values emphasizing concern for the welfare and interests of others (includes Benevolence and Universalism)

These categories are arranged along two bipolar dimensions: one contrasting openness to change versus conservation, and another contrasting self-enhancement versus self-transcendence.

A Quick Look at Your Star Map

After you answer the seven questions and confirm your email, your Star and personal Values Profile will open, overlaid on the Star Map. You’ll see a visual indication of where you are on the total map, among multiple smaller stars representing the motivational landscape of other users. This is the same interface used in the Q7 Culture Compass tool (Q7-PRO).

Q7-Lite will give a clear visual indication of where you are on the Values Map and whether other individuals with congruent profiles are nearby. If you want to have an open conversation with a colleague or partner, just hold your profiles side by side with theirs, as shown in the header image. The profiles will probably differ – and that’s normal.

Values don’t always need to match. They need to be understood.

If your Star (the vector of your basic values) is in the Self-Enhancement sector, while the team you are leading, according to the Q7 App, is predominantly in the Self-Transcendence sector, you are not necessarily going to fail in your leadership role. But you will experience ongoing tensions with the team members, sometimes bordering on animosity.

The moment people visualize that, many things become obvious.

 (Note that your Q7 profile cannot be changed for 30 days. Real values don’t change on a whim, and the 30-day cooldown prevents gaming the system.)

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Culture affects retention, collaboration, and performance. But the hidden layer—the one almost no company tackles systematically—is the gap between what the organization values and what individuals value.

That gap is where friction, suspicion, passive resistance, and low-grade daily dysfunction thrive.

People don’t fight over KPIs.

They fight over priorities.

And priorities are driven by values.

When values align, the opposite happens: Teams make decisions faster because priorities are naturally shared. Communication feels effortless because everyone operates from the same motivational framework. Trust builds quickly. Conflicts, when they do arise, resolve faster because people understand what truly matters to each other. High-congruence teams don’t just perform better—they feel better to be part of.

This is why “hiring for culture fit” isn’t just HR jargon—it’s the difference between teams that gel naturally and teams that require constant mediation.

When leaders miss that, they end up managing symptoms instead of causes. But when they see the underlying motivational map – both for individuals and for the team as a whole – they suddenly understand why certain conflicts never go away, why certain collaborations flourish effortlessly, and why some employees stick around despite better offers elsewhere. Introducing Q7-Lite may be the natural first step towards that understanding.

The beauty and magic of the Collectiver Culture Compass (including Q7-Lite and Truvtus) is that it is an agnostic tool that is applicable wherever people interact, be it politics, manufacturing, or retail.

The Starbucks Moment (The Part CFOs Care About)

Let’s be blunt: executives don’t invest in tools because they’re “interesting.” They invest because something improves performance, reduces risk, or cuts waste.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Most leadership teams have no idea what truly motivates their workforce. Nor what attracts their customer. Nor who the customer is. And least of all they know if their customer and their staff serving the customer have compatible profiles.

They guess. They infer. They invent narratives.

But even a small misalignment creates costly strategic blind spots.

An example that needs the Q7 help is Starbucks. As a leading global café chain, Starbucks reported $37B in annual revenue. If Q7-based alignment improved their same-store performance by even 1%, and field experience suggests that the improvement is often higher, that’s $370 million of unlocked value per year – not from marketing, promotions, or discounts, but from reducing the invisible inefficiencies caused by conflicting motivational priorities.

Trying to appeal to everyone is shooting in the dark. Define your ideal patron’s values profile, then align your team accordingly location by location – that’s how same-store sales grow organically. When your baristas’ values match your target customer’s values, everything from service quality to atmosphere naturally aligns – and revenue takes off.

Beyond Business: The Personal Connection

Professionals come to Q7-Lite for different reasons. Some want clarity. Some want novelty. Some want a clean, jargon-free way to describe their priorities without sounding like a LinkedIn parody. But the personal angle – your P2P (Person-to-Person alignment) – is universal.

If your organization already has a team or company Q7 profile (P2O, or Person-to-Organization alignment), individuals can compare themselves to those Values Maps instantly. The friction points become obvious. So do the opportunities – for both parties.

And outside work, on a very personal level, if you expect a relationship to last longer than a vacation romance, motivational compatibility is not optional. It’s foundational. Q7-Lite reveals whether you thrive on harmony, security, achievement, independence, stimulation, or deeper ideals—and whether your partner actually fits the same motivational ecosystem.

“Honey, can you show me your Q7 profile?”  This exercise provides clarity that avoids years of friction.

Going Deeper: The Professional Toolkit

Q7-Lite gives you immediate insight into your values profile—and for many purposes, that’s sufficient. But when you need to understand team dynamics at a deeper level, assess organizational alignment, or make critical hiring and development decisions, the professional version offers capabilities that go far beyond the Q7-Lite scope:

• Team-level congruence calculations that reveal the collective motivational landscape and identify potential friction points before they become problems
• Person-to-organization alignment scores that quantify how well individual values match organizational culture
• Detailed analysis and strategic recommendations delivered through Collectiver Consulting, drawing on a decade of field experience across diverse organizational contexts.

If Q7-Lite sparks questions about your team’s dynamics or your organization’s cultural alignment, professional consulting services are available to take you deeper.