The Communication Tendencies Assessment (CTA) is a research-informed, practitioner-debriefed profile measure designed to help people recognize the communication patterns that shape workplace interactions. It draws on David Kantor's Structural Dynamics and translates that work into a contemporary assessment and debrief process for individuals, groups, and teams.
When communicating with others, people often move quickly from behavior to interpretation — someone challenges an idea, speaks forcefully, pauses before answering, and others build a story about who that person is and why. Those stories may feel compelling, but they often close down the very dialogue the situation needs.
Read the structure, not the story
The CTA reads the observable structure first — the pattern of how people initiate, follow, challenge, reflect, organize, include, adapt, connect, make meaning, and pursue results.
It shows the relative weight a person tends to give each position — which come readily, and which are used less often. A profile is never a verdict; it is a map of current range, and an invitation to widen it.
Rooted in Structural Dynamics
The CTA is rooted in Structural Dynamics, the framework David Kantor developed to explain the recurring patterns people enact in real-time communication. Communication has a structure: a small set of recurring positions people use to move conversations forward, challenge them, stabilize them, widen them, and make meaning from them.
The CTA measures these tendencies across three domains. Every tendency is potentially useful, and none is inherently better than another. The developmental question is not whether a person has the "right" tendency, but whether they can use the tendency the moment requires.
The three domains
Read together, the three domains describe a whole communicative posture rather than three separate scores. Because the profile is proportional, it captures emphasis rather than category: most people draw on every position at times, yet lean on a familiar few. The aim is not to confirm those leanings but to make them visible, so a person can reach for a less-practiced position when the moment asks for it.
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Action — how we act
How someone tends to participate in the movement of a conversation
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Operating — how we operate
How someone tends to handle structure, process, and participation
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Attention — what we track
What someone tends to track as most important while communication unfolds
Instrument design
The CTA is designed to support varying levels of depth and application. It is available for individuals and for groups or teams, positioning it as a flexible assessment system for individual, group, and organizational use.
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CTA Basic
8-item short form focused on Action domain
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CTA Standard
31-item assessment focused on all three domains
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CTA Group & Team
Aggregate applications that show collective tendencies
Scoring uses a weighted approach that accounts for response variability, calculates both individual and aggregate results, and applies refined thresholds to interpret distribution patterns clearly. Tendencies connect to tips, reflective prompts, and practice resources, so scoring is built to inform a conversation, not to replace one.
Certified Practitioners & Responsible Use
The CTA is most powerful when interpreted with a certified practitioner. The practitioner is the bridge between a profile and real change: holding the structural frame, protecting interpretive safety, connecting the data to lived experience, and guiding the move from insight to action.
Certified practitioners are trained not simply to "read" a profile, but to facilitate a responsible interpretation process. Their role is to help participants understand patterns without becoming fixed by them, and to connect assessment language to the real conditions in which communication happens.
The goal is not to tell people who they are. The goal is to help people notice what they may do under certain conditions, understand the impact of those patterns, and choose how they want to communicate next.
Want to facilitate this yourself?
Becoming a certified practitioner means bringing this structural lens into your own coaching, teams, and organizations — administering and debriefing the CTA with the people you work with.