Understanding Your Zoo Insights Report

Natural Style (Graph II — right side): This is the person at their most comfortable, resourced, safe, and not under pressure to be something they're not, or to move at a pace or in a way that extends beyond their natural instinct. It reflects default wiring: the behaviors that come easily, and the ones that don't.

Adapted Style (Graph I — left side): This is how the person is currently showing up in response to their environment — their manager, their team, their culture, and the expectations around them both stated and unstated. This graph shifts over time as conditions change.

Reading the two graphs side by side tells you what the environment is asking of this person and what that's costing them.

The 50 mark on the graph is the energy threshold.

Behaviors scoring above 50 on the Natural graph are in the person's natural flow — they come easily and don't require sustained effort. Behaviors scoring below 50 are lower-intensity for that person — accessible, but not wired in.

When the Adapted graph crosses the 50 line in a direction that moves away from the Natural score, that gap costs energy. A person whose Natural relationship-focus sits at 25 but whose Adapted relationship-focus is at 65 is spending significant daily energy on behavior that doesn't come naturally. Over time, this sustained crossing of the energy line is one of the primary drivers of fatigue, disengagement, and burnout — even when the person can't point to a specific cause.

Not all energy line crossings are problems. Healthy flexing is part of professional growth. The health signal is in the sustained pattern, not a single moment.

Any score sitting above 90 — Natural or Adapted — signals that a behavior is operating not only at maximum intensity, but is rooted in a deep need. This is where behavioral tendencies become archetype need requirements. Scores at this level are not bad — they simply indicate the archetype's natural behaviors likely show up with intensity, consistently. The goal is to help improve their self-awareness of how they show up, where it works, and where it doesn't.

Consider:

• A Lion with a Natural directness score of 93 may consistently land as blunt or aggressive, even when intending to be clear and efficient. This Lion may benefit from hearing raw feedback from the people they respect to manage the energy and impact of their presence more effectively.
• An Elephant with a 95 on accuracy may be creating massive bottlenecks — unable to let work ship until it meets a standard that no timeline can accommodate. This Elephant may benefit from greater clarity around what's most urgent and important, and what "good" looks like, literally.
• A Lemur at 91 may be showing so much expressiveness that others read as overwhelming or scattered. This Lemur may benefit from learning to measure their energy in conversations more effectively.

Over-extension isn't a character flaw. It's a strength rooted in instinct, running so hot it needs conscious management. When you see a score above 90, your coaching question is: Is this person aware that this is running at maximum? And do they know what it looks like to others?

A score very close to zero is the quietest — and sometimes most significant — signal on the report.

Under-extension means a behavior is essentially offline, and rooted in deep need and significant experiences.

For some archetypes, a low score in a given dimension is expected. A Lion naturally low with relational warmth is operating as wired. But a naturally high scoring Lemur showing up with a near-zero Adapted score is not suddenly a different animal — they're in an environment that has made those behaviors feel unsafe, unrewarded, or too costly to maintain.

Under-extension often goes unnoticed precisely because it's silent. High scores announce themselves through behavior. Low scoring behaviors have never been visible. It's easy to miss behavioral cues you've never seen. When you see a near-zero Adapted score in a dimension that sits significantly higher on the Natural graph, that gap deserves direct, curious exploration, focused on understanding how the ecosystem around that person can help or hurt their experience and performance.

The overall gap between the two graphs is the report's central story.

When Natural and Adapted scores are close, the person is in a relatively aligned environment — what the situation asks of them and how they're naturally wired are reasonably matched.

When there are significant gaps across multiple dimensions — especially when Adapted scores are crossing the energy line, approaching over-extension, or showing under-extension — the person is working hard to show up in a way that works, but doesn't come naturally. That sustained effort has a cost, and it will eventually show up somewhere: in their engagement, their relationships, their output, or their health.

In the workplace where "busy" is everywhere, we often misjudge behaviors colleagues give off as dismissive, obnoxious, weak or difficult — when in reality they are signaling a deeper need, or in the case of adaptation, exhaustion.

A Zoo Insights Report is most useful when it opens a conversation — not when it ends one.

Your job as a Zookeeper is not to deliver a verdict. It's to read the story and invite the person into it: "Here's what I'm seeing in the data — does this feel true for you?"

The report opens the door. You walk through it together.

In Live Assessment 1, you'll be asked to narrate a Zoo Insights Report out loud as if presenting it to the person it belongs to. Practice reading the graphs specifically — identify the energy line crossings, flag any over-extension or under-extension, and narrate the gap between Natural and Adapted as a story, not a list of data points.