.png)
NEW ERA. NEW LEADERSHIP. NEW SCIENCE.
The Assessments in your arsenal were built for a world that no longer exists
WHY NOW
Every major economic shift has demanded a new model of leadership. Every time, the tools used to understand and develop people have lagged behind, sometimes by decades. Peter Drucker saw it coming in 1998: "Most of our assumptions about business, technology and organization are at least 50 years old. They have outlived their time." The pace has only accelerated since.
We moved from the Industrial Era, where stability, hierarchy, and expertise defined success, into the Knowledge Era, where access to information became the competitive advantage. Now we're moving again. Into the AI Era, where AI has democratized access to knowledge overnight, and the only edge that can't be replicated is the one that was always hardest to measure: how people think together, lead through uncertainty, and build something that didn't exist before.
And we are still measuring leaders with tools built in the 1960s.
THE PROBLEM ISN'T JUST THE TOOLS, IT'S THE MODEL
Legacy assessments evaluate individuals in isolation, measuring fixed traits against stable role requirements in predictable environments. But change people without changing the environment around them, and you won't see lasting change. Performance isn't a property of individuals. It's a property of systems, the individual, the team they operate within, and the culture and environment that shapes both.
The U.S. Army understood this. Decades of research on military teams, where the cost of getting team dynamics wrong is measured in lives, points to the same conclusion: individual talent is necessary but insufficient. What determines whether a team succeeds under pressure isn't who's in it. It's how they function together, in context.
That insight; person plus environment, behavior over trait, team as the unit of performance, is what Symeta was built on. Not retrofitted from a corporate framework. Built from the ground up for the era we're in.
The AI era needs a new science of leadership.
This is it.
OUR FOUNDATION
20+ years of organizational science. Purpose-built for how teams work today.
20+ years of research, 60+ scholarly publications. 100+ conference presentations & invited talks. 1,000+ studies in the foundational synthesis and analysis.
Featured in Harvard Business Review · Forbes · Gallup · American Psychologist · Frontiers in Organizational Psychology
Built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, organizational psychologists who have spent careers studying how people make decisions under uncertainty, how teams form and fracture, and what behaviors predict performance in high-stakes environments.
OUR FRAMEWORK
12 Behavioral Gears. 4 Levers. One Complete Picture.
Most frameworks were designed to describe who people are. The 12 Gears of Entrepreneurial Change™ map what they do, the specific behavioral patterns that determine how someone shows up when the environment is uncertain, the stakes are high, and there's no playbook. Measure the Gears, and for the first time you have a reliable picture of how a person is likely to perform, lead, and adapt in the moments that matter most.
LEVER 1: THINKING
How you see opportunity, design the method to pursue it, and develop the strategy to win.
Vision: Opportunity recognition, conceiving a direction, and selling that idea to others. The ability to see what's possible before it exists, and make others believe in it.
Strategy: Developing a plan that fits a market need and is competitive within the industry. Translating vision into something that can work.
Resourcefulness: Marshaling the necessary tools, capital, and supplies, and using them creatively when resources are scarce.
LEVER 2: OPERATING
Where thinking becomes reality, the engine that turns method into momentum.
Execution: Devising and implementing business plans, core functions, and operational systems. The discipline to build what was designed.
Innovation: Maintaining competitive advantage by continuously improving products or services. The drive to keep getting better, even when good enough would do.
Decision Making : Analyzing and processing information to solve problems and make decisions. Knowing when to move and when to wait, under conditions of uncertainty
LEVER 3: RELATING
How your vision enters the world, through the people you bring with you.
Collaboration: Building and managing relationships, motivating, and leading others. The connective tissue that holds teams together under pressure.
Direction: Providing guidance and orchestrating members towards shared goals. Not just leading, aligning.
Influence: Managing complicated situations, handling deals, taking risks, and acting on behalf of the venture. Moving people and circumstances in the direction of the mission
LEVER 4: ADAPTING
The inner forces that determine whether pressure breaks you or builds you.
Vitality: Setting goals and performance standards and focusing on their attainment. The energy that sustains momentum when the journey is longer than expected.
Resilience: Managing and allotting energy and effort to achieve goals. Knowing how to pace, recover, and push, without burning out the engine.
Persistence: Dealing with crises, overcoming obstacles, coping with stress, and managing emotions. The ability to stay in the game when everything is telling you to stop.
OUR AWARDS
OUR RESEARCH: THE IDEA LAB
The science behind every decision Symeta helps you make
The Idea Lab is where Symeta's science stays alive, a collaborative research community fueled by the next generation of organizational psychologists from Illinois Institute of Technology and beyond. Where the science behind the platform is continuously tested, challenged, and advanced.
Entrepreneurial Teams & Startup Performance
The behavioral science of what makes founding teams succeed or fail: the direct foundation of the 12 Gears of Entrepreneurial Change™.
Blacksmith N. & O'Malley, A. (2025) Psychological Science in Action: Building a Startup that Works. Association for Psychological Science.
Blacksmith, N., & McCusker, M. E. (2024). Data-driven decision-making in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Routledge.
Blacksmith, N., McCusker, M. E., Diouf, K., & Wagner, D. (2023). Entrepreneurship performance in startups: Development of a behavioral taxonomy. SIOP Annual Conference.
Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Entrepreneurial environments demand decisions made with incomplete information, under pressure, at speed. This research underpins how Symeta evaluates and develops decision-making capability.
Shortland, N. D., McCusker, M. E., et al. (2023). Avoidant Authority: The effect of organizational power on decision-making in high-uncertainty situations. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology.
Blacksmith, N., & Fleming, A. C. (2022). Examining Evidence for a Taxonomy of Cognitive Biases. U.S. Army Research Institute Technical Report.
Blacksmith, N., & McCusker, M. E. (2020). A unifying framework to study workplace decision-making aptitude and performance. Personnel Assessments and Decisions.
Team Dynamics & Leadership
How teams form, how leadership emerges, and how dynamics evolve over time, the science behind Symeta's team-level intelligence.
Maupin, C. K., McCusker, M. E., et al. (2019). A tale of three approaches: Leveraging organizational discourse analysis and dynamic network analysis for collective leadership. Human Relations.
McCusker, M. E., Foti, R. J., Abraham, E. (2018). The problem with leadership research methods. In What's Wrong With Leadership? Routledge.
Goodwin, G.F., Blacksmith, N., & Coats, M. (2017). The science of teams in the military: Contributions from over 60 years of research. American Psychologist.
Assessment Science & Technology
The methodological rigor behind how Symeta measures behavior, and why the approach is more valid and reliable than legacy tools.
Blacksmith, N., Behrend, T.S., Dalal, R.S., & Hayes, T.L. (2019). General Mental Ability and Decision-Making Competence. Personality and Individual Differences.
Blacksmith, N., Willford, J.C., & Behrend, T.S. (2016). Technology in the employment interview: A Meta-Analysis. Personnel Assessments and Decisions.
Blacksmith, N., Yang, Y., Behrend, T. S., & Ruark, G. A. (2019). Assessing the validity of inferences from scores on the cognitive reflection test. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
Adaptability in Entrepreneurship
Symeta was built to remove bias from consequential people decisions, this research grounds that commitment in science.
Costanza, D.P., Blacksmith, N., et al. (2016). The effect of adaptive organizational culture on long-term survival. Journal of Business and Psychology.
Blacksmith, N. (Chair), Sandoval, R., & Ennen, N. (2024). Towards an Inclusive Landscape of Entrepreneurship: Supporting Underrepresented Founders. APS Annual Convention.
Wilson, M. & Blacksmith, N. (2019). Women minority entrepreneurs: Does risk-taking differentially predict performance? APS Annual Convention.
WE PRACTICE THE GOLD STANDARD
Rigorous enough to trust. Transparent enough to verify.
Symeta's assessment framework meets the gold standard for assessment validity and reliability set by The Standards of Educational and Psychological Testing which was co-developed by American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME).
Every instrument is designed, validated, and regularly audited to ensure accuracy, fairness, and consistency across the diverse populations Symeta serves. Because the decisions made with this intelligence are consequential, the science behind it is held to the highest standard.
