Why I Created PERS6NɅ: Five Years of Research, a Grail Found in Chicago, and a Conviction Born From My Own Journey

I never wanted to be a coach. I never wanted to create a test. I just wanted to understand how we function, and how to work together despite everything that sets us apart.

From family bookshelves to a career in marketing

I'm the son of a doctor and a psychomotor therapist. As a teenager, I dug through the family bookshelves — that's where I opened The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud, and Mintzberg on Management by Henry Mintzberg. The first explained how I worked. The second, how different people could still build something together. I didn't know it yet, but these two questions would shape my entire career.

I first built a career in marketing. Then, in 2015, I completed the Coach and Team program — much like attending a management school. That's where, as a young coach, I discovered the world of personality tests.

The maze of personality tests

My company had me take a Process Communication Model® assessment. I didn't understand much, other than that I was good at coloring in my square house. But I liked the idea: finding clues about yourself, having something reassuring to lean on. So I kept taking them: TTI Success Insight®, MBTI®, 4D Clarity®, Clifton Strength Finder®, Monkey Tie 5D®, and more recently Mindset Map® and Com Colours®.

None of them truly spoke to me. I liked the idea, but not always the tool.

2018: the meeting that changed everything

In 2018, at the Institut Maieutis, my path crossed the Process Communication Model® again — but this time thanks to Isabelle Jarniou Contal. For the first time, a model became genuinely readable to me. I trained in PCM with Gérard Collignon and Isabelle, then deepened my practice through Patrice Dubourg's Process Therapy Model, someone I consider one of the most knowledgeable people on the model.

PCM helped me a great deal, both individually and in groups. But a more demanding question started nagging at me: where does this model actually come from? How was it built? How are the questionnaires administered?

Five years of research

That question launched me into more than five years of research. I spent a lot of time exchanging with peers — Philippe Coudol, Isabelle Jarniou, Vannina Malekzadeh, Mélanie Le Van Cau. I wrote an article on the « Be Perfect » driver. I contacted the International Transactional Analysis Association about publishing it. I was supervised by figures in Transactional Analysis — Daniel Chernet, Philippe Ducatteeuw — and by American clinicians. And every month, I kept exchanging with Patrice Dubourg: shared books, translations, ideas taking shape.

I also used artificial intelligence very early in this work — not to move faster, but to go deeper: querying dedicated agents, building my own GPTs from my sources. I bought dozens of rare books in duplicate — one copy to read, one copy to tear apart and scan to feed an AI dedicated to that exact body of work. A living library, rather than a stack of books gathering dust.

I gathered and studied hundreds of articles and books — Eric Berne, Claude Steiner, Ian Stewart, Michael Brown, Taibi Kahler — often rare, sometimes nearly impossible to find.

The Chicago grail

Among these finds was a personal grail: a signed copy of Transactional Analysis Revisited by Taibi Kahler — a book I had never seen, even among highly specialized peers. I found it at a secondhand bookshop in Chicago. It traveled to San Francisco to a friend's place, then cost me a same-day round trip to Paris just to pick it up. This kind of detail might seem trivial. To me, it sums up the whole approach: never settle for the simplified version when the original source still exists somewhere.

More broadly, I mobilized every resource available to me — academic research, exchanges with peers, artificial intelligence — to understand how a personality test is actually built, from A to Z. And out of that understanding came, not a copy, but a diagnostic conceived differently: PERS6NɅ.

What this research taught me

This exploration led me to a simple conclusion: many personality tests don't have a solid scientific foundation, or have never been updated since their creation. Those that do rely on a clinical basis most often do so through psychoanalysis or the study of behavioral disorders. And Transactional Analysis itself, the very thing that had helped me so much, is ultimately just a way of translating personality types — not a scientific source in itself.

So I dove into the DSM-5-TR (2022, American Psychiatric Association), the ICD-11 (2022, World Health Organization), and then the PDM-3 — the classifications that doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists use today to describe personality functioning and disorders.

Facing my own injunctions

With all this information gathered, only one obstacle remained: myself. Creating your own model means running headfirst into your own injunctions — in my case, « don't be important » and « don't succeed ». My Native personality type is Evaluator: rigor, verification, demanding proof before any conclusion. That's probably exactly the trait that kept me from publishing anything before I had checked everything — and that, today, guarantees nothing in PERS6NɅ was put forward lightly.

The birth of PERS6NɅ

PERS6NɅ was born from this meeting between a personal quest and a scientific requirement. The model was first tested with an initial group of 30 people, in cross-tests against other personality tools. Since then, the base has grown: to date, more than 60 people have completed their PERS6NɅ diagnostic in addition to a Process Communication Model® assessment they had already taken — a direct comparison that keeps refining the model over time.

One methodological requirement was non-negotiable from the start: asking participants to rank the 6 personality types against each other, rather than scoring them separately. Some profiles, in action or reaction mode, tend to want to fill out a test too quickly — which weakens the reliability of the result. Ranking forces a choice, and therefore honesty with oneself.

A conviction that remains a quest

Over time, this research became almost an obsession — in service of a simple idea: understand deeply in order to transmit and support better. PERS6NɅ is not a finish line. It's the logical continuation of a child who wanted to understand why no one ever really talked to him about himself, and who ended up building the tool he wished he'd found.

Igor Heres, founder of PERS6NɅ

Process Communication Model®, TTI Success Insight®, MBTI®, 4D Clarity®, Clifton Strength Finder®, Monkey Tie 5D®, Mindset Map® and Com Colours® are registered trademarks of their respective owners. PERS6NɅ is not affiliated with any of them. PERS6NɅ is a non-clinical, non-diagnostic personality assessment, inspired by the ICD-11, DSM-5-TR and PDM-3 classifications.