Openness in the Big Five: conventional, curious or progressive?
What openness measures, what 2,704 profiles reveal, and how conventional, curious and progressive people can work better together.
A team is discussing a new work process. One colleague asks what problem the current process actually causes. A second wants to run a small trial first. A third immediately sees five possibilities that nobody has explored. Who is most open to change?
Probably the third person. But openness is not a contest for the best ideas, nor a judgment about who keeps up with the times. The Big Five trait openness to experience describes the extent to which someone seeks new ideas, experiences, perspectives, and complexity.
Our personal guides use three recognisable anchor points: conventional, curious, and progressive. They are not fixed types or grades. They describe how readily someone seeks novelty and how much evidence, familiarity, or practical meaning they need before a new route becomes attractive.
This is part three of our series about the five Big Five dimensions. After conscientiousness and extraversion, we again combine scientific research with aggregate data from 2,704 complete Personal User Guide profiles. This time, we examine how people approach the new and the familiar.
Openness is about more than enjoying something new
Research into the structure of the Big Five distinguishes two related aspects within openness: openness, which concerns imagination, perception, emotion, and aesthetics, and intellect, which concerns ideas, abstraction, and reasoning. Colin DeYoung, Lena Quilty, and Jordan Peterson found these two aspects when they analysed 75 underlying personality facets in two samples (DeYoung, Quilty & Peterson, 2007).
That distinction prevents three misunderstandings:
- Openness is not the same as intelligence. Enjoying abstract ideas is different from cognitive ability.
- Conventional is not the same as opposing change. Someone can support a change once the problem, evidence, and benefit are clear.
- New is not automatically creative. An idea becomes valuable only when it is both original and useful in its context.
Our guide terms translate this broad trait into everyday behaviour.
Conventional means that someone likes to build on what has proved itself, values concrete information, and wants to connect change to a clear problem. Curious means that someone explores new possibilities while also looking for practical meaning. Progressive means that someone readily thinks beyond existing frames, tolerates complexity, and gains energy from ideas that have not yet been tried.
Every position has a shadow side. Preservation can become holding on to the familiar for too long. Curiosity can remain stuck in exploration without a choice. Progressiveness can turn into novelty without a problem, too many concepts at once, or too little attention to what already works.
What 2,704 profiles reveal
For this article, we use the same privacy-safe analysis as in our earlier study of personality profiles. Public demo profiles were excluded. We report aggregates only and no individual user data.
Conventional fits 11 percent best, curious 43 percent, and progressive 46 percent. Almost nine out of ten profiles therefore fall in the middle or on the progressive side. That does not make the conventional voice less relevant. In a team, this less common preference can reveal which problem an idea solves and which existing quality must not be lost.
This user group is not a representative sample of any country or of all employees. People chose to create a Personal User Guide profile. We do not have reliable data about age, country, sector, role, or context of use. The figures describe this group, not the general population, and do not demonstrate cause and effect.
Innovation can quickly become a question of status
New ideas often sound ambitious. Requests for evidence can quickly sound obstructive. A progressive colleague may therefore acquire a reputation as a visionary, while a conventional colleague is dismissed as difficult or old-fashioned. The reverse also happens: a new idea is treated as fantasy before anyone has examined it fairly.
The team is then no longer discussing the quality of the proposal. People are defending identities. The progressive colleague has to prove that they are innovative. The conventional colleague has to prove that they are realistic.
A better process separates three questions: which problem are we solving, which possibilities deserve exploration, and which evidence do we need for a decision? Imagination and scrutiny then both receive a legitimate place.
What research says about creativity and learning
Openness is closely related to creativity, but its two aspects do not contribute in the same way. Across four samples with a total of 1,035 participants, openness primarily predicted creative achievement in the arts, while intellect primarily predicted creative achievement in the sciences. These differences remained visible after the researchers accounted for the other Big Five traits, cognitive ability, and divergent thinking (Kaufman et al., 2016).
That makes openness relevant to innovative work, but it does not turn every progressive person into a successful innovator. Creative achievement also requires knowledge, practice, opportunity, collaboration, and execution. A preference for ideas does not guarantee that an idea is good or will be realised.
A classic meta-analysis of personality and job performance found no general advantage for openness in every role, but it did find a relationship with training proficiency (Barrick & Mount, 1991). That is consistent with curiosity, broad interests, and a willingness to process new information. Here too, personality is one factor alongside training quality, prior knowledge, motivation, and the work environment.
Six well-known politicians on one scale
To make the three terms more concrete, we place six of the world’s best-known political leaders on the openness scale. Their preferences come from our demo profiles and are editorial estimates based on public sources. They are not self-assessments, diagnoses, or evidence about politicians as a group.
Even within one professional category, preferences vary. A politician can build conventionally on proven approaches, curiously combine different perspectives, or progressively challenge existing conventions. The visual says nothing about political views, suitability for office, or success.
In practice: conventional, curious, and progressive
Asks which problem will be solved, seeks concrete evidence, and safeguards value that change could remove.
Investigates new possibilities while looking for a practical trial from which the team can learn.
Connects ideas, tolerates complexity, and opens routes beyond the team's current assumptions.
Conventional: connect change to a real problem
Conventional people bring continuity, practical knowledge, and respect for proven solutions. They often see dependencies that an enthusiastic innovation story overlooks. Their question “why change?” can sharpen a project.
The risk is that the current situation remains the standard against which every new route must prove itself completely. The familiar then receives trust for free, while the new faces an impossible burden of proof. Agree on what concrete signal is sufficient to start an experiment without immediately abandoning the entire way of working.
Curious: learn with a purpose
Curious people usually move easily between exploration and application. They want to understand how something works and seek a way to test it in practice. This can make them a bridge between conventional and progressive colleagues.
Their risk is a growing collection of interesting options without a clear moment of choice. Make visible in advance which question the experiment must answer and which outcome will lead to continuing, adapting, or stopping.
Progressive: open possibilities without losing execution
Progressive people readily combine ideas, think abstractly, and are less easily discouraged by complexity or an incomplete picture. They can help a team move beyond assumptions that were once useful but have become limiting.
Their strength can turn into stacking concepts, becoming bored with execution, or treating innovation as a goal in itself. Alongside “what is possible?”, ask “which problem will this reduce?” and “what must happen to test this for one real week?”.
Adapting when the rules change
Openness may be particularly valuable when a familiar approach no longer fits. In a laboratory study, 73 participants made decisions in a simulation whose rules changed unexpectedly. After those changes, higher openness was associated with better decisions. Before the change, cognitive ability was the primary predictor of performance (LePine, Colquitt & Erez, 2000).
This was a small, controlled study, not evidence that progressive colleagues handle every reorganisation better. It does illustrate a useful mechanism: when old rules lose their predictive value, a willingness to revise one's representation of the task can help.
The lesson for teams is broader. Do not design a process only for stable conditions. Also agree on which signal means that the assumptions must be examined again.
Design change as a testable loop
A good innovation process does not choose between imagination and evidence. It gives each one work at the right moment.
- 1PreserveName what works and what hurts
Specify which problem calls for change and which existing quality must remain protected.
- 2ExploreOpen several possibilities
Delay judgment briefly and investigate routes beyond the current assumptions.
- 3TestMake one idea small enough
Choose a reversible trial with an owner, a timeframe, and a visible learning signal.
- 4DecideUse evidence and intent
Continue, adapt, or stop. Record how the experiment changed the original assumptions.
Four questions make this rhythm concrete:
- Which problem justifies change? Without a problem, innovation quickly becomes the preference of the loudest voice.
- What must not be lost? Explicitly preserve the value that the current process does deliver.
- Which assumption are we testing? A small trial should produce information, not just activity.
- When will we decide? Without a decision point, curiosity lingers and experimentation becomes the new routine.
What openness does not tell you
Openness does not tell you whether someone is intelligent, creative, tolerant, moral, sophisticated, or suited to leadership. Conventional does not mean old-fashioned. Progressive does not mean visionary. Curious does not mean interested in everything.
Nor does the preference mean that someone responds in the same way in every context. A progressive designer may hold tightly to a proven safety process. A conventional accountant may be the first at home to try new technology. Interest, knowledge, risk, and role all shape behaviour.
Ask about concrete situations instead:
When does a new idea give you energy, which evidence do you need to take it seriously, and what do you want to protect when we change?
That is more useful than asking whether someone is open-minded. It reveals how a team member actually combines ideas, evidence, and change.
Openness is about the route from familiar to possible
Openness is not a ranking of good and bad colleagues. Conventional people protect continuity and evidence. Curious people connect exploration with application. Progressive people open possibilities beyond the existing frame. Problems arise when one contribution excludes the others.
Our 2,704 profiles make that collaboration concrete: 11 percent are conventional, 43 percent curious, and 46 percent progressive. In almost every larger team, people therefore meet with different burdens of proof and different appetites for the unknown.
Do not use the Big Five test or your personal guide to decide who the innovator is. Use them to design a better process: which problem are we solving, which possibility are we testing, and which evidence determines the next step?
The next parts of this series will examine agreeableness and emotional sensitivity with the same combination of research, aggregate data, and concrete collaboration agreements.
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