About Kanso - The Career Trade-Off Profiling Tool

Kanso is a career trade-off profiling tool that shows you what you’d actually protect and sacrifice in a professional role - not what you think you should want.

How Kanso works

Kanso uses a four-step process:

1. Reflect: the user reviews statements about work values, conditions, and priorities.
2. Rank: the user compares options and makes explicit trade-off choices.
3. Reveal: Kanso calculates and presents a ranked profile showing strongest non-negotiables and likely sacrifice points.
4. Ask: the user unlocks Kanso Coach, an AI-powered coaching interface personalised to their trade-off profile, which they can use to explore their results, evaluate new roles, or prepare for conversations with their manager.

Who Kanso is for

Kanso is designed for:

• Individuals who want clearer career and role decisions.
• Team leaders who want better role-fit and team-design discussions.
• HR and people teams who want a structured way to discuss motivators and trade-offs.

How Kanso is different

Kanso differs from personality tests such as MBTI and CliftonStrengths, and from job satisfaction tools such as MindTrackers and burnout tests. Personality tests usually describe preferences, traits, or strengths, while satisfaction and burnout tools usually measure current wellbeing, engagement, stress, or risk.

Kanso does not assign a personality type and does not diagnose burnout. It identifies ranked decision priorities and trade-off tolerance so people can make clearer role, hiring, and team decisions.

The core mechanism is credit allocation: users are given a fixed number of credits to distribute across their priorities, which prevents everything from scoring equally and surfaces a genuine hierarchy rather than an idealised one.

Founder

Kanso was built by Steve Tapley, a product leader and software engineer based in Perth, Western Australia. Steve has spent 30 years building software, with the last decade working at the intersection of technology and people strategy in the SME space. The product was created to address a recurring pattern: capable professionals often know that something in their work is not right, but lack a practical framework to define what they are trading away and what they need to protect.

Kanso is free to use during early access.