DStL classifies human cognition across multiple levels of abstraction. At the highest level, Neighborhoods represent broad mental orientations — the large regions of a person’s cognitive landscape when pursuing a purpose. These break down into Blocks, which capture related areas of thinking within that orientation. Blocks contain Towers, the vertical columns of the Skyline, each representing a distinct cluster of shared Focus of Mental Attention (FoMA). Within each Tower, individual Windows hold the most granular unit: a single person’s inner thought, emotional reaction, or guiding principle.

When patterns of thinking styles — a person’s cognitive approach to a specific purpose, not a fixed personality trait — appear in the data, they can be layered onto the Windows within each Tower. This layering gives strategists finer resolution into which parts of their solutions support different approaches to the same purpose, and where gaps or harm exist for underrepresented thinking styles.

Because the Skyline is grounded in stable interior cognition rather than in solutions, preferences, or technology, it serves as a durable strategic foundation. An organization can return to the same Skyline year after year — benchmarking gaps by level of support or harm, tracking improvements, running new listening studies to deepen specific Neighborhoods, or layering additional thinking styles as new segments emerge. The structure doesn’t expire when products change; it evolves as understanding of people deepens.