The Myers-Briggs test

The Myers-Briggs test offers the emotional pleasure of a horoscope with the administrative confidence of a spreadsheet.

Four letters arrive. Suddenly your contradictions look organised. You are not moody; you are an INFP protecting your energy. Your colleague is not irritating; they are an ESTJ expressing structure. Everybody receives a tidy explanation of themselves.

The problem is not that categories are always useless. Crude labels can begin a conversation. The problem is forgetting how much was crushed to make the label fit. Logic and sentiment are treated as opposite ends of one switch, even though the same person can compare insurance policies ruthlessly and choose a birthday present with tears in their eyes. Context does the work; the type takes the credit.

Worse, unstable results can acquire stable authority once printed on a report. A playful questionnaire becomes evidence about jobs, teams and compatibility. The person starts enacting the description, and other people interpret every exception as “development”.

Use the letters as pub conversation if you enjoy them. They may give a team language for differences it previously handled by muttering. But if a decision follows, keep the underlying answers, repeat the test later and compare what the person actually does in different settings.

An employee can receive one result during a cheerful induction and another after a brutal quarter. The report may still look wonderfully official. The person changed, the context changed, or the questions were never measuring the stable essence everyone wanted. Nobody knows merely because four letters arrived in bold type.