Bad Sorting

A few days after my post on The Corporate Sorting Hat, I found myself arguing on Twitter about the ethics of using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). 

@swardley and @Jon_Ayre argued that MBTI was not merely unscientific, based on dubious theory, but positively harmful. Jon made the following points.

1. Using the instrument to select people for management positions results in incompetent managers being appointed.

2. If candidates know which MBTI type is preferred, they have an incentive to lie in order to improve their chances of selection.

 

As I see it, bad candidates can lie through their teeth, and bad managers can be appointed, regardless of what selection process is used. And there are undoubtedly organizations whose management is dominated by liars and cheats, without having used MBTI at all. So these arguments seem to depend on MBTI producing significantly worse results than any of the commonly used alternatives.

However, if MBTI is so unreliable, it may occasionally be capable of producing better results than any alternative. It's worth noting that good candidates sometimes fail to present themselves in the best possible light, and a process of this kind might conceivably give them a second chance.

Jon also argued that it was unethical to make important decisions about people based on an unscientific and unreliable instrument.

If you have a scientifically credible and reliable alternative, then perhaps it would be unethical to use anything else. But the reality is that most selection processes are just as unfair and unreliable as this one, if not worse, so how much difference does it actually make?

 

And then there's Facebook.

Rory Cellan-Jones, Facebook accused of allowing sexist job advertising (BBC News, 9 September 2021)

Victor Lipman, The Disturbing Link Between Psychopathy And Leadership (Forbes, 25 April 2013)

David Robson, How narcissists climb the career ladder quickly (BBC Worklife, 1 September 2021)

 

The Corporate Sorting Hat

Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers are known as the inventors of a personality instrument known as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It's not a test, its supporters insist, because you can't fail.

Briggs Myers argued that everyone was good at something. The point of the instrument was not only to recognize and value your own strengths, but to appreciate that other people had different strengths and styles. She thought this knowledge would help people work together more efficiently and effectively. During the Second World War, this also meant enabling people of all types to contribute productively to the war effort.

And not complaining, accepting one's rightful position in life, which is perhaps why so many corporations like it. The MBTI combines a simplistic version of Jungian type theory with an immutable division of labour. You are born with one of these sixteen personality types, and this supposedly determines your path. 

Merve Emre notes how MBTI rhetorically intertwines "the fiction of the complete self with the fiction of the happy, hard-working team". Instead of using the instrument (it's not a test) for self-development, it becomes a way of labelling yourself and others, helping to define and reinforce your identity.

If you have difficulties with a partner or colleague, it is probably useful to remind yourself from time to time that they don't have the same view of the world as you do. A fictional explanation, whether it is based on MBTI or astrology, is probably better than no explanation at all, and may allow you to accept that they mean well ("positive intent") rather than assuming they are being deliberately difficult.

And if you believe that these labels are fixed through life, which is what MBTI theory claims, then you should work with the personality you have been given rather than trying to change it.

So why do so many organizations use this instrument? The first answer is perhaps - because it's there. Briggs Myers worked with Edward Hay, the founder of a management consulting firm specializing in personnel management, and this kind of instrument is popular with consulting firms because it allows them to generate apparently value-adding work for their junior consultants.

Perhaps another reason is that bureaucratic organizations like sorting people at all stages in the employment cycle, selecting people for recruitment, promotion and redundancy. Selection by gender or race is no longer acceptable, but selection by personality type apparently is. If you have the idea that people of a particular type tend to be good at sales, then this becomes an enabling prejudice.

Briggs Myers herself had some old-fashioned views on gender and race. The extreme racism in her second novel was considered unacceptable even in the 1930s, and early versions of her instrument differentiated between men and women. She presented Hay with two scoring keys - a "standard" key and a "female" key. It may astound readers of this blog to learn that this resulted in women being type-cast as nurses, teachers, and secretaries, rather than executives and managers. As Merve Emre remarks sardonically, "destiny wasn't biological; it was typological".

 

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Dean Burnett, Nothing personal: The questionable Myers-Briggs test (Guardian, 19 March 2013)

Merve Emre, Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs (Digg, 1 October 2015)

Elle Hunt, What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world (The Guardian, 30 August 2021)

Tim Lewis, Myers-Briggs personality tests: what kind of person are you? (Guardian, 15 September 2018)

Lisa Wong Macabasco, They become dangerous tools: the dark side of personality tests (Guardian, 4 March 2021)

Isabel Briggs Myers, Gifts Differing (1980)

Related posts: Are Best Practices Obsolete (September 2009), From Sedimented Principles to Enabling Prejudices (March 2013), Algorithms and Governmentality (July 2019), Bad Sorting (September 2021)

Book of the Dead

A few years ago, the British Museum had a large exhibition for the Egyptian Book of the Dead. According to John Taylor, the curator of the exhibition, it's a practical guide to the next world, with spells that would help you on your journey:

• spells for controlling your own body after death;
• spells for protecting yourself from attack;
• spells for satisfying the gods and demons guarding the gateways you must pass through.

We bought a jigsaw puzzle at the time, which we finally got around to solving this Christmas. The jigsaw at least we solved. But what about the meaning of the picture?

Page from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer, c. 1275 B.C.E., 19th Dynasty, 45.7 x 83.4 cm, Thebes, Egypt © Trustees of the British Museum

The picture shows a ceremony called the Opening of the Mouth. This is a ritual performed on a mummy (in this case, Hunefer) to enable the dead person to breathe, to speak, and to consume ritual offerings. The priests are waving the foreleg of a bull calf over the heads of Hunefer's grieving wife and daughter.
 
But the spell has already been cast, so why would Hunefer need to know the spell? To my mind, the purpose of this particular page doesn't seem like practical guidance at all, but more like bureaucratic compliance. It is a certificate (audit trail) to prove that the Opening of the Mouth ceremony has been correctly cast. One might imagine an official in the Egyptian afterlife scanning the document, rather in the same manner as a US immigration official checking your visa waiver and customs declaration form. 

So the Book of the Dead seems to conflate and confuse the functions of guidebook and logbook. John Taylor acknowledges that parts of the Book don't make sense to the modern mind, and speculates:

"Perhaps there was a box-ticking mentality going on here: you should have one of these in your tomb so you get it and it doesn’t really matter if it’s completely accurate or not. You’ve got it, it’s there, it’s in the tomb, and it has got the right spells on it. It’s a part of the burial kit you must have."

Box-ticking? From one of the most bureaucratic cultures in the Ancient World? Surely not!

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Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Exhibition at the British Museum, November 2010 - March 2011.

Page from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer, 1285 BC (Google Cultural Institute, retrieved 2 Jan 2016)

Hunefer, Book of the Dead (Khan Academy, retrieved 2 Jan 2016)

John Taylor, What is a Book of the Dead? (British Museum Blog, September 2010). A bit of afterlife admin? (British Museum Blog, December 2010).

Wikipedia: Ancient Egypt, Opening of the Mouth Ceremony

School Inspections

#Ofsted's @mcladingbowl via @rachelala asks everyone to share a school inspection myth-buster. So here goes.

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Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, reporting directly to Parliament. It carries out hundreds of inspections and regulatory visits every week across England; separate bodies handle inspections in the rest of the UK.

According to Ofsted, inspection acts in a number of ways to drive and support school improvement.

• raises expectations by setting the standards of performance and effectiveness expected of schools
• provides a sharp challenge and the impetus to act where improvement is needed clearly identifies strengths and weaknesses
• recommends specific priorities for improvement for the school and, when appropriate, checks on and promotes subsequent progress
• promotes rigour in the way that schools evaluate their own performance, thereby enhancing their capacity to improve
• monitors the progress and performance of schools that are not yet good, and challenges and supports senior leaders, staff and those responsible for governance.

Of course, schools wish to perform well in these inspections, and to avoid the inconvenience and shame of being selected for "special measures". So it is not surprising that certain beliefs have grown up around these inspections.

Although I don't have direct experience of school inspections, I can easily imagine how such beliefs might develop. Perhaps the inspector visiting school A casually asks to see a particular document, or comments on its absence. This becomes part of the collective memory of the school. Before the next inspection, every teacher in the school has been instructed to prepare this document in readiness. In time, this knowledge spreads to other schools, and becomes widely accepted as "best practice" for passing an inspection.  

Ofsted now wishes to dispel certain myths about the inspection process, and denies that it "requires" or "expects to see" loads of stuff. In its latest clarification, Ofsted officially deprecates a number of specific practices.

But there is a critical ambiguity in the notion of requirement. These practices may not be officially required by Ofsted; but if they happen to be strongly correlated with successful inspections, it may well be rational for school teachers to continue to regard these practices as implicitly encouraged and reinforced by the actions of Ofsted inspectors. It would be a brave head teacher who abandoned those practices that had got the school through past inspections, simply because Ofsted insisted that these practices were not officially required.

Ofsted is also charged with a range of political and social objectives, including promoting British values and tackling extremism, and these implicit objectives are believed to colour its assessments of educational outcomes.

And when Ofsted insists that "it is up to schools themselves to determine their practices and for leadership teams to justify these on their own merits rather than by reference to the inspection handbook", this sounds suspiciously like a classic double bind. Of course you can have as much bureaucracy as you like, as long as you really want to do it for its own sake and not because we told you to. Oh, and please make sure none of it is "unnecessary".

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Ofsted, Framework for School Inspection (July 2014)

Ofsted inspections - clarification for schools (October 2014)

Richard Adams, Ofsted tells teachers what not to do in effort to dispel inspection myths (Guardian 17 October 2014)

Graeme Paton, Ofsted being turned into a 'schoolroom security service' (Telegraph 28 November 2014)


Zoe Williams, Swamp or success: your school is being racially profiled (Guardian 23 November 2014)

What is the Purpose of Diversity?

#bloggerscircle I have recently joined the RSA Bloggers' Circle, which encourages me to pick a random blogpost from the circle to discuss on my own blog. So here goes ...

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Simon Cooke, a Tory Councillor from a pretty little village in Yorkshire, complains about the triumph of groupthink: diversity. Simon dislikes the political agenda that he associates with this concept, and he believes it distorts decisions, policy and activity. However, he fears that criticizing the concept of diversity will be met with ad hominem accusations, as if the defenders of "diversity" regard it as such an obvious good that only sexists, racists and homophobes could possibly object to it.


An initial objection to the concept of "diversity" is that it defines our identity in terms of the groups we belong to, whether by choice or circumstance. But that is just what people do all the time. Simon introduces himself as a Tory politician, in other words providing a preliminary sketch of his own identity in terms of a particular affiliation, so he can't expect me to put that out of my mind while I'm reading his blog. And if I see a group photo of Simon and his fellow councillors, I'm probably going to notice whether they all look similar or different.

But that's just it. Diversity is often perceived in terms of a visual image - what we might call the "imaginary". Does the group look diverse? Do we have the happy smiling black person, the young woman, the older woman, the wheelchair user - like the stock photographs in any corporate brochure or website? Or do we have a bunch of dead white males, as in this notorious picture from the launch of Microsoft Vista (via Seth Godin).


Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg News/New York Times

When we see people who look the same, we may expect them to think the same; this expectation may be fair, or it may be merely a projection of our own assumptions. Even if I didn't know who the men in this picture were, I could easily imagine them sitting together in a bar, arguing robustly for their own interests but against a background of common beliefs and attitudes.

The fact is that images matter. We see the pictures of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, George Osborne and their university chums posing in top hats or in hunting apparel (image search: Bullingdon), and these pictures appear to tell us something simple and obvious about who these people are and where their loyalties lie, even if the truth is far more complex than that. A black man in the White House has enormous importance as an image, encouraging black people and other minorities around the world to feel that they have a chance too, while causing some white Americans to feel that their categories have been upset. Images of diversity, or lack of diversity, convey important messages of opportunity or threat, hope or despair. Is this real diversity? Possibly not, but it is important nonetheless.

A second type of false diversity is the bureaucratic manifestation. Simon rails against "the corporate, controlling state" which uses diversity as "another stick with which to beat ... the ordinary man or woman going about an ordinary life. Another way to slice and parse the people."

It is true that bureaucracy turns diversity into a set of policies based on a set of profiles. But that's a problem with bureaucracy, not with the idea of diversity as such. One of the characteristics of bureaucracy is that it can take a living idea, however good or well-meaning, and turn it into something wooden. Trees produce sticks, but it's not the tree's fault if the stick is used as a weapon.

Social change driven by bureaucratic policies may be inauthentic and sometimes even unjust. But it may sometimes happen that this kind of change leads to a deeper, more authentic shift in social attitudes and behaviour. First we see token minorities and women in powerful positions, then we gradually start to think this is perfectly normal; a recent study showed that the British people have become much more tolerant of social diversity. That's not to say that the end ever justifies the means, but it is nonetheless true that authentic change can sometimes grow from inauthentic beginnings.

So we have three types of diversity here - imaginary (based on appearances), symbolic (based on conforming to some bureaucratic code, or what Simon calls "an artificial mediation of language") and real diversity (what Simon calls "a deeper variety"). Simon apparently thinks we can reject the first two and just have the third. But I don't think that's possible; in practice the three are all intertwined.

How are they linked? See my post More on the Purpose of Diversity (December 2014), Ornamental Intersectionality (May 2021)

Positive Intentions

NLP practitioners sometimes talk about discovering The Positive Intention. For example, if a person drives a car into a tree, NLP will ask what purpose this action might possibly serve (for example, escaping a difficult domestic or work situation) and then find a less destructive way of achieving the same outcome. This approach, which was pioneered by Virginia Satir, is a clear application of the POSIWID principle. 

Instead of labelling people as “stupid” or “obstinate” or “narrow-minded” or “bureaucratic”, this principle suggests we look for a way of framing the situation in which their behaviour makes sense. 

Here’s an example. A colleague was running a course with sixteen students. At the end of the course, only fifteen evaluation forms could be found. The administrator got very anxious about the missing form, and insisted on a new form being produced. My colleague couldn’t see what the fuss was about, assumed that the missing form probably wouldn’t provide any additional information, and attributed the anxiety to a mindless procedural rigidity.

But let’s try and construct a different frame for the administrator. Perhaps he imagined that my colleague had destroyed one form because it had contained especially critical comments. So the concern about the missing form might have stemmed not from a bureaucratic mindset but from a lack of trust. (In any case, these two explanations are not so far apart - bureaucracies emerged historically as a solution to certain forms of corruption, and are often specifically designed to reduce reliance on personal trust.) The new form had a positive intention – it served to reassure the administrator that my colleague hadn’t acted dishonestly.

However, I have a quibble with how NLP practitioners sometimes talk about positive intentions. (The founders of NLP were very alert to small details of language that revealed habits of thought, but their followers aren’t always so careful.) The word “the” seems to imply that once you have found a frame in which the behaviour seems to make sense, you can stop your analysis because you have found the truth: The Positive Intention. But I prefer to regard this as a hypothesis rather than a truth: A Positive Intention. Sometimes when a person drives a car into a tree, it really is just an accident. As Freud said: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. 

Some people never stop looking for alternative frames; arguably these people are the true systems thinkers.

 

See also Good Ideas from Flaky Sources (December 2009)

Common Sense Policing

I am delighted to report that four English police forces (Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Surrey and West Midlands) have decided to tear up government targets and bureaucracy, and return to common-sense policing.

• Officers 'to use own judgement' [BBC News, 31st May 2008]
• Top police boycott official paperwork [Times, 31st May 2008]

This decision will mean that the Surrey force will lose its position at the top of the league tables; but I'm sure Surrey residents won't be taking to the streets of Guildford in protest.

Let's hope that this example is followed by other organizations in the public sector plagued by stupid targets and pointless league tables.

Target-Setting

WYMIWYG - What You Measure Is What You Get

This is another very important system principle. Systems are distorted by the presence of targets, which increasingly fail to measure what they were supposed to measure. 

Here is a well-known example. If you test, measure and analyse the ability of school-children, this may tell you all sorts of useful things about the socio-geographic distribution of ability, about the success of different teaching methods, and so on. But if you set targets for the scores achieved on these tests, this will motivate some changes in behaviour among teachers, parents and children. Teachers will "teach to the test", while many middle-class parents will send their children for special coaching. (Indeed, for many schools, the excellent results achieved in the school league tables are in large part due to the huge amounts of extra tuition received by children outside school, and bears little relationship to the amount of added-value provided by the school itself.) While this may indeed improve the scores, it seriously undermines your ability to learn anything useful about the ability of school-children, or to make any systematic changes. 

Another interesting example came up in the UK election. Given a reasonable-sounding goal that health clinics should try to see patients within 48 hours, the government had imposed a target. It emerged (on live television, to the surprise and embarassment of the Prime Minister) that in order to reliably achieve this target, some clinics had changed their appointment policy and were now refusing to book appointments more than 48 hours in advance.

Jenni Russell When you can't see a GP (Guardian, April 30th, 2005)

The present Labour government is often criticized for its obsession with targets, but it should be remembered that this obsession was shared by the Conservative government under John Major. The desire to set measurable targets often comes from quite sincere motives, but these targets have dysfunctional effects. This is especially true when targets are set by politicians under political pressure without proper systems analysis.

• Setting isolated targets for improving the things you are unhappy about, while failing to set targets for maintaining the things you are happy about.
• Setting sample targets as illustrations of the things you could improve, which then receive disproportionate amounts of attention and resource. ("We will cut waiting times for breast cancer" ... hang on, what about other forms of cancer such as prostate?)

And of course target-setting is not just a disease of politicians. It is also an occupational hazard of managers within organizations. We cannot reasonably demand an end to targets, but we need to work on developing wiser targets. 

 

POSIWID - Purpose of System Is What It Does

At one level, POSIWID shows us how complex systems resist simplistic attempts to change them, or sometimes even to monitor them. The education system contains a testing subsystem whose purpose is to achieve high scores. Tracing how the testing subsystem actually achieves high scores reveals some important dependencies: the test results are dependent on the coaching subsystem, which in turn is dependent on the social system of the parents. 

If we want to make meaningful changes in the education system, it is very useful to carry out this kind of dependency analysis, because it helps us to predict several things:

1. How successful a given initiative will be.
2. How quickly this success will become visible.
3. How unequally this success may be distributed in different areas.
4. How quickly this success may be eroded or undermined by other system effects.

At another level, we can ask about the POSIWID of the target-setting system itself. The avowed purpose of target-setting is usually something to do with accountability or performance or both. The actual effect is often to make things more complicated and more bureaucratic, achieving local accountability or performance only at the expense of accountability and performance elsewhere in the larger system.

It is possible to intervene into this system too, but it needs an intervention at the right logical level. Perhaps incredibly, the quality standard ISO 9000 (dismissed by many people as hopelessly bureaucratic) contains a defined point where you can plug in a control loop that will limit or even reverse the growth of bureaucracy. I really enjoy that kind of intervention - it's like one of those martial arts where you simply redirect the energy of your opponent. 

 

See also On the performativity of data (August 2021). More posts on target-setting.