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)

Ornamental Intersectionality

 The CIA has released a video featuring one of their officers, daughter of immigrants and proudly "intersectional". 

This video has raised consternation on social media. There seem to be at least two different lines of argument. 

The first line of argument is specific to the CIA, based on sweeping disapproval of the CIA and its history. As if to say "how dare an unenlightened organization have enlightened employment policies and practices".

The second line of argument would seem to apply to any large organization. It suggests that the language of emancipation and intersectionality should be reserved for struggles against what bell hooks calls a "culture of domination", and should not be coopted by the establishment.

For example, @zei_squirrel argues that 

CIA has coopted what was supposed to be the emancipatory language of intersectionality as practiced in niche segments of the academy 

quotes bell hooks 

MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AGO, identity politics was the rage because so many exploited and oppressed people were growing in political consciousness and awareness. The hope of identity politics was that it would create a foundation for all of us to respect diversity. Unfortunately, identity politics gradually became more of a tool of separation and competitive one-upmanship. Positively, the struggle for voice, which was centered around identity politics, did foreground diverse perspectives even as it often obscured places of commonality and shared struggle. Within a culture of domination, all our political struggles risk commodification in ways that diffuse their radical intent. This was, and is, certainly the case with identity politics.

and references Bourdieu and Wacquant.

It is a screen discourse, whose intellectual status is the product of a gigantic effect of national and international allodoxia, which deceives both those who are party to it and those who are not.

(I had to look up the word allodoxia, which roughly means false beliefs resulting from faulty categorization.)

There have been many previous arguments against "appropriations of the concept of intersectionality that have watered it down and wrested it from its radical foundations" (Runyan). Sirma Bilge has called this ornamental intersectionality. This seems to be related to the distinction I have made earlier in this blog about imaginary, symbolic and real diversity.

Let's come back to the CIA video. The woman in the video is presenting herself at the intersection between several different categories - Latino woman, mother, daughter of immigrants, successful career, a reasonable level of self-confidence. There is perhaps a difference here between what the word intersectionality denotes (any intersection of categories, whether oppressed or otherwise) and what the word apparently connotes (intersection of specifically oppressed categories). And the CIA itself is also presenting itself as some kind of intersection. So perhaps not surprising that this can be read in many different ways.

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Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality Undone (Du Bois Review Social Science Research on Race, January 2014)

Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, NewLiberalSpeak (Radical Philosophy 105, Jan/Feb 2001)

Gail Fine, False Belief in the Theaetetus (Phronesis, 1979, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1979), pp. 70-80

bell hooks and others, Artists and Identity (Art Forum, Summer 2016, Vol 54 No 10)

Anne Sisson Runyan, What Is Intersectionality and Why Is It Important? (Academe Nov/Dec 2018)

Related posts What is the Purpose of Diversity? (January 2010), More on the Purpose of Diversity (December 2014)

More on the Purpose of Diversity

There are several arguments for diversity, and these arguments may lead to different flavours or styles of diversity. I use the term imaginary diversity for an appearance or image of diversity that may not reveal the underlying reality. And I use the term symbolic diversity for a formal procedural diversity, often found in bureaucratic organizations, which may also be a long way from real diversity.


One argument for diversity is based on justice, and the visibility of justice. When we see an organization with a largely homogeneous workforce, we may suspect that there is some discrimination going on. Nowadays, this kind of discrimination is unlikely to be deliberate policy, but can be caused in various ways:

• the managers feel more comfortable recruiting people like themselves
• the working practices favour people of a particular type - for example, working hours that are not compatible with childcare
• an expectation of a particular career path - for example, entry via unpaid internships or expensive qualifications 

However, having an appearance of diversity doesn't prove the lack of discrimination. A company may employ lots of women, but few with small children, and none in senior positions. And until someone leaks the salary data on the internet, the female employees may not know if they are paid the same as male employees doing equivalent jobs.

Another argument for diversity is based on organizational intelligence. Similar people see the world in similar ways, with similar assumptions and blind spots.

Race and gender are generally more visible than other potential discriminatory factors, such as class, educational background, sexual orientation and religious affiliation.

The problem with imaginary diversity is that it privileges visible signs of difference over other, perhaps equally important kinds of difference. We don't achieve real diversity in politics merely by mixing male, female, white and ethnic, especially if the politicians (and the journalists interviewing them) all studied the same degrees at the same universities. Politicians such as Barack Obama (black male, Harvard), Hillary Clinton (white female, Yale), Ed Miliband (Jewish male, Oxford) and Diane Abbott (black female, Cambridge) have a lot of things in common: similarity here is not just a function of race and gender.

The problem with symbolic diversity is that it nominates a few kinds of difference for special treatment, while ignoring other forms. Suddenly everyone gets worked up about age discrimination or postcode discrimination or whatever, and we have an official policy and procedure about that, while other forms of discrimination are permitted or even encouraged.

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See also

Nesrine Malik, The Naga Munchetty row shows diversity is still about optics, not real change (Guardian, 30 September 2019)

Alex Rubenstein is scathing about the general adoption of a narrative of diversity across US and international institutions. He labels this as a new moralistic dogma, and links it to rainbow capitalism. Alex Rubenstein, Intersectional Imperialism: A wholesome menace (Substack, 15 March 2021). Republished on RT and The Bellows.

Wikipedia: Rainbow Capitalism

Related blogposts

Relationships built on self-interest (January 2009), What is the Purpose of Diversity? (January 2010), Organizational Intelligence and Gender (October 2010), Delusion and Diversity (October 2010), Ornamental Intersectionality (May 2021)

links added 30 September 2019, 3 May 2021

What if architects designed our communities?

@juliandobson #bloggerscircle Another random blogpost with an interesting link to my previous attempt on the Purpose of Diversity.

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Julian Dobson finds a simulated picture of a group of people enjoying a new building. He notes the lack of diversity in the picture - everyone is young, thin and able-bodied, the couples are straight, and even the dog is white. According to the distinction I made in my previous post on the Purpose of Diversity, the diversity that this lacks is imaginary diversity - diversity of the image.

Prompted by this picture, Julian asks What if architects designed our communities? As some of the comments below Julian's blog point out, pictures like these may not be produced by architects themselves, but they are produced within a system supposedly governed by Architecture and whatever values it purports to represent. The picture causes us to wonder what kind of community (if any) this system has any interest in.

Because the picture doesn't just lack diversity, it also lacks community. The people in the picture are not gathered in groups, they are standing alone or in couples, checking their mobile phones, not looking at each other. Some people are taking photos of thin air. There is a toddler, apparently without any parents, attracting no attention whatsoever. This is not how people behave in public, except perhaps in some autistic fantasy.

As Julian says, "Buildings are only of value, surely, at the point when they're used, animated by or engaged with by people" - and surely this applies to open spaces as well. But the picture shows some aimless and disengaged people in a meaningless space. So this does not tell us a good story about the de facto purpose of Architecture as it is practised, not as in the books of idealistic architectural theories but under the social and commercial constraints of the Real World.


See also Michael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros, The Architect Has No Clothes (Guernica, 19 October 2011)


Link added 5 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)

Purpose of a Nation

James Liu posted a question to the Linked-In Systems Thinking Group.

What is the purpose/aim of a nation (such as US, UK... ) as a system? How can we get there if we don't know the aim of our nation?

The following is edited from my contributions to this discussion.

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My first response was to suggest that nations only exist because other nations exist. I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about a nation in isolation. The system whose purpose I'd like to understand is the system that has (often violently) carved the world into the nations we have today, and still threatens to split existing nations into smaller ones and/or create new ones. What purposes are served by the concept of "Nation"? And how does a single instance of this concept relate to this international context?

This prompted an interesting response from Joseph Higginbotham, who rephrased my suggestion in terms of alterity (Otherness) - the organization of the nation is an answer to the threat posed by organization of the Other. But that doesn't quite explain what triggers the process of nation-forming in the first place.

Joseph went on to speculate about the end of this process of nation-forming.

So what is advancement? A Utopia where humans only organize to accomplish something that can only be accomplished through cooperation, not because they feel threatened? And of course, as the world grows "flatter" and more interconnected and more interdependent, we have to ask if One World Government is inevitable, right? I mean, theoretically, can wars be eliminated if we're all One World?

Obviously if there is only one government, then there cannot be wars between governments. But history tells us about many other kinds of war - civil wars (British, American, Spanish), revolutions, guerrilla and terrorism. The nation-state pattern (one nation = one country = one government) is not a universal one. And from a systems perspective, the notion of historical inevitability is highly problematic.

A vision of competition being replaced by cooperation suggests that there were in fact two different questions under discussion: not only what the purpose of a nation actually is, but also what the purpose should be. Some of us may have a personal preference for cooperation over competition, or for peaceful resolution rather than violent conflict, but getting large complex systems (such as Global Politics) to follow our personal preferences is a highly political activity.

Joseph says the challenge would be to agree on why we have a government or a nation. That is certainly a challenge, but I see it as primarily a political challenge. A systems-thinking challenge (I hesitate to say "the" challenge) would be to agree on a systematic or systemic way of exploring and perhaps improving the purpose of governments or nations, without being constrained or coopted by any single political or ethical position.

James offered an answer to his original question: "Currently the primary aim of a democratic nation is to help its citizens to enhance their quality of life." This answer has added two important words: currently and democratic.

I take the word "currently" to indicate that this is his observation of the AS-IS purpose of a nation (what it already is), rather than his aspiration of the TO-BE purpose (what he thinks it ought to become).

I also note the addition of the qualifier "democratic". Democracy has long been a key component of how America has perceived itself, and how it has been perceived by others. In his classic book Democracy in America, the 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville sought to understand why republican representative democracy had succeeded in the United States while (at that time) failing in so many other places. He sought to apply the functional aspects of democracy in America to what he saw as the failings of democracy in his native France. (Book summary based on Wikipedia.) A useful read if you want a historical perspective on the purpose of a democratic nation.

Today, many Americans sees one important purpose of the United States of America as being a Beacon of Democracy. If you search the Internet for "beacon of democracy", you will also find this phrase being applied to other nations, including Canada, Ghana, India, Mongolia and Taiwan, as well as some imaginary future state of Iraq.

But is this systems thinking as opposed to straight politics? By straight politics I meant undiluted politics, which Churchman identified as one of the Enemies of the Systems Approach. I wasn't thinking specifically of realpolitik.

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James's second question (How can we get there if we don't know?) seems to be making an assumption about the nature of goal-directed systems. However, with large complex systems, we can achieve (happen upon) all sorts of wonderful outcomes without knowing the purpose in advance. I often use Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle to try and work out the hidden agendas of complex systems.

Joseph acknowledged that governments and government officials have many different purposes, some of them declared and some hidden. But then Joseph went on to say that "we cannot apply systems thinking to government until we can agree on what government is trying to accomplish". My view is the exact opposite of Joseph: we MUST apply systems thinking to government IF WE WANT TO MAKE SENSE OF what government is REALLY trying to accomplish. (This is perhaps a classic example of the POSIWID principle.)

Joseph thought that my position (that systems thinking must be applied to figure out what government is trying to accomplish) has at least three logical flaws:

1. It assumes humans always act rationally and that their plans always reflect their intent. I can use systems thinking to analyze the probably outcome of a government policy or I can go the other way and start with the outcome and work backwards from the outcome through the system that produced it to the cause but I still don't know what that government intended. Only if they are consistent systems thinkers who intentions always align with their policies can I assume that.
2. It assumes our policy makers are good enough systems thinkers themselves to reason from intent to plan to implementation to execution to outcome. We don't know if our leaders are systems thinkers. We don't elect them for their systems thinking skills. We elect them because they say what we want to hear and then we pray they meant what they said. Of course, most of the time they don't.
3. Policy keeps changing and pretty soon, due to budget cuts, elections, changes in party, lack of political will, lack of public support, etc., by the time we get enough data to start looking backward from outcomes to processes to causes to intents, we don't know what was intended.

Thus Joseph stood by his original statements that we have to know what a government is really trying to accomplish in order to use systems thinking to get it there.

My approach to systems thinking is careful not to make any of the assumptions he imputed to me, and I don't accept that there were logical flaws in my argument. But it became increasingly clear from our discussion that Joseph and I had completely different notions of what systems thinking actually was. He acknowledged the validity of logically walking backwards from outcomes through processes to ask questions about systems, such as "Your system is perfectly designed to deliver X, was that your intent? Did you know your system was designed to produce X or do you just not know what you're doing?" But he didn't seem to regard this line of inquiry as a form of systems thinking. I do, although it's not the only kind of systems thinking I recognize.

What Joseph is calling systems thinking seems to be limited to a particular rationalist style of systems design. As it happens I am currently re-reading Churchman's book on the Systems Approach and its Enemies, where this practice is described as Objective-Planning. But this leaves out what Churchman calls Ideal-Planning (working out the objectives in the first place), which I regard as an important (perhaps the most important) element in Systems Thinking.

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To the extent that this discussion was taking place in the Systems Thinking group, I expected to see some willingness to find systems-thinking answers to some important questions about nationhood, and I hoped such answers would be different to the answers we might have found in a Political Study group (if there were one).

James thought it was interesting to see totally different perspectives from different groups. And he thought that this diversity suggested it was a question worth to ask and discuss.

Diversity is often a sign that there is something problematic about the question. Systems thinking often helps us by changing the question. The Linked-In Group was certainly having an interesting discussion about something important, although the exact nature of the question (as often happens with discussions about complex systems) seemed to be shifting kaleidoscopically, and I was interested to see the interplay between different systems concepts - purpose, role, causal loops, and so on.

Some later contributions to the discussion seemed to be converging on identifying a purpose for the discussion itself - perhaps to identify how people (such as ourselves) can make a difference to the political formation of the nation and its activities (including diplomacy and warfare).

And this is a strong theme within some styles of systems thinking - the need to rephrase the original question into "What is the purpose/aim of OUR ASKING ABOUT a nation (such as US, UK... ) as a system?

Someone else talked about the discussion "drifting around" - and calling it that makes it sound as if it's always better to follow a charted course. But then you will only arrive at pre-ordained destinations.

When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.

Paradise Wildlife Park

My local paper has a wraparound cover this week advertising the Paradise Wildlife Park in Hertfordshire, under the politically incorrect headline "Paradise - it's all white".

Perhaps the consciously intended meaning of this headline was the fact that the zoo features a number of white animals, including white lions and white tigers.

The advertisement contains several pictures of children enjoying the facilities at the zoo. All of the children in these pictures are white. Is this a coincidence? Does it matter?

We are increasingly accustomed to "political correctness" - and this sometimes seems to entail compliance with some inauthentic and unconvincing vision of modern Britain, achieved by including token representatives of minority groups. Any gross failure to conform to this stereotype - for whatever reason - seems to stand out as an act of deliberate or inadvertent defiance.

My local paper serves a large borough of West London, containing people with a wide diversity of ethnic backgrounds. What message are the non-white families going to get from this advertisement? That they are not welcome at this Zoo?

Perhaps those responsible for this advertisement - including those at the local paper who accepted and printed it - will deny any conscious racism. But that's not the point. Racism is not only manifested as overt bigotry - it may also be manifested through unconscious choices. That's an excellent example of POSIWID - what matters here is the effect.

After all, racism is rarely acknowledged in ourselves. Racism is always other people, isn't it?

ID Card Compromise

A possible compromise on the UK Identity Card scheme is reported in today's news.

Ministers are expected to announce a compromise on compulsory identity cards ahead of a Commons vote on Monday. [BBC News, Feb 10th 2006]

What is the likely effect of this compromise?

1. Those responsible for the scheme will be looking to encourage people to carry the card voluntarily. One way of doing this is to provide differential advantages to card-holders. For example, fast-track security in various settings. But this means that these security mechanisms are now designed to produce a beneficial effect on the ID card scheme, and they may become less effective at delivering real security. (I am tempted to say even less effective.)
   
2. This in turn means encouraging a wide range of service providers (such as airlines perhaps) to differentiate between card-holders and others - to accept the identity card for a range of purposes, while making complicated demands on everyone else (passport plus driving licence plus two utility bills, etc. etc.). Thus we have function creep.
   
3. But these service providers have a range of commercial and other goals. This introduces diversity at several levels - diversity of intention as well as diversity of action - which in turn introduces various modes of interoperability risk.

Thus the compromise would decrease effective security, and increase function creep and risk. There's some very bad (or perhaps very devious) systems thinking going on here. I have commented in this blog before about the strange POSIWID logic behind the ID card proposals. If this compromise goes ahead, it will complicate the logic even further.

Further commentary. BBC Action Network, Wired article on Multi-Use ID Cards by Bruce Schneier

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