How billion-dollar businesses built their people strategy on pop psychology and bondage metaphors.
The first time I took a personality test, I thought it was harmless fun. It was early in my career, at my first consultancy — the kind of small, caffeine-fuelled outfit that believed cleverness could solve anything. Their chosen gospel was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, that four-letter oracle of modern management.
I have two degrees in psychology, so I recognised the format straight away — the same sort of multiple-choice riddles we’d fill out online at university for fun: Which philosopher are you? Which dog breed best matches your leadership style?
I assumed Myers-Briggs was grounded in science — a tidy way to understand how people prefer to work. I certainly didn’t imagine it was the corporate equivalent of reading tea leaves.
At this consultancy, your type wasn’t trivia; it was identity. Everyone knew everyone else’s letters. Project teams were built around them. And if two people shared a type, they were assumed to share everything — strengths, weaknesses, even bad habits.
I turned out to be an ENTP — the same as one of the partners, who was brilliant, charismatic, and catastrophically disorganised. Before I’d written a single slide, my manager smiled and said:
“Ah, ENTP — big ideas, terrible with detail. I’ll book you on a project-management course.”
So I went. I took the assumption that Myers-Briggs was solid science and leaned into it. Only later did I discover the entire system had been stitched together in the 1940s by a mother-and-daughter duo with no psychological training, guided by Carl Jung’s musings and a healthy dose of intuition.
I’d taken it as truth. It wasn’t even good fiction.
A few years later, I met a true believer. My new boss had just taken a DiSC personality test — the four-quadrant cousin of Myers-Briggs — and he was glowing with revelation.
He called me into his office, eyes wide, and said:
“This has changed my life. I’ve just realised — for the first time — that other people actually think differently to me.”
He was fifty.
When he saw my face trying not to crack, he added, “You already knew that, didn’t you? Psychology background and all.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that yes, you tend to pick that up somewhere between your first group project and your second degree. But that’s what these systems sell: revelation disguised as research. They turn the obvious into an awakening — and charge handsomely for the privilege.
Then came my first American firm, and a new mythology: the colour wheel. Four hues, four “energies.” Red meant bold and dominant; Blue meant analytical; Green meant nurturing; Yellow meant sociable. We were told that by learning our colour mix, we’d unlock teamwork nirvana.
Predictably, Reds took this as a hall pass for bad behaviour.
“Sorry to interrupt, I’m just very Red.” “I know I’m blunt — it’s my colour.”
It was astrology for extroverts, with better stationery.
Only later did I learn how big this circus really was. The global market for workplace personality testing is worth over $5 billion, growing 10–15 percent a year. The Myers-Briggs Company alone makes about $20 million annually; the Scottish colour-coding giant Insights Discovery turned over nearly £100 million last year.
The model is elegant:
1.
Charge per person for the test. 2.
Charge again for the workshop. 3.
Charge again to “certify” HR people so they can buy more tests. 4.
Sell annual renewals to keep them hooked.
It’s not quite a pyramid scheme — but you can see the shape from here.
And then there’s DiSC’s origin story, which is so bizarre it borders on performance art.
Its creator, William Moulton Marston, was a Harvard psychologist who lived in a polyamorous household with his wife Elizabeth Holloway and his partner Olive Byrne, both brilliant women who helped him invent the lie detector. Olive’s mother and aunt were pioneering birth-control activists; her silver bracelets inspired the accessories of Marston’s most famous creation: Wonder Woman.
Because yes — the inventor of DiSC also invented Wonder Woman.
Marston believed submission could be empowering for women, and his psychology revolved around four drives: Dominance, Inducement, Submission, Compliance. Those same themes — power, control, bondage — ran through the early Wonder Woman comics. The ropes, cuffs and “lasso of truth” weren’t metaphors; they were straight from his life.
Friends described him attending “kinky sorority parties” with Olive, experiences that reportedly fed directly into his writing. After his death in 1947, the comics were sanitised — but the theory endured, reborn decades later as a wholesome HR tool for “team communication.”
So the next time someone tells you they’re a “High D,” remember: they’re quoting a psychologist who lived in a four-way marriage and built his model around dominance and submission. You couldn’t make it up — and yet corporate life did.
The science still doesn’t hold. Half of all Myers-Briggs test-takers get a different result if they retake it within five weeks. Human traits exist on spectra, yet these tests force binary choices — introvert or extrovert, thinker or feeler — because simplicity sells. And there’s no credible evidence that any of these frameworks predict performance, teamwork or leadership.
But they do make people feel understood, which is intoxicating. They flatter, they simplify, they give us a sense of control. And companies keep buying, because it’s easier to hand out colours than to deal with complexity.
The danger is when that theatre turns into dogma. I’ve watched good people get pigeonholed or excused by their “type.” Poor performance brushed off with, “I’m a big-picture person, not detail-oriented.” Rudeness rationalised as “just being a Red.” We wouldn’t dare stereotype people by protected characteristics — but we’re strangely happy to do it by pseudoscientific ones.
And here’s the irony: personality isn’t fixed. Are you the same person at work you were ten years ago? If you are, you haven’t learned very much.
These frameworks pretend our quirks are destiny. They freeze us in time. That’s not self-awareness — that’s self-limitation.
So yes, if a test helps you realise that other people think differently, great. That’s useful. But if you’re using it to define who people are, or what they can do, you might as well be using star signs. The evidence is about the same.
You wouldn’t build a leadership team by comparing zodiac charts. So why do it with personality profiles whose scientific footing is just as flimsy?
Next time someone quotes their type at you — “I’m a Red,” “I’m an ENTP,” “I’m a High D” — translate it in your head:
“I’m a Pisces.”
And take it as seriously as that.
Because that’s what these tests are: neat little constellations of flattery, spun into frameworks that look like science but act like mythology. And in a world that swears it’s data-driven, we’ve built an empire on belief.
I’m calling bullshit on it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read Wonder Woman in a whole new light.