The Lanyard and the Label

The lanyard is already making my neck itch. It’s cheap plastic, the kind that smells faintly of a chemical sweetness, and the clip is digging into my collarbone. On the laminated card hanging from it, my name is printed below four bold letters: INTJ. The facilitator, a man named Dave with unnervingly white sneakers, points a laser at a PowerPoint slide.

He smiles, as if he’s just handed us a Rosetta Stone for human interaction. A few people nod sagely. Sarah, who I’ve had exactly three conversations with, all of them pleasant, gives me a wary look from across the room. Just like that, a wall has been built between us, constructed from a 95-question quiz I took on a Tuesday morning because a calendar invite told me to. The air conditioning hums. I can feel the collective, unspoken thought of at least half the room: is it lunchtime yet?

The Baffling Ritual of Corporate Pseudoscience

This is the baffling, enduring ritual of corporate pseudoscience. In a world of data analytics, machine learning, and an almost pathological obsession with metrics, we are still using a system with the scientific validity of a newspaper horoscope to sort, categorize, and fundamentally misunderstand the people we work with. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is not a tool; it’s a parlor game that escaped the living room and somehow convinced the boardroom it has a PhD.

And here’s the thing I hate to admit: I get the appeal. I really do. The first time I got my four letters, I felt a little jolt. A flicker of recognition. “The Architect.” It sounded impressive, mysterious. The description talked about a strategic mind, a thirst for knowledge, an independent streak. It felt like someone had peeked inside my brain and written down the flattering parts. It’s the Barnum Effect in action-statements so general they could apply to almost anyone, yet specific enough to feel personal. It’s the same mechanism that makes you think a fortune cookie was written just for you.

I once made a terrible mistake with this knowledge. I was working on a project with a colleague whose type was supposedly the polar opposite of mine. Every time he suggested a more collaborative, open-ended approach, I’d internally roll my eyes and think, “Ugh, such a Perceiver.” I wrote him off as unfocused and allergic to deadlines. I used his four-letter label as a justification for my own impatience and rigidity. I stopped listening to his ideas and started managing his presumed personality type. The project suffered, and our working relationship soured, not because our types were incompatible, but because I used a label as a lazy substitute for the hard work of actual communication and empathy.

The Abysmal Test-Retest Reliability

My friend Jordan B. is an algorithm auditor. His job is to dissect complex systems and find their flaws, their biases, their breaking points. I once asked him about the MBTI. He just laughed.

He explained that the test forces a false binary. You’re either Thinking or Feeling, Judging or Perceiving. There’s no room for context, for growth, for the simple fact that a person can be a strategic thinker on Monday and an empathetic listener on Tuesday. We contain multitudes, but the MBTI demands we pick a side.

MBTI Test-Retest Reliability (5-week period)

The Potato Standard: Specificity vs. Shorthand

It’s a strange double standard we have. We demand such precision in other areas of our lives. Think about potatoes, of all things. We don’t just say, “give me a potato.” We care about the specifics. Is it waxy or starchy? Is it a Nicola, good for salads, or a Russet, perfect for baking? An entire agricultural science is devoted to classifying them with incredible specificity, understanding their properties, and predicting their behavior when cooked. You can look up the kartoffelsorte laura and find out exactly what it’s good for, its texture, its taste profile. This classification is useful because it’s based on observable, reliable, and consistent data. We’d never accept a grocer telling us, “Eh, it’s a root vegetable, just boil it.” Yet we let a consultant with a PowerPoint tell us our colleague is “too much of a J” and nod along as if it means something concrete.

That’s what my manager told me in a performance review a few years ago. “Some of the feedback is that you can be… a little too much of a J.” He said it gently, as if diagnosing a mild but chronic condition. A J, a Judger in the MBTI framework, supposedly prefers structure and decisions. In this corporate dialect, it was code for “you are annoying people by asking when the deadline is.” It wasn’t a conversation about communication styles, workload management, or conflicting priorities. It was a judgment delivered via a pseudoscientific shorthand. My personality had been pathologized. The label, which the company itself had paid for and assigned to me, was now being used as a gentle reprimand.

Management Theater: The Illusion of Insight

These tests thrive in the corporate world not because they are accurate, but because they are easy. They provide the illusion of insight without the messy, time-consuming effort of actually getting to know people. It’s a shortcut that leads to a dead end. It gives managers a flimsy excuse to avoid difficult conversations. It gives employees a fixed script for their own identity, often limiting their potential.

The real work is harder. The real work is sitting down with Sarah and asking about her weekend. The real work is understanding that your project manager isn’t a J, he’s a single father of three who is desperately trying to keep a complex project on schedule. The real work is extending grace, assuming good intent, and being endlessly, frustratingly curious about the complex, contradictory, and utterly unlabeled human beings you work with every single day. The answers aren’t in a four-letter code. They’re in the difficult, unglamorous, and deeply necessary process of paying attention.