A warning against using DiSC / Myers-Briggs profiling in the workplace.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Companies have been flocking to personality profile frameworks for decades. The allure of an easy to consume and deploy cheat sheet to help with hiring and managing staff is understandable, however, they are a scam and pose a serious risk to the efficiency and credibility of your people management.

Why?

It lacks evidence and credibility.

Hopefully this doesn’t come as a shock to you, but none of these models are considered real Psychology. They are simply frameworks or concepts that fledgling, faux, or wannabe psychologists coined many years ago and have now been misappropriated by businesses hoping to make a buck.

So why isn’t it Psychology?

In order for a Psychological theory to be validated by the scientific community, aka ‘proven to be fact’ (though nothing in science is ever considered untouchably factual), it must subjected to the scientific method.

The scientific method requires that a theory be proven not just once, but in fact repeated by other credible professionals using your same process over and over again. Nothing is ever proven as a ‘fact’, not even gravity or the laws of relativity, which we’ve really only been observing properly for a few centuries, and just assumed the rules have never changed. The closest thing you will get to something being considered a ‘fact’ is years and years of other people running the same or similar experiments and coming up with the same results as you. At this point your theory is considered credible and your work carries weight within the wider community.

This is extremely important for a field like psychology, for two core reasons.

The first is that Psychology had some very wild beginnings. As recently as the early 1900’s, some insane and downright unethical stuff was carried out in the name of science and psychology.

For example, the man who founded Kellogg’s Corn Flakes fancied himself a bit of a head doctor. He tackled psychological problems by pouring acid on women’s genitals and shoving yogurt and coffee up his patients bums daily.