7 Myths and Misconceptions About Myers-Briggs
These seven tend to come up during Myers-Briggs workshops and can cause a lot of confusion. So without further ado…
Half Price Myers-Briggs Step II!!
FINALLY.
I’m now able to offer the Myers-Briggs Typing Indicator® (MBTI®) through the blog. To commemorate this momentous occasion - the first five people who email me get the MBTI® Step II, Form Q - normally priced at $115 - for half price: $57.50. Here’s a sample of the Form Q Interpretive Report - all 18 pages of it.
Simply email me via the handy email form on my About… page, subject ‘Half Price Form Q.’ If you’re one of the first five you get the most comprehensive Myers-Briggs assessment, including 18 pages of highly detailed information, custom-taylored to your individual personality type, for a bargain price.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Organizational Character Index
After an overly long transition, we’ve set up shop in our new home. To celebrate I’m giving everyone a gift. I’ve coded William Bridges’s “Organizational Character Index” (OCI) into a survey-style page. Now anyone can apply the principles pioneered by Myers and Briggs to their organizations. The OCI is not an adaptation of the MBTI® - it is an experimental tool based on the same type research and using the same dimensions:
- Energy - how your organization gets energy (Extroversion or Introversion)
- Perception - how your organization gets information, what it pays attention to (Sensing and iNtuition)
- Judgment - how your organization uses information to make decisions (Thinking and Feeling)
- Orientation - how your organization shows itself to, and deals with, the external world (Judging or Perceiving)
Take The MBTI
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The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) assessment is the best known and most trusted personality tool available today. From developing more productive work teams to building closer families, the MBTI can improve the quality of life for anyone and any organization.
After more than 50 years, the MBTI instrument continues to be the most trusted and widely used assessment in the world for understanding individual differences and uncovering new ways to work and interact with others. More than 2 million assessments are administered to individuals annually —including employees of many Fortune 500 companies.
At OSI, included in the cost of your MBTI assessment is Exploring YouTM, an advanced web-based tool that helps you self-verify your MBTI results by experiencing the eight Jungian functions directly.
Taking the MBTI Assessment online is easy. Just complete the following steps:
- Determine which report you’d like to receive and purchase it (see the list of available reports below). Reports range from brief summaries to comprehensive assessments.
- After purchasing your report, you’ll receive an email providing the web address and password for your online assessment. Follow the link and take the assessment, which consists of 93-144 questions and takes 20-30 minutes to complete.
- After you complete the assessment, we’ll contact you with further instructions. All reports include a phone consultation with our MBTI consultant to explain and verify the results of your assessment.
Here are sample reports for the different assessments listed below.
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Updating...Out With The Golden Rule, In With The Platinum Rule! (i.e., The Golden Rule Is Wrong, Part II)
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Last week I explained why the Golden Rule is misguided, misplaced, and just plain wrong. Today I follow up by completing two examples on how to operate under the Platinum Rule: “Do Unto Others As They Would Like You To Do Unto Them.” I’m going to refer to the first article throughout this article so click on the link above for reference purposes.
Sphere: Related ContentIDEO’s Ten Faces Of Innovation
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Finally, a book that connects innovation with personality and creative style. Tom Kelley of IDEO describes in great detail the different types of people it takes to staff an innovative organization. This describes each of the ten types in great detail. Which are you? I share traits of both “Collaborator” and “Cross-Pollenator.”
Sphere: Related ContentDegrees of Innovation Effectiveness
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After thinking a great deal about the IDEO and Doblin information I’ve presented, my views on targeted innovation are entering another evolutionary stage. Again.
Innovation effectiveness is becoming more of a science. Effectiveness is rising as we learn more about what works, and what doesn’t, at the macro level. So what is the role of creative thinking in the science of innovation effectiveness?
Sphere: Related ContentKeirsey Temperament Assessment - Free, Powerful, and Revealing
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During my last session at the Advanced School for Innovators we were reminded of another personal inventory tool that’s just as useful as Myers-Briggs (MBTI) and KAI - the Keirsey Temperament Assessment.
When you go to the Keirsey assessment page the first thing that you notice is that, unlike KAI, you can take the assessment over the internet. The second thing you notice is that, unlike KAI and MBTI, the Keirsey assessment is free. This makes it a lot more accessible than the other two. The website has a wealth of information on interpreting the assessment results.
Unlike MBTI, which assesses personality into one of sixteen broad types, the Keirsey assessment places you into one of four possible temperaments (descriptions taken from the Keirsey webpage):
- Guardian: Guardians pride themselves on being dependable, helpful, and hard-working. Guardians make loyal mates, responsible parents, and stabilizing leaders. Guardians tend to be dutiful, cautious, humble, and focused on credentials and traditions. Guardians are concerned citizens who trust authority, join groups, seek security, prize gratitude, and dream of meting out justice.
- Artisan: Artisans tend to be fun-loving, optimistic, realistic, and focused on the here and now. Artisans pride themselves on being unconventional, bold, and spontaneous. Artisans make playful mates, creative parents, and troubleshooting leaders. Artisans are excitable, trust their impulses, want to make a splash, seek stimulation, prize freedom, and dream of mastering action skills.
- Idealist: Idealists are enthusiastic, they trust their intuition, yearn for romance, seek their true self, prize meaningful relationships, and dream of attaining wisdom. Idealists pride themselves on being loving, kindhearted, and authentic. Idealists tend to be giving, trusting, spiritual, and they are focused on personal journeys and human potentials. Idealists make intense mates, nurturing parents, and inspirational leaders.
- Rational: Rationals tend to be pragmatic, skeptical, self-contained, and focused on problem-solving and systems analysis. Rationals pride themselves on being ingenious, independent, and strong willed. Rationals make reasonable mates, individualizing parents, and strategic leaders. Rationals are even-tempered, they trust logic, yearn for achievement, seek knowledge, prize technology, and dream of understanding how the world works.
Each of the four main temperaments has four subtemperaments. Each is explained in detail on the assessment page linked above. This page explains the relationship between Keirsey and MBTI.
My temperament is Rational. I can see a lot of the archetypal rational characteristics in myself, but also a few from idealist and artisan. My main rational trait is pragmatism, and I’m drawn to strategic planning as are many rationals. I also place a high value on competence, my own and that of others. But as a musician I have some artisan traits, and as a thinker I have some intuitive traits of the idealist.
Regarding the relationship between my type and temperament, it doesn’t seem to match. My rational temperament should indicate a type ENTP, whereas I’m an ESTP. The page I linked above claims a 75 percent corrrelation, but in my case the Form Q portion of my MBTI assessment indicates I’m right on the border between S and N anyway.
Take the Keisey assessment and read up on your results. It will tell you a lot about yourself and how you relate to others.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Nature of Innovation Part II - Creative Styles
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In my first post I discussed the two different broad categories of innovative change - doing things better (evolutionary change) and doing things different (revolutionary change). Now I discuss the connection between these two categories and individual creative style.
Creative style theory’s main proponent is M.J. Kirton, father of the Kirton Innovative-Adaptive (KAI) theory and inventory. This short video from the KAI website is a nice introduction to creative style. Kirton believes creative style is ‘hard wired’ into your cognitive processes, like personality. I suppose that is debatable because I don’t think there’s been a lot of research in the effects of creating thinking training on creative style. Anyway, Kirton believes there are two types of creative styles - one geared to doing things better (adaptive) and one geared to doing things differently (innovative). The KAI inventory assesses how adaptive or innovative you are.
The KAI is not nearly as widespread or well-known as Myers-Briggs (MBTI) - you can take a MBTI assessment online for a fee, whereas to take the KAI you must find a certified practitioner to administer the assessment directly (you are mailed a form, which you fill out and return manually). The KAI assessment consists of 33 questions focused on how hard it is for you to present yourself in various ways. The output of the assessment is a score between 32 and 160. The low end of the scale is purely adaptive, the high end purely innovative. KAI scores for the general population form a familiar bell curve, with the big end of the bell centered on the mean score of 96. My KAI is 118, which puts me on the innovative side of the mean.
Adaptive people crave structure and routine. Their creative energy is focused on performing day to day tasks in the most efficient, effective ways possible. So when you ask an adaptive person to solve a problem, their ideas focus on how to make things better - improvements and efficiencies. Further, an adaptive individual doesn’t necessarily like to share ideas unless asked - they don’t aspire to create change in their environment. Adaptive activities might include plumbing, environmental cleanup, shipping and receiving, logisitics - fields where getting things done is the priority of the day.
In contrast, innovative people seek to disrupt the status quo. They produce and share ideas on a constant basis, and their ideas tend to focus on novelty and ‘breaking the mold.’ Innovators are attracted to fields like strategic planning and research. Ask an innovator to solve a problem and you’ll get big ideas to do big things outside the norm. A lot of their ideas won’t be practical - for every 20 or so ideas, only 5 might be regarded as useful. But more of their useable ideas will result in revolutionary breakthroughs.
Adaptors don’t like innovators because they aren’t practical and don’t care about getting things done to solve today’s crisis. Innovators like to focus on having big ideas, not implementing them, and as a result the task of making their ideas work falls into the laps of others. Innovators don’t like adaptors because they resist change and are naturally critical of novel thinking - they’ll focus on why the big ideas CAN’T work, in an effort to keep the status quo intact.
What’s missing is a ‘translator’ class - those who can interface effectively with both adaptors and innovators. This is often the role of those whose scores cluster around the mean. They often serve as ‘bridgers’ - the ones that take innovators’ ideas and turn them into practical solutions, and work with adaptors to mitigate the negatives and turn ideas into action. Bridgers also make good facilitators.
When I learned about creative style theory, it was as if someone had turned on the light. My degree is in engineering but I never felt I ‘fit the mold’ due to the largely theoretical nature of engineering training. It is very nuts and bolts oriented, often tedious and detailed, concentrating on the science behind the technology. My KAI score of 118 shows I am far from a nuts and bolts person - I gravitate more towards high level systems focus, strategic planning and broad goals setting. There isn’t much room for that kind of thinking in the engineering department - maybe I was better suited for a more creatively focused curriculum (there are no classes on creativity in the engineering department). Eventually I settled into the field of planning and learned innovation facilitation - now my creative energies have a more effective outlet.
By taking the KAI inventory you can learn alot about your creative thinking and your strengths and weaknesses. You can also learn your best ‘fit’ in the organization and who you can relate to the easiest. After a while you can guess others’ creative styles by observing how they react to certain situations and how they respond to problems. By knowing others’ creative styles you can learn how to better relate to them. If I know you are adaptive I will tend to stress the aspects of my ideas which you’ll connect with - improvements and efficiencies. If I know you are innovative I will help you work out the practical aspects of your big ideas so they’ll have a better shot at succeeding.
Next: Using Creative Style Effectively
Sphere: Related ContentRecommended Reading
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These books represent the best of the best on the topics of innovation, creativity, and personality type.
