your style & preferences
The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory
"Oh, great Father, never let me judge another man until I have walked in his
moccasins for two weeks" - Albert Einstein
The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) is a tool used increasingly in the management and development of creative teams. The MBTI evaluates you along four dimensions:
- extrovert - introvert, how one relates to others and the world
- thinking - feeling, the way one makes decisions
- sensing - intuitive, how one gathers information (sensing focuses on the present and on information gained from the senses, intuition focuses on the future and on patterns and possibilities) and
- judging - perceiving, the way one lives life (judging favours order and organisation, perceiving favours flexibility and open options).
This gives a possible 16 different personality profiles, with individual differences between people of the same type being marked by particularly strong preferences along one or more dimensions.
This model is very useful for anticipating and managing conflict, and raising awareness of the number of very different possible ways of approaching a task, of working, of organising oneself, and relating to other people.
The model predicts the potential for conflict arising from bringing together people of very different styles and preferences. A certain amount of conflict has been found to be desirable and necessary for creative synergies to take place within a group of people. If all the members of a team are very similar in personality, temperament and values, there may be great harmony and agreement, but there is a risk that ideas and assumptions will not be challenged, that consensus will be reached too quickly for any genuinely creative and innovative ideas to be formulated, explored and developed, a syndrome known as 'groupthink'.
We often use the MBTI in Innovation BoostersTM to form groups with an appropriate degree of diversity, and to help individuals reflect on their creative styles and their way of relating to others.
