Mark Boulton

20 Responses to “Think Do Think”

1. 
   patrick h. lauke said on: August 25th, 2007 at 5:42 am

   appar­ently i’m ENTP — sim­ilar to you, but with a loud mouth :)

2. 
   Joefish said on: August 25th, 2007 at 6:09 am

   Hav­ing done a few of these per­son­al­ity type tests before, I can agree with how use­ful they are, espe­cially when it comes to inter­act­ing with people you live or work with. Another resource you may find use­ful is a book called “Per­son­al­ity Plus”, by Florence Lit­tauer (I think I spelled that cor­rectly). It’s a very easy read (pos­sible to read in one or two sit­tings, if you like read­ing), and also very help­ful in describ­ing how dif­fer­ent people approach things and interact. 

   The book is based of a dif­fer­ent way of break­ing down per­son­al­it­ies; it uses only four types (with a per­son hav­ing a main and a sec­ond­ary type). But don’t let it’s sim­pli­city fool you, I found it very help­ful (espe­cially when try­ing to explain to oth­ers the basics of per­son­al­ity differences). 

   If any­one is after clue into their per­son­al­ity type but doesn’t want to do a long test, I found the four ques­tions at http://www.personalitypathways.com/type_inventory.html to do a fairly good job of describ­ing someone with the Myers-Briggs indic­at­ors. (you’ll need to scroll down some­what to find them — read the descrip­tions care­fully as they explain a lot).

   If you’re in a job where you deal with people a lot, then I highly recom­mend invest­ig­at­ing per­son­al­it­ies in more detail (actu­ally, I’d recom­mend it to any­one after doing it myself).

3. 
   Priit said on: August 25th, 2007 at 8:43 am

   INTP too.

   So I prom­ise I never think of ask­ing about that book of yours. Like ask­ing myself and know­ing the answer :-)

4. 
   Tomasz Gorski said on: August 25th, 2007 at 9:03 am

   Mark thanks for another very inter­est­ing post and the link to: “TypeLo­gic have a few links off to online tests” I will check it maybe it will help me with par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult cli­ents! Regards

5. 
   Will Bolton said on: August 25th, 2007 at 1:14 pm

   As you say, the import­ant thing to remem­ber is that the Myers-Briggs test is a meas­ure of pref­er­ence, not aptitude, so there are no right or wrong answers and no bet­ter or worse per­son­al­ity type. Its value is in giv­ing an insight into what makes an indi­vidual tick. 

   I’ve found it very use­ful per­son­ally to gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of myself. I’ve taken the test in vari­ous forms and con­sist­ently score as an INTJ. It’s helped me to be a bit more accept­ing of my intro­ver­sion and other pref­er­ences. How­ever, I do think there is a danger in labelling one­self and chan­ging your beha­viour based on your per­son­al­ity type. 

   With regard to using Myers-Briggs to improve under­stand­ing of oth­ers in a work envir­on­ment, I was think­ing that maybe the col­our wheel would make a good meta­phor. For example an INTJ and an INTP are ana­log­ous and com­ple­ment­ary. They could work together har­mo­ni­ously. An INTJ and an ENFP might be dir­ect oppos­ites on the wheel — it might be assumed that they are very dif­fer­ent and there­fore wouldn’t work well together, but in fact their con­trast­ing styles don’t lead to con­flict but to strong mutual support. 

   Or some­thing like that any­way. Maybe I’m stretch­ing a meta­phor too far.

   Here’s a good resource for find­ing out a bit more about your per­son­al­ity type: [url=http://www.personalitypage.com]http://www.personalitypage.com[/url]

6. 
   Gingerskhan said on: August 25th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

   One thing I’ve found with tests like these is do you still get the same res­ults when you take the test again some time later. 

   For the record I’m INFP, which I’m sure is not me but I will be tak­ing the test again later to see. If I test the same I may have to change professions.

7. 
   melissa said on: August 25th, 2007 at 2:19 pm

   I too have had that test done at a fin­an­cial firm I worked at in Boston who took this very seriously.  

   Once the res­ults came back of all the vari­ous 30 people employed at the firm, they redesigned how we were to inter­act with oth­ers and often times they asked us to inter­act with a inter­me­di­ary indi­vidual so we would work more effect­ively as an organization.  

   For instance the sales people should not approach the fin­an­cial people dir­ectly but go thru the admin­is­trat­ive staff who would have an easier time com­mu­nic­at­ing with the fin­an­cial people. 

   This method of com­mu­nic­a­tion added to a lot of time delays in relay­ing inform­a­tion as well as cre­at­ing an envir­on­ment where people were dis­con­nec­ted which is a shame in such a small organization. 

   I cer­tainly am glad I no longer work in this type of envir­on­ment but it is import­ant to know how to com­mu­nic­ate effect­ively with all the dif­fer­ent types of people that make up an organization. 

   Inter­est­ing post, I nearly for­got of that time.

8. 
   NatalieMac said on: August 26th, 2007 at 10:38 pm

   I’ve taken this test many times and con­sist­ently score as an INFJ. 

   I, too, took this test with all my co-workers at a past job as part of a team-building exer­cise. I thought the leader of the exer­cise did the group a ter­rible dis­ser­vice in not prop­erly explain­ing that your type indic­ated your pref­er­ences. The extro­verts had a field day inter­rupt­ing when oth­ers were speak­ing, and blurt­ing out wildly inap­pro­pri­ate com­ments then shrug­ging and say­ing ‘I’m an extro­vert!’. It was awful.

9. 
   Ben Scott said on: August 27th, 2007 at 4:22 am

   not sure about this test but have done a lot of these in teacher training 

   there are many mod­els to study­ing learn­ing styles and it is stated that no one model is pre­script­ive, that you find the model that suits at that moment in time and really it is a com­bin­a­tion of these mod­els that explains how people learn/interact.

   It is also strange that people are say­ing they come out with the same res­ults. as far as I remem­ber you can have a tend­ency towards the same res­ults but it is more nor­mal to change over time. 

   Per­son­ally I find these mod­els a little simplistic and pat­ron­ising. just me.

10. 
    Mark Boulton said on: August 27th, 2007 at 5:37 am

    Like­wise Ben. Ini­tially, I found the test pro­cess and res­ults pat­ron­ising. How­ever, as someone who isn’t prone to ana­lys­ing my own beha­viour, the insights the res­ults gave me have helped me in the past—particularly where con­flict has been an issue.

11. 
    ben scott said on: August 27th, 2007 at 6:15 am

    yes it is a use­ful test 

    good to point out that we are all a little different

12. 
    Gerry Quach said on: August 27th, 2007 at 6:25 am

    The MBTI and vari­ous related the­or­ies such as the Keir­sey Tem­pera­ment Sorter are the most use­ful per­son­al­ity mod­els I’ve come across. I’ve always tested as INFJ, and the Type and Tem­pera­ment the­or­ies have always made com­plete sense to me. 

    There’s a lot of rub­bish online “MBTI” quizzes out there which aren’t based on any kind of tested the­ory at all but are simply there to rake in money from ad rev­enue. It’s worth­while get­ting a proper MBTI ques­tion­naire done (which costs money) or tak­ing one of the respec­ted tests like the Keir­sey Tem­pera­ment Sorter. 

    Ter­ence Duniho’s DDLI (an MS DOS-based applic­a­tion) is also worth a shot—it’s free, and most likely not as rig­or­ous, but still very well done and miles bet­ter than most of the free online tests that have exploded on the Web.

    I think it’s import­ant that people don’t expect to have some kind of epi­phany or reli­gious exper­i­ence when they find out the res­ults of the quiz. Some people will find it use­ful, oth­ers won’t. That’s OK. I’ve found the MBTI to be incred­ibly use­ful, and in the end, it’s just another very handy tool in my toolkit for self-improvement. 

    I’ve found most people to be unre­cept­ive to the MBTI, and that’s OK too, I don’t blame them. That’s why I don’t think it’s worth­while to intro­duce the MBTI into work­place train­ing and work­shops. I see it more as a use­ful tool for per­sonal growth, and that’s some­thing people gen­er­ally don’t want to deal with in the workplace.

    Dif­fer­ent strokes for dif­fer­ent folks.

13. 
    Tristan Juricek said on: August 27th, 2007 at 11:13 am

    INTJ here, con­firmed mul­tiple times over a few years. I was also skep­tical, but found use­ful­ness in learn­ing dif­fer­ences between the categories. 

    My own best use of it has been doing revi­sions of com­mu­nic­a­tion: doc­u­ment­a­tion, email, present­a­tions, etc.  While fairly vague gen­er­al­iz­a­tions, they’re remark­ably com­plete alto­gether. Ergo, if you want to revise some­thing you’re try­ing to com­mu­nic­ate, try read­ing it from the eyes of another per­son­al­ity. It’s a great exer­cise for get­ting out of your com­fort zone. 

    And of course, if this sort of thing helps people accept them­selves, that’s great. Redu­cing pess­im­ism is a Good Thing. But I would also think that these tests some­times func­tion like a horo­scope: people really enjoy believ­ing more than what’s often stated.

14. 
    Keeran said on: August 27th, 2007 at 6:29 pm

    INTP here too, though I found a few of the ques­tions to be in con­flict, so answer­ing one made me think about how I answered some­thing fur­ther up the page. 

    Very inter­est­ing the­ory though, and could explain a lot of what goes on in our office ;) 

    Next week we’ll all do it in public :)

15. 
    khutina said on: August 28th, 2007 at 4:15 am

    I’m an enfp.…i think I’m th only one on this thread…how strange! 

    I thought on your descrip­tion I would be an INTP, but on read­ing the enfp pro­file it is very much like me. It is creepy to read from a ran­dom test details about the way I think and to have them so accurate. 

    love the site mark! your blogs are always so inter­est­ing and lov­ing the tutorials!

16. 
    jay said on: August 28th, 2007 at 6:29 am

    the myers-briggs is fun, and it does point out that there are sim­il­ar­it­ies and dif­fer­ent per­son­al­it­ies. but i would not take it any fur­ther than that. like rorschach test­ing, there is no cred­ible sci­entific basis upon which this has been created.

17. 
    Chemotherapy said on: August 29th, 2007 at 9:46 am

    use­ful test! thanks for the article!

18. 
    Jack Cole said on: September 1st, 2007 at 4:17 pm

    Keeran said, “INTP here too, though I found a few of the ques­tions to be in con­flict, so answer­ing one made me think about how I answered some­thing fur­ther up the page.” 

    From what I under­stand, that’s done on pur­pose to help ‘tease out’ the level of your pref­er­ence. One ques­tion may not show a strong pref­er­ence toward I or E, but a later ques­tion worded to be at odds with the pre­vi­ous one will express the pref­er­ence more clearly. 

    I’m INTJ — see­ing the responses here, I’m won­der­ing if there’s an “NT/F” pat­tern emer­ging for people work­ing in cre­at­ive fields? 

    Thanks for the writeup, Mark!

    -
    
    jkc

19. 
    Clydesdale said on: September 3rd, 2007 at 6:14 am

    I have already read many inform­a­tion about types of per­son­al­ity, but this Myers-Briggs Per­son­al­ity ques­tion­naire is the best in the cur­rent time

20. 
    Afrika said on: September 11th, 2007 at 4:20 am

    Hi Mark,
    
    thanks for this inter­est­ing post and the link!
    
    I think too often it is for­got­ten, that people are dif­fer­ent — its good to be reminded from time to time.
    
    By the way, did the test: INTJ 

    Best regards from Germany