Roll Your Own Bullshit

Many people with pointless psychology degrees make money by creating corporate training courses. But you don't need a fancy degree to write your own training course. They all follow the same basic format:

1. Pick any two axes of the Myers-Briggs personality test.
2. Ask the participants to answer a few questions designed to determine where they fall on those axes. It is unimportant what the answers are, only that there is a distribution of answers.
3. Since you have chosen two axes, the answers will, by necessity, fall into four quadrants. (Had you chosen three axes, you'd have eight octants, which is too messy to visualize.)
4. Fudge the median scores so that the quadrants are roughly equal in size. If you have a lot of participants, you can use statistical methods to ensure that the quadrants are equal, but for small groups, just eyeball it.
5. Give each quadrant a name, like “The Thinkers”, “The Feelers”, “The Doers”, and “The Dreamers”. It doesn't matter what you call them, as long as they sound good.
6. Assign to each quadrant a set of traits that are supposed to be broad stereotypes of people in that quadrant. Again, it doesn't matter what you say, as long as it sounds good. Pick at least two positive and two negative traits for each quadrant.
7. Assign each participant to a quadrant based on their answers.
8. Have the participants break into focus groups for their quadrants and discuss among themselves how their quadrant relates to the other quadrants.
9. Break for stale sandwiches and bad coffee.
10. Have each group report back to the larger group, where they restate what they discussed in their focus groups.
11. Conclude with a summary of the traits of each quadrant, and how they relate to each other. This is the most important part, because it is where you can make up any bullshit you want, and nobody will be able to call you on it. Try to sound as if you have made some profound insights.
12. Have the participants fill out a survey to see how they feel about the training. This is important, because it allows you to claim that the training was a success.
13. Hand out certificates of completion to all participants.
14. Profit.

It is a simple formula, and it is apparently easy to sell such courses to companies. I have attended several of these courses, and they all follow this same basic formula. They are all a waste of time, and they are all a scam.