Canter Bridge

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The classification of temperament is as at least two millenia old. Some of this effort falls decidely in the the half-baked side of the pan. Yet much of it is decidely helpful in understanding ‘the way we are wired’ and ‘the way we process things’, to use two very modern metaphors of personality typing.

Maybe you’ve never thought of it like that.

Linda Berens and Dario Nardi want you to think again, and to discover yourself in the profiles they’ve developed and invited you to try on. Their paradigm is the well-known Myers-Briggs assignment of four letters to a temperament, each of them a choice between two options. If you run the math, you’ll quickly discover that there are sixteen possibilities, thus the title of this book. (Full disclosure: I’m an INTJ, so I’m really enjoying systematically reporting on this book, gentle reader.)

Berens and Nardi have made this guide user friendly and it is not necessary to have taken the Myers-Briggs ‘test’ in order to use it. In my opinion, the reader will greatly benefit from having done so. There are so many ‘hooks’ that one finds to hang one’s temperament on in just about any prose description, that I find the M-B system is almost necessary in order to inject some element of objectivity into the process.

The great value of Berens’ and Nardi’s work is their trademarked (yes) two-word description of each of the sixteen types (INTJ: ‘Conceptualizer Director’) and the one-page ‘Self-Portrait: What’s it like to be you?’.

The latter is distilled from interviews with individuals belonging to each personality type. I have checked this against a number of friends in the presence of family and peers and found an extraordinary degree of confirmation that this is how the typed individuals actually feel about the world and their selves in it.

This book could serve as good introduction to the modern practice of temperament/personality classification. I also find it helpful in a business/organization context, where mutual understanding (without the touchy-feely excesses that lead so predictably to the gag reflex) is often essential to accomplishing shared goals and avoiding hallway assassinations.