We recently sat down with James Healy, author of BS at Work — a book cataloguing hundreds of examples of workplace practices that look credible, feel authoritative, and simply don't hold up to scrutiny. James has a simple litmus test he applies to almost everything in business: "Will this really work?"

We asked him, out of all those stories, which two he'd pick as his favourites.

His answer: DISC and Myers-Briggs. Two of the most widely used personality profiling tools in the world.

DISC: Wonder Woman's Lesser-Known Sibling

DISC was invented in the 1940s by William Moulton Marston — better known as the creator of Wonder Woman. Marston and his two wives, with whom he lived in an unconventional three-way relationship, wrote a book called The Emotions of Normal People. James describes it as "a sort of pseudo-psychological justification for the alternative lifestyle."

The 'D' originally stood for Dominance. The 'S'? Submissive.

This is the foundation of a tool still used by some of the world's largest organisations for hiring, team building, and career development.

Myers-Briggs: Born From a Mother's Disapproval

Myers-Briggs has a similarly colourful beginning. A young woman comes home from college with a surprise — her new fiancé. Her mother, who happened to be an erotic novelist, is horrified by how different he seems from the family. So she goes down a rabbit hole of personality types, builds her own typology, and later encounters the work of Carl Gustav Jung — "obviously very famous, but now utterly discredited," as James puts it.

The result? Named after the fiancé (Myers) and the mother's family name (Briggs).

James's kicker: if you take the Myers-Briggs test twice within five weeks, there's a greater than 50% chance you'll get a different result. As he notes, none of the categories are ever negative either — "it's like horoscopes. Vague, positively framed. You want to be that person."

So Why Does Any of These Personality Tests Matter?

These aren't just entertaining pub quiz facts. Billions of dollars in hiring, team development, and leadership decisions are made every year on the back of tools like these.

At Wizer, we encounter this anchoring constantly — Decision Profiles get mentally filed alongside personality tests, and it's something we work to gently correct. Our platform is built on the extensive research of Dr Juliet Bourke, and is designed with a fundamentally different objective: not to label individuals, but to understand the cognitive make-up of a decision room. There are no bad profiles. The question is simply whether your team has the right mix of thinking around the table when it matters.

That's a different question entirely.

But don't take our word for it — watch James tell these stories himself. He's considerably more entertaining about it than we are. Jame's full interview is here.