Earlier this year, three clients mentioned Surrounded by Idiots to me within days of each other.
The book has sold millions of copies, joining decades of enthusiasm for DISC, HBDI, MBTI, Insights and other personality tools. I’ve used these tools with leaders since the mid-1990s and, despite academic concerns, I think they’re genuinely useful. They give people a shared language for how we think and communicate differently - that’s a good thing.
But notice the reflection underneath the enthusiasm. When something isn’t working between people, we reach for a tool: a profile, a program, a framework, a restructure. Call it a magic wand. Personality tools are not magic wands. Nor is anything else.
Bicycles, frogs, and mixing them up
Alistair Mant’s Intelligent Leadership (1999) gave us a useful picture: bicycle problems and frog problems. A bicycle is a machine. There are plenty of bicycle problems: an approval that sits with the wrong person, a handover step nobody owns, two systems that don’t talk to each other. When it fails, you find the faulty part, fix or replace it, and ride on. A frog is alive. Take it apart and you no longer have a frog.
The trouble starts when we mix the two up, and it happens in both directions.
We tend to apply bicycle solutions to frog problems. Our default fix-it habit is a bicycle habit: find the faulty part (usually a person or a team), repair or replace it, expect the whole to run. Yves Morieux shares a good example in his TED talk, As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify. In banks, the back office and the front office don’t cooperate, so the bank creates a middle office. A year later, he says, there are two problems instead of one, plus a middle office to pay for. Adding a part is a bicycle fix. Cooperation is a frog problem, because the parts behave as they do because of the whole.
Rory Sutherland makes the same point about the London–Paris train. In his 2009 TED talk he describes spending around £6 billion on new track to take about 40 minutes off a 3 ½ hour journey, and suggests the money might have been better spent on the journey itself, by adding wifi or, better yet, free champagne. A faster train is a bicycle fix. The experience of the journey is the frog.
It also runs the other way: frog solutions to bicycle problems. A communication-styles workshop for a team whose real problem is a missing handover step. A personality profile where the answer is simply to fix the process. Personality tools are good frog tools, which is exactly why they’re the wrong answer to a bicycle problem.
People are rarely irrational
When someone’s behaviour looks irrational – hoarding information, escalating everything, ignoring the new process – it usually isn’t. It’s the logical choice given what they’re measured on, who they answer to, what they’re resourced to do and what actually gets rewarded. Morieux and Tollman make this the first of their Six Simple Rules: understand what people do and why, including the goals, constraints and resources that make that behaviour rational for them.
We use a simple three-circle model to hold this idea. Direction: strategy, plans, measures and incentives. Ecosystem: systems, structure, processes and reporting. People: skills, mindset, behaviour and leader example. What we experience as culture, and the behaviour that comprises it, comes from where the three overlap: the work context. It’s a practical model, not a scientific one. Its job is to prompt better questions to understand the implications of any changes to the system. (We’ve written about the circles in Culture is not a people problem.)
A personality tool works in one circle, and only part of it. It can’t change the measure that makes hoarding sensible, or the structure that makes escalation the only route.
Where you stand changes what you see
Barry Oshry’s Total System Power adds a second layer. Tops, Middles, Bottoms, and Customers are conditions, not just job titles, and most of us are in several of these at once: we’re a Bottom when the budget cut comes from above; a Middle between our team and our boss; a Top for our own group.
Oshry describes a typical reflex in each. Tops pull responsibility up to themselves. Bottoms hold higher-ups responsible. Middles stay connected to some parts of the system and lose touch with their peers. Each is a logical response to the position, and culture and reward systems often reinforce it. The implication is humbling: whatever fix we propose, we propose it from one seat, and we can’t see the system from the others.
Hold the whole system and the tensions within it
Robert Siegel’s recent book The Systems Leader comes at it from the executive’s side. Siegel, who teaches systems leadership at Stanford, argues that effective leaders understand how an action in one part of a business ripples through the rest, and that they learn to live with five permanent cross-pressures. For example, holding people accountable while showing empathy, or balancing execution with innovation. A magic wand promises to remove the tension. A systems leader accepts that it’s part of the job.
Where does that leave the personality profile?
Exactly where it belongs. It earns its keep when its language gets built into everyday practice: performance conversations, role design, how meetings run. Just don’t expect it to do anything miraculous, and don’t let it stand in for looking at the whole picture.
Four questions before you reach for the wand
🐸 Bicycle or frog? Is there a part I can simply find and fix, or is this about how things interact?
🧠 What makes this behaviour the logical choice for the person doing it? Look at measures, incentives, structure and who they answer to
🔍 Where am I standing, and what can’t I see from here? Who sits in the other seats: above, below, alongside, and the customer? What can they see?
⚙️ What else moves if I change this? Change one thing and the system shifts. Better to know or predict where before it happens
No single tool will fix the problem. If you want people to make a different choice, change what makes the current one logical.