TBM 440: The Problem With Putting People in Boxes
John Cutler · email · 2026-09-19 Reader 🖥️
Hierarchy & Org ChartsMental Models & UnderstandingOrganizational LegibilityPluralistic Ignorance & Adaptation vs. EndorsementPsychological Safety
Putting people in boxes — typing them by personality, strengths, or 'culture fit' — is a category error at work because behavior is not a stable, context-free trait but a function of the person interacting with situational incentives, norms, power dynamics, and constraints, so the operative question should be 'under what conditions do you/they behave differently' rather than 'what type are you.'
mixed, leaning practical · essay — headed sections building one continuous argument, mixing a constructed hypothetical, an autobiographical anecdote, and light citation of academic traditions (institutionalization, organizational culture, social dominance theory), closing with reflective diagnostic questions rather than a formal method — Substack newsletter essay (The Beautiful Mess); no primary-source links or data, scholars are named but not quoted or cited in detail; aimed at changing how the reader builds and evaluates teams, not at theory for its own sake.
Structure
| Part | Role |
|---|---|
| Opening critique of personality/strength tests' appeal and insufficiency — fun but never replacing the hard work of actually getting to know people across contexts. | thesis setup |
| Sports-team / 'culture fit' framing critique: shows how context-free strength-words (decisive, collaborative, low ego) launder the existing culture's own quirks into 'good,' shifting the burden onto the individual to 'fit.' | diagnosis of the first failure mode |
| 'Types And Other Boxes' section: reframes the operative question from 'what type is this person' to 'under what conditions do you behave differently, and what distinctions cause you to switch modes.' | core reframing |
| Meeting-cadence hypothetical: two people who share the same Big Five profile (high conscientiousness, low neuroticism / high agreeableness) give opposite answers to a concrete policy question. | illustrative proof-of-concept for the reframe |
| Personal example: Cutler describes switching between collaborative and confrontational 'defender mode' depending on whether he perceives an abuse of power, and the 'polarizing' feedback that followed. | autobiographical evidence and credibility move |
| 'That's Just How Things Work Around Here' section: norms are the sedimented, depersonalized residue of people's past behavior; the burden of adapting to them falls disproportionately on people underrepresented in the environment and in the wider profession (citing institutionalization, organizational-culture, and social-dominance literatures). | extends the critique from individual typing to organizational norms |
| 'Courage!' section: abstract-sounding virtue words (courage, discipline, bias to action, ownership) are not context-free — organizations reward only a particular local expression of them, so evaluating someone's 'possession' of the virtue is really evaluating whether their expression is culturally legible. | mechanism connecting individual-typing critique to organizational evaluation practice |
| Conclusion: don't abandon the idea that people have relatively stable tendencies, but treat them as a 'center of gravity' — understand the contextual factors that pull people away from it; closes with three reflective diagnostic questions. | practical payoff / partial alternative |
Key terms
- boxes
Static personality/strength/skill typological categories (Myers-Briggs, DiSC, StrengthsFinder, Big Five, 'strategist,' 'people person') used to classify people at work — labels that compress complex, context-dependent behavior into something fixed, easy to remember, and easy to repeat. - culture fit
A framing that nominally acknowledges someone might thrive in one culture and struggle in another, but in practice translates the existing culture's quirks into seemingly context-free, admirable trait-words (decisive, collaborative, low ego, fast-moving) and shifts the evaluative burden onto the individual to 'fit' that unexamined baseline. - mode / switching modes
A distinct, internally coherent behavioral pattern a person moves into under specific triggering conditions (e.g. his own 'defender mode' when perceiving abuse of power) — implying a person can have several such modes rather than one stable trait profile, and that the interesting question is what triggers the switch. - "that's just how things work around here"
A rhetorical move that depersonalizes organizational norms — treats them as neutral, landscape-like features ('that's the way water flows') rather than as the accumulated, still-contestable behavior of specific people, often people who continue to benefit from the norm as established. - courage (as a stand-in for context-free virtue words)
A word that sounds like a universal, trait-like virtue but in practice only rewards one particular, culturally local expression of it (e.g., 'courage' means challenging the CEO in one company and registers as disrespect in another); assessing whether someone 'has' the virtue is actually assessing whether their expression of it is culturally legible to the evaluator.
Propositions
- explicitPersonality/strength typologies describe relatively stable individual tendencies, but what matters at work is how a person behaves in a specific situation given incentives, norms, power dynamics, and constraints — the same trait profile can produce very different behavior.conf: highsupportsTBM 419: Stop Being So Negative! Stop Being So Naive! · p4 — TBM 419's prescription — that the best teams sequence outcome-optimism and capability-optimism modes explicitly rather than resolving the tension into one fixed style — is a concrete, team-level operationalization of TBM 440's general claim that behavior is context-triggered mode-switching rather than a fixed trait.
- explicitTwo people who score identically on Big Five conscientiousness and neuroticism can give opposite answers to a concrete policy question (a meeting-cadence decision) because they differ in how they read reversibility, evidence requirements, and legitimate decision authority — not because they differ in trait.conf: high
- explicitOrganizational norms are the sedimented byproduct of people's past behavior, but once established they get depersonalized into 'that's just how things work around here,' so the behavior that created the norm becomes invisible while the behavior required to adapt to it becomes a personal competency and burden.conf: highextendsTBM 438: Am I the Only Weirdo in This Company? · p2 — TBM 438 establishes that people mistake others' adaptation to power-weighted norms for genuine belief; TBM 440 extends the same mechanism one step further — once that adaptation-as-norm is depersonalized ('just how things work around here'), the burden of adapting gets reattributed as an individual competency gap rather than a collective, power-shaped choice.
- explicitThe burden of adapting to depersonalized organizational norms falls disproportionately on people who are underrepresented both in their immediate environment and more broadly in their profession or industry, because they have fewer people around them whose defaults resemble their own and less power to define what counts as normal.conf: high
- explicitAbstract-sounding organizational virtues (courage, discipline, bias to action, ownership) are not context-free; organizations reward only one particular local expression of each, so evaluating whether someone 'possesses' the virtue is actually evaluating whether their expression of it is culturally legible to the evaluator.conf: highsupportsTBM 426: The Trouble With Mirrors · p3 — Both pieces argue that seemingly neutral organizational framings (a 'mirror' reflecting reality; a 'virtue' someone either has or lacks) are actually authored and interested — someone chooses the frame, or the local culture defines which expression of the virtue counts — rather than objective, context-free readings.
- explicitA single person can display behavior that looks inconsistent across contexts (highly collaborative in one setting, confrontational in another) while remaining internally coherent, because both behaviors serve the same underlying value and are triggered by different situational cues.conf: high
- explicitThe convenience of trait-labels ('they're a strategist,' 'low in agreeableness') lies in compressing complex, context-dependent behavior into something easy to remember and repeat — which is exactly what makes them misleading for actually understanding how to work with someone.conf: high
- implicitBehavior is primarily a function of the interaction between a person's dispositions and the situational cues, incentives, and power structure they're in, rather than a stable, situation-independent trait.conf: medium
Arguments
When trying to work well with someone, we should focus on the situational/contextual triggers of their behavior rather than on typological labels. strength: medium
Explicit premises:
- Typologies describe stable tendencies, but what matters at work is situational behavior.
- The same trait profile can yield opposite behavior depending on how the situation is read (the meeting-cadence hypothetical).
- Trait-labels compress complexity conveniently, but that convenience is exactly what makes them misleading.
Implicit premises:
- Behavior is primarily a function of context/system rather than stable trait (the load-bearing assumption of the whole piece).
- Understanding 'what causes someone to switch modes' is a tractable, learnable diagnostic that is more useful in practice than typing them.
- The two constructed responses to the meeting-cadence question genuinely reflect different underlying reasoning processes rather than being post-hoc rationalizations invented to fit the argument.
Inferences:
- Because both meeting-cadence responses are compatible with the same Big Five profile, Cutler infers that trait models under-determine behavior in a way that makes situational analysis necessary — but this inference rests on a hypothetical he constructed himself, not on observed behavior from real teams.
Norms and 'the way things are' in an organization are not neutral features of the landscape; they are the accumulated, depersonalized residue of behavior by people who often still benefit from them, and treating adaptation to those norms as a personal competency gap misattributes an organizational-design cost onto individuals — disproportionately onto the already-underrepresented. strength: medium
Explicit premises:
- Norms are the sedimented byproduct of people's behavior.
- Once established, norms get depersonalized into 'just how things work around here.'
- The person adapting is evaluated individually (read the room, develop executive presence) while the norm-creators' behavior becomes invisible.
- Underrepresented people have fewer local models of their own defaults and less power to define what counts as normal.
Implicit premises:
- The people whose past behavior originally shaped a norm are typically also among those currently advantaged by it, so invoking 'the norm' rather than 'our choices' is not neutral description but a move that obscures whose interests it continues to serve.
Inferences:
- From 'norms have a human, behavioral origin' Cutler infers 'therefore treating adaptation-to-norms as a personal competency gap rather than an organizational design choice misattributes the burden' — this moves from a descriptive claim (norms are chosen/behavioral in origin) to a normative one (the burden is unfairly placed) without separately arguing the fairness premise.
Narratives
- The meeting-cadence hypothetical: two people who score identically on relevant Big Five traits are asked to set a company meeting cadence, and give opposite answers (impose a default now vs. diagnose the problem before deciding) because they read reversibility, evidence, and authority differently.
→ Demonstrates, via a constructed but concrete case, that trait scores underdetermine behavior — makes the abstract critique of typologies feel falsifiable and specific rather than merely asserted. - Cutler's own autobiographical account of switching between collaborative co-design mode and confrontational 'defender mode' depending on whether he perceives someone abusing power, and the 'polarizing' feedback he received as a result.
→ Shows that apparently inconsistent behavior can be internally coherent once read through triggering conditions rather than fixed traits; also functions as a credibility/vulnerability move — he applies the critique to himself rather than only to abstract others or subjects. - The 'rivulets and channels water passes through' metaphor for how organizational norms sediment out of repeated behavior and then appear to be features of the landscape rather than choices.
→ Naturalizes and then denaturalizes the idea that 'how things are done here' is landscape rather than choice, setting up the depersonalization critique that follows.
Questions addressed
- ✅ Why do personality/strength-typing tools feel satisfying at work despite not helping with day-to-day collaboration?
They compress complexity into memorable, repeatable labels (cognitive convenience) and occasionally produce a resonant 'wow, how right!' moment, but they never do the harder work of learning how context changes a person's behavior. - ✅ What should replace 'what type is this person' as the operative question for team-building?
Ask under what conditions the person behaves differently and what they're noticing/assuming about risk, authority, fairness, reversibility, and responsibility in those conditions — treating stable tendencies as a 'center of gravity' rather than the whole story. - ✅ Why does the burden of cultural/behavioral adaptation fall unevenly across people in an organization?
Established norms are depersonalized residues of already-advantaged people's behavior; underrepresented people have less local mirroring of their own defaults and less power to redefine what counts as 'normal,' so they do disproportionately more of the adapting.
Gaps
- incompleteCutler never operationalizes the alternative he proposes. The reflective questions at the close ('what kinds of situations cause you to switch modes,' 'what assumptions are you making about risk, authority, fairness...') are individual, private prompts, not a method for eliciting this at team-formation time, running it with a group, or building a shared vocabulary the way Myers-Briggs or StrengthsFinder do. The critique dismantles the typing toolkit but doesn't supply an equally teachable, shareable replacement practice.
Read next: Corpus material on situational agency and systemic apprenticeship (extract-leadership-summit-2026-grit-and-growth) for how a context-focused alternative might actually be operationalized at team or organizational scale, since that piece raises but doesn't resolve the same scaling question. - incompleteCutler concedes at the outset that typologies 'became fodder for some fun discussions and had that occasional wow, how right! horoscope vibe,' but never weighs this genuine value (shared vocabulary for self-reflection, low-stakes team bonding, an entry point into talking about difference at all) against the costs he documents. The piece critiques typologies' insufficiency for the hard work of teamwork without arguing they are net-harmful, leaving open whether a more modest, supplementary use of typing survives the critique.
Read next: None in this corpus yet directly weighs the self-reflection/vocabulary value of typologies against their organizational misuse — a genuine open question for a future read on personality-assessment validity research. - incompleteThe three academic traditions cited (institutionalization: Berger, Luckmann, Zucker; organizational culture: Schein, Martin; social dominance: Sidanius, Pratto) are named but not engaged with — no specific finding, mechanism, or quotation from any of them appears in the piece. They function as authority gestures that lend the argument credibility rather than as evidence a reader could verify or follow up on directly from this text.
Read next: Read Berger & Luckmann's 'The Social Construction of Reality' and Sidanius & Pratto's social dominance theory directly to check how closely Cutler's depersonalization-of-norms argument tracks their actual claims versus using them as a plausibility gesture. - uninformedThe claim that underrepresented people bear a disproportionate adaptation burden is asserted as established via named literature (social dominance theory) but no data, case study, or even a paraphrased finding is offered within this piece to substantiate the specific magnitude or mechanism of that burden in a workplace setting — it is plausible and consistent with the field, but not evidenced here.
Read next: Empirical organizational-behavior research on code-switching, executive-presence coaching, and promotion-rate disparities by demographic group, to see what evidence actually exists behind the claim as applied to workplaces specifically (versus the broader social-dominance literature Cutler gestures at).
Closes gaps elsewhere
- TBM 438: Am I the Only Weirdo in This Company? · g2 — TBM 438 leaves open where power-weighted norms originate, flagging an unaddressed regress ('who is the power behind the power'). TBM 440 supplies a partial account: norms are the sedimented byproduct of repeated individual behavior (the 'rivulets and channels' metaphor) that becomes depersonalized once established, drawing on institutionalization theory (Berger, Luckmann, Zucker) — an origin story in terms of accumulated behavior and social construction, though it still doesn't fully resolve the regress of who currently holds the power to keep a norm in place.
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