What color is your brain?

For our Leadership class, we each got the opportunity to take the HBDI "Whole Brain Analysis" test.  Its along the same lines as a Meyers-Briggs personality test or a Predictive Index test.  Its the latest testing fad.  The goal is to find out how your brain works, which will tell you what work-style preferences you have, which, through extrapolation, tells you what kind of employee or manager you'll be.

HBDI uses a 4-color system

Engineers tend to be blue, teachers red, accountants are green and psychologists yellow.  Roughly.

My issues with this type of testing are two-fold.  

1) I could take this test every month for a year and get a different result every single time.  The responses you choose depend entirely upon your mood, your most recent experiences, and what else you have on your mind.  This is not science, this is at best an educated guess about how you might behave at a single moment in time, a snapshot.  As such I believe it has very limited use as a predictor of future behavior.  

2) It boxes people in.  Our results were handed out in class and we spent 10 minutes reading through and chatting with our neighbors.  I heard so many people say "I'm blue!" or "I'm green and red!".  As soon as we apply these color labels, it narrows our view of how we think a person does or should behave.  If someone scores high in blue, does that mean they'll make a bad teacher?  Its a dangerous tool when applied too liberally.  Its best used as a rough guide for what a person might prefer as a work style or from a job.  

What color am I?  I know you're dying to know.  I fully expected to be blue.  I spent, oh, 7-odd years as a scientist.  I enjoy working through problems analytically and like to think that I react rationally under stress.  What did my test say?  That I was mostly red, then equally yellow and green, but very little blue.  But when stressed, I become very blue and not a lot of any other color.  Yes, I fully realize that because the test didn't give me the results I expected that I may be slightly biased, more willing to call the test into question.  Because clearly the results were wrong.  Right?  I've had a lot of time to mull over my results and read a little more about the colors and the test itself.  I'm now willing to admit that there may be some small, tiny, minuscule kernel of truth in the results somewhere.  Why else would I have hated lab work so much and chosen to run off and join the Red Cross?  All this self reflection made me realize that I had actually put myself in a box labeled "scientist", a box much too small to fit a softer, more intuitive red side.  I need to be more open to exploring all my colors.  So I guess the test was good for something after all.