Page 85 - Ray Dalio - Principles

6
reality” case studies that could be used for training. Over
time, these tapes became part of a “boot camp” for new
employees as well as a window into an ongoing stream of

situations connected to the principles for handling them.

All this openness led to some very frank discussions about
who did what and why, and as a result we were able to deepen
our understanding of our different ways of thinking. This was
enlightening to all of us in showing how differently people’s
brains worked. If nothing else, I could better appreciate people
I’d once wanted to strangle! Moreover, I recognized that

managers who do not understand people’s different thinking
styles cannot understand how the people working for them will
handle different situations, which is like a foreman not
understanding how his equipment will behave. That insight led
us to explore psychometric testing as a way of learning how
people think differently.

DISCOVERING PSYCHOMETRIC

TESTING

Early in my kids’ lives, I’d had them tested by a brilliant

psychologist named Sue Quinlan. Her assessments proved
spot-on and provided a great road map for how they would
develop over the years. Because that testing process had been
so successful, I worked with her and others to try to identify
the best tests for determining what the people I worked with
were like. In 2006, I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

(MBTI) assessment for the first time and found its description
of my preferences to be remarkably accurate.

Many of the differences it described, such as those between
“intuiting people,” who tend to focus on big-picture concepts,
and “sensing people,” who pay more attention to specific facts
and details, were highly relevant to the conflicts and

disagreements we were having at Bridgewater. I began to look
for other tests that could help us deepen our understanding of
each other. This was slow going at first, largely because most
of the psychologists I met were surprisingly squeamish about