The team away-day is going well. Someone has brought pastries, the projector works first time, and the facilitator invites everyone to share their Human Design type. The operations manager is a Generator. The new marketing hire is a Projector, which, she explains, is why she works best when invited rather than told. The founder is a Manifestor and laughs that this finally explains why she never warns anyone before changing the plan.
Everyone enjoys it. For the first time in months, people are talking openly about how they like to work. It feels like progress.
Then, a few weeks later, the founder catches herself thinking that maybe the next hire should be a Generator, because the team needs “more sustainable energy”.
That’s the moment worth pausing on. Human Design is increasingly showing up in team building, leadership coaching and even recruitment conversations. Some of what it offers teams is genuinely helpful. But when a framework moves from conversation starter to decision-making tool, the stakes change, and for employers in South Africa, so does the law.
One Like insight: A label can start a good conversation about how people work. It shouldn’t finish one about who gets hired.
Why typing feels useful in teams
It’s worth being fair about what happened at that away-day. Something good took place. People talked honestly about when they do their best work, what drains them and how they prefer to be approached. The Projector felt able to say that being given orders without context frustrates her. The founder admitted she changes plans without warning. Those are valuable conversations, and many teams never have them.
Personality frameworks, whether it’s Human Design, Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram, are good at starting these conversations because they give people a neutral, shared vocabulary. It’s easier to say “As a Projector, I need to be invited in” than “I find it irritating when you don’t ask for my opinion.” The label takes the sting out.
That matters more than it might seem. When Google studied 180 of its own teams in a project it called Aristotle, its researchers expected the best teams to have the right mix of personalities and skills. As researcher Julia Rozovsky later put it, “We were dead wrong.” What mattered most was how team members interacted, particularly whether people felt safe to speak up, admit mistakes and take risks in front of each other. This sense of safety, which Harvard’s Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety, outweighed who was actually on the team.
That finding cuts both ways for Human Design. If a type-sharing session helps people speak more openly, it may be doing real good, not because the types are accurate but because the conversation is. But the same research suggests that building a team around the “right” mix of types is solving the wrong problem.
Highlight: The value of a personality session is usually in the conversation, not the categories.
The trouble with putting people in boxes
Human Design is not the first system to sort people into types, and the history of its better-known cousin is instructive. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which places people into 16 types, is one of the most widely used personality tools in business. It has also attracted decades of criticism from psychologists.
One problem is consistency. In reviews published in 1993 and 2005, the psychologist David Pittenger reported studies in which roughly half of people were assigned a different type when they retook the test just weeks later. Another problem is the boxes themselves. Ronald Riggio, a professor of leadership and organisational psychology at Claremont McKenna College, points out that traits like extraversion run along a continuum, yet typing systems force people into one category or the other. Someone who barely tips into “extravert” gets the same label as someone off the scale. On using the test to select employees, Riggio is blunt: “This is an obvious misuse”, because there is no evidence supporting its accuracy in hiring. He does see value in using it for self-reflection and for discussing how people differ.
The Myers-Briggs has its defenders, and the debate over its reliability continues. But Human Design faces a more basic problem. The Myers-Briggs at least asks people questions about how they behave. Human Design calculates your type from birth data alone and has never been independently shown to predict anything about how someone works. If a well-studied questionnaire is unsuitable for hiring decisions, a birth chart is further still from being suitable.
[Infographic placement] Where a personality framework belongs. A four-step traffic-light scale. Green: personal reflection (“What does this make me notice about myself?”). Green: team conversations (“How do we each like to work?”). Amber: assigning roles or tasks (“Only alongside real evidence of skills and preferences”). Red: hiring, promotion or pay decisions (“Never on the basis of type”). Caption: The further a framework moves from conversation to decision, the more evidence it needs.
Highlight: The further a personality label moves from conversation to decision, the more evidence it needs. Human Design has none.
Where it crosses a line
For South African employers, this isn’t only a question of good practice. Section 8 of the Employment Equity Act says that psychological testing and similar assessments of an employee are prohibited unless the test has been scientifically shown to be valid and reliable, can be applied fairly to all employees, and is not biased against any employee or group. Section 9 extends that protection to job applicants. (An earlier requirement for tests to be certified by the Health Professions Council of South Africa was removed from the Act with effect from 1 January 2025, but the validity, reliability and fairness tests remain.)
It is hard to see how a Human Design reading could meet the first of those conditions. Whether a type-based reading counts as a “similar assessment” under the Act would ultimately be for the CCMA or a court to decide, and One Like isn’t offering legal advice. But the direction of risk is clear.
There’s a second consideration. Section 6 of the Act prohibits unfair discrimination on a long list of grounds, which includes “birth” and ends with the words “any other arbitrary ground”. A hiring or promotion decision based on a chart calculated from someone’s time and place of birth, with no proven link to the job, is the kind of decision an employer would struggle to justify if it were challenged. The Act does allow employers to distinguish between people based on an inherent requirement of a job. Being a Generator is not one.
Employers in other countries face their own discrimination and testing rules, which we haven’t reviewed here. But the principle travels well. If you can’t explain how a selection method relates to the job, you probably shouldn’t be using it to choose between people.
Highlight: If you can’t explain how a selection method relates to the job, it shouldn’t be choosing between people.
What this means for a small business
None of this means you need to ban Human Design from the office. If your team enjoys it and it opens up useful conversations, that can be a genuine positive. The line to hold is simple: types can start conversations, but they don’t make decisions.
In practice, that means keeping charts out of recruitment, promotion, pay and performance reviews entirely. It means never pressuring anyone to share their birth details or their type. Some people find these systems meaningful, others find them uncomfortable, and both are entitled to their view. And it means being careful not to let a label quietly harden into an expectation, such as assuming the Projector won’t take initiative or the Manifestor can’t collaborate.
If you want the benefits without the baggage, you can get most of them directly. Ask each person how they prefer to receive feedback, when they do their most focused work and what kind of tasks give them energy. Write the answers down and revisit them. For hiring, use structured interviews and practical tasks that relate to the actual job. They’re not as exciting as a bodygraph, but they’re fairer, more defensible and more likely to find you the right person.
A few questions can help:
- Is this framework helping our team talk, or helping us sort people?
- Would anyone feel uncomfortable or excluded if they didn’t want to take part?
- Could we explain every hiring or promotion decision without mentioning a personality type?
- What do we actually know about how each person likes to work, from what they’ve told us and what we’ve seen?
Which brings us back to the founder thinking about hiring a Generator. What she really wants is someone with steady, sustainable energy who won’t burn out. That’s a reasonable thing to look for. The good news is that she can find it by asking candidates about how they manage their workload, checking references and watching how they handle a realistic task. None of that requires knowing what time they were born.
Sources
- Mindset, Jodi Tosini, “Google spent two years studying 180 teams…”, 8 May 2026. Summary of Google’s Project Aristotle, including the Julia Rozovsky quote originally published on Google’s re:Work site.
- Ronald E. Riggio, “The Truth About Myers-Briggs Types”, Psychology Today, 21 February 2014.
- David J. Pittenger, “The utility of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator”, Review of Educational Research 63(4), 1993 (DOI 10.3102/00346543063004467), and “Cautionary comments regarding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator”, Consulting Psychology Journal 57(3), 2005. Cited for the retest findings, as reported in secondary sources.
- Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, section 6, section 8 and section 9, via Acts Online. Section 8(d) deleted with effect from 1 January 2025.
