Macmillan USA
30.07.2019
304 pages
ISBN: 978-1-250-25517-4
Thomas Erikson is a Swedish behavioural scientist, leadership coach and book author. He runs a consulting company that advises international companies and organisations. His book “All Idiots!?” was the Swedish non-fiction bestseller of 2016/2017 and has been translated into more than 20 languages.
Surrounded by idiots
This book title sums up the feeling that probably most of us know: we are often convinced of something and cannot understand why our fellow human beings do not see what is obvious to us in the same way. People irritate us with their behaviour, which we cannot relate to the given situation. So, we must inevitably be surrounded by idiots.
Thomas Erikson describes our everyday trouble with difference in an easily readable and entertaining way.
Reds, yellows, greens and blues
The author deals with the topic using the four types of the DISC personality profile with the characteristics dominant, influencing, steady and conscientious. He explains the different behaviour of people with their different personalities in four expressions. You will easily recognise one or the other friend or acquaintance in the profiles described.
Danger of stereotyping
However, simplification carries the danger of stereotyping and then leads to statements like: “That’s typical yellow again” or “as a red she can’t behave any differently”. The good idea of showing differences in a comprehensible way becomes a danger of labelling people and thus undermining the positive intention. Of course, Erikson emphasises that types do not exist in their pure form and that most people combine characteristics of two types, a minority even of three.
However, this reminds me of a personality test I was introduced to at a former employer. It uses the same four colours and reduces the entire human population to about 130 different types. The individuality of the test persons is taken into account insofar as they are allowed to cross out all statements that do not apply to them in the automatically generated personality description. The remaining typification then resemble character descriptions in horoscopes: although they make an individual impression, they are so general that many people can recognise themselves in them.
Bearing in mind the temptation of all typification to oversimplify and to adapt the perception of reality to the model, the book is absolutely worth reading.