As someone with more than a fair bit of experience with DISC, I wanted to provide some pushback on the article a bit:
> Erikson has repeatedly claimed that the benefit of his colour approach is that it helps us understand ourselves and others and, as a result, improves our communication and reduces conflicts. This is his argument as to why companies and organisations should adopt his approach. Since there is no scientific support for the four colours, there is naturally no support for this claim either.
Bullshit. Just because there was no study published on it in Nature doesn't mean it doesn't have value or you should dismiss it completely! If I went around proclaiming the importance of Agile, you shouldn't just dismiss me because "there is no academic support". And to more of a point, it seems unfair to single this guy out of the sea of pop-psychology and business management books.
> It is difficult to imagine a more unpleasant and unfair way of dealing with a problem than simply attributing it to the fact that the person in the centre of a conflict “is blue”.
This seems to be a gross mis-characterization of the expected outcomes of the behavioral training. The outcome of them (at least the ones I've gone through) is to reframe work conflicts away from "this guy is stupid and should be fired" to "we have completely different ways of talking through problems". In that regards it's been super freaking helpful. I don't need an academic consensus that I feel warm and fuzzy afterwards.
>The claim that MBTI gives you new information would be a bold scientific claim and would require bold scientific evidence. I don’t know to what degree the MBTI people make this claim, but I don’t think it’s necessary for me to enjoy the test and consider it useful. All it needs to do is condense the information you put into it in a way that makes it more relevant and digestible.
>Five Factor and MBTI are trying to do fundamentally different things. Five Factor is trying to give us a mathematized, objectively correct version of personality useful for research purposes. MBTI is trying to separate people into little bins that put continuous personality space into discrete and easy-to-think-about terms suitable for human processing, and even very poorly drawn bins will do a pretty good job, just like European countries.
100%, DISC is just a construct, but it can still be a super useful and effective one. Even if it's a placebo, I don't need someone running up and knocking it out of my hand and telling me they did me a favor.
> Erikson has repeatedly claimed that the benefit of his colour approach is that it helps us understand ourselves and others and, as a result, improves our communication and reduces conflicts. This is his argument as to why companies and organisations should adopt his approach. Since there is no scientific support for the four colours, there is naturally no support for this claim either.
Bullshit. Just because there was no study published on it in Nature doesn't mean it doesn't have value or you should dismiss it completely! If I went around proclaiming the importance of Agile, you shouldn't just dismiss me because "there is no academic support". And to more of a point, it seems unfair to single this guy out of the sea of pop-psychology and business management books.
> It is difficult to imagine a more unpleasant and unfair way of dealing with a problem than simply attributing it to the fact that the person in the centre of a conflict “is blue”.
This seems to be a gross mis-characterization of the expected outcomes of the behavioral training. The outcome of them (at least the ones I've gone through) is to reframe work conflicts away from "this guy is stupid and should be fired" to "we have completely different ways of talking through problems". In that regards it's been super freaking helpful. I don't need an academic consensus that I feel warm and fuzzy afterwards.
I strongly recommend this post from SlateStarCodex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/27/on-types-of-typologies...
>The claim that MBTI gives you new information would be a bold scientific claim and would require bold scientific evidence. I don’t know to what degree the MBTI people make this claim, but I don’t think it’s necessary for me to enjoy the test and consider it useful. All it needs to do is condense the information you put into it in a way that makes it more relevant and digestible.
>Five Factor and MBTI are trying to do fundamentally different things. Five Factor is trying to give us a mathematized, objectively correct version of personality useful for research purposes. MBTI is trying to separate people into little bins that put continuous personality space into discrete and easy-to-think-about terms suitable for human processing, and even very poorly drawn bins will do a pretty good job, just like European countries.
100%, DISC is just a construct, but it can still be a super useful and effective one. Even if it's a placebo, I don't need someone running up and knocking it out of my hand and telling me they did me a favor.