The colours of the mind

Shrewsbury International School teachers participate in an e-colours workshop to learn about personality traits.

It is often said that there is no silver bullet when it comes to safety or risk management. Likewise, there is no magic to knowing how a person will act or react to a given circumstance. But one group of researchers has created a colour coded personality tool to help simplify and predict how people will act to different stimuli.

"People of the same personality traits and tendencies have the same or very similar approach to" solving problems and responding to a given set of facts, according to Equilibria, a company that specialises in development and implementation of safety management systems. Though the systems were initially designed for the oil and gas industry, the principles are equally applicable to mergers and acquisitions, and even academic management and students in the classroom.

Carl Jung, the noted Swiss psychiatrist, concluded that the tendencies and personality traits in individuals generally made them fall into four categories: directors, thinkers, socialisers, and guardians. Equilibria takes this into the twenty-first century by converting Jung's basic conclusions into an e-colours tool (see graphic), that has four main parts:

Directive: director / doer - red;
Cautious: thinker / analyst - green
Talkative: socialiser / influencer - yellow
Supportive: guardian / relater - blue. Ashley Taylor, the education and community advisor for Equilibria, agrees that the colours-describers are not mutually exclusive. A person who is predominantly red in his or her personality, may nevertheless have significant green (or yellow or blue) personality traits, too. This allows for the four basic tendencies to be further subcategorised (see graphic). This is the e-colour tool.

Participants explore their strengths and weaknesses to realise their potentials.

"A person with a large amount of red is most comfortable directing and doing. Yet, he may still have portions of the three remaining colours in his personality. The majority of people have two predominant colours. And these colours indicate our strengths and weaknesses, or potential limiters," Taylor says.

"Equilibria has developed a series of dynamic performance and learning enhancement workshops using the e-colour tool as a management tool" and provides other tools for individuals and organisations to realise their potentials. The core strategy is finding a balance in working lives and helping employees and even students get along better, to better understand one another, and to more easily complete common tasks.

With the e-colour tool approach, people learn about personality traits through training so they can have a better understanding of human behaviours and responses. The approach helps both personal and organisational development.

People with a large proportion of red and green tend to be task oriented, while those who are high in yellow and blue are people oriented.

"Once the four colours have become clear in people's mind, " Ashley says, "it isn't much effort to further develop the process to where people understand that in fact we all have four colours in us." Knowing that people are motivated by and react differently to certain stimuli, we can approach safety, teaching and learning in ways that best achieve the results we seek. This kind of knowledge could be applied when grouping students, for example. For example, a student with a green/red personality - task oriented, independent, logical, practical, analytical thinker - is unlikely to willingly jump into an ongoing task without acquiring adequate information to complete the task. Thus, if the same student is rushed into an activity without the needed information, he will feel uncomfortable, and that will most likely create friction among other members of the group.

"E-colour workshop helps people in the organisation realise their existing behaviours that can be counterproductive at times. Understanding one another's personality traits can minimise incidents or conflicts," Ashley explains.

Consequently, workers and students who learn how to use e-colours will know how to approach or treat the individual personalities that the colours represent. Students who know and work with the personality traits of the members of their workgroup can more efficiently achieve the target goal, for example.

For more information on Equilibria, please contact Ashley Taylor at 02-664-2790 ext. 110 or email him at Ashley@equilibria.vg