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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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Foreword
Many years ago, Bill Bonnstetter and his son David developed a revolutionary software system based on the DISC method—a way of describing human communication and classifying behavior and the method that is used throughout this book. Sadly, Bill has since passed away, but David continues to run their company—TTI Success Insights—to this day. From its humble origins in rural Iowa, this method of behavior profiling has now been used by businesses and corporations all around the world.
It all began with one question. A simple, specific question: Could an agricultural salesperson sell more seed simply by looking at a farm?
As a child growing up in rural Iowa, I watched my father apply the foundational principles of William Moulton Marston’s Emotions of Normal People. At the time, my father was focused on Buyer Profile Blending, giving agricultural salespeople the knowledge of Marston’s tools to better understand themselves and their farmer customers. I can still recall the earliest days, sitting at a knotty-pine table over meals of hot pork tenderloins and roast corn, when my father was working through his observations. “Pristine driveways and neat groves? Definitely a Blue. New and experimental livestock and buildings? You’re looking at a Red.”
Although we were close, our paths were incredibly different. My father, a true entrepreneur and Red/Yellow in every sense of the phrase, was driven to build consulting firms and agencies that helped salespeople refine their craft. I sought the collegiate path, attending university at the University of Iowa, leaning into my Red/Blue nature while studying accounting and computer science. I spent my free time in the computer lab, pouring my soul into programs through my fingertips. While I was studying, my father perfected his wizardlike ability to understand people.
My father and I always remained close and spoke to each other most weeks, even though we were at different milestones in our lives. While I was studying at the University of Iowa, my father sat me down and asked me about contributing to his venture. He asked, “What if we could couple your ability to develop software with my ability to analyze human behavior?” I was ambitious, hungry for fun coding work, and proceeded to embark on the most exciting journey of my life. Together, we built a software system that would produce reports about human behavior. This was a multiplying factor; soon we were able to reach more people and reveal a person’s potential through 3.5-inch floppy disks and twenty-four-page reports. My father and I built a company, TTI Success Insights, in 1984 in Iowa to do just that.
Over time, we escaped the frigid winters in the Midwest of the United States, relocated ourselves, our families, and our business to sunny and warm Scottsdale, Arizona. In the late nineties, we began using the web for distribution of our famed assessments. Today, we have a thriving business with distributors all over the world.
Up until now, you might have wondered why you are so different. Human behavior is, for the most part, complex and nebulous. In some cases, the people around us are idiotic. Understanding human behavior is a never-ending task, an endless pursuit to know the how, what, and why behind a person’s choices. It is both easy and dangerous to categorize someone who behaves differently from you as ignorant, wrong, or even thickheaded. Today’s world requires a more sophisticated understanding where you value a person for his or her strengths and weaknesses.
My father has since passed on. But the purpose we invoked, to reveal human potential, continues to live on. This book is written about the concepts my father applied in sales trainings and applies them to an even more complex situation—understanding the idiots who surround us all.
As you read, I think you will understand the worth of a Red, a Yellow, a Green, and a Blue. I hope you will pull away some practical advice in communicating effectively with each type. But the most important lesson that you can walk away with is that the idiots who surround you are, in fact, not idiots at all. Instead, they are individuals worthy of respect, understanding, and being valued.
Anyone can use the frameworks outlined in this book to get ahead in the game of life. And look at it this way: If you don’t understand and use the principles, you’ll continue to be surrounded by idiots. And nobody wants that.
—David Bonnstetter
Chief Executive Officer
TTI Success Insights
Introduction
The Man Who Was Surrounded by Idiots
I was in high school when I first noticed that I got along better with certain people rather than others. It was easy to talk to some of my friends; in any conversation, we always found the right words and everything just flowed smoothly. There were never any conflicts, and we liked one another. With other people, however, everything just went wrong. What I said fell on deaf ears, and I couldn’t understand why.
Why was speaking to some people so easy, while others were total blockheads? Since I was young, this certainly wasn’t something that kept me awake at night. However, I still remember puzzling over why some conversations flowed naturally, while others didn’t even start—no matter how I conducted myself. It was just incomprehensible. I began using different methods to test people. I tried to say the same things in similar contexts just to see what reaction I got. Sometimes it actually worked and an interesting discussion developed. On other occasions, nothing happened at all. People just stared at me as if I were from another planet, and sometimes it really felt that way.
When we’re young, we tend to think of things very simply. Because some people in my circle of friends reacted in a normal way that meant, of course, that they were automatically the good guys. And so I just assumed there was something wrong with the people who didn’t understand me. What other explanation could there possibly be? I was the same all the time! Certain people just had something wrong with them. So I simply began to avoid these weird, difficult people because I didn’t understand them. Call it the naïveté of youth if you will, but it did give rise to some amusing consequences. In later years, however, all of this changed.
Life went on with work, family, and career, and I continued to pigeonhole people into two groups—good and sensible people and all the rest, the people who didn’t seem to understand anything at all.
When I was twenty-five years old, I met with a man who was self-employed. Now in his sixties, Sture had founded his own business and built it up for many years. I was given the task of interviewing him just before a new project was to be implemented. We started talking about how things were functioning in his organization. One of the very first comments Sture made was that he was surrounded by idiots. I remember laughing at the time because I thought it was a joke. But he truly meant what he said. His face turned crimson as he explained to me that the people working in Department A were complete idiots, every single one of them. In Department B you found only fools who understood nothing at all. And he hadn’t even come to Department C yet! They were the worst of all! They were so weird that Sture couldn’t fathom how they even made it to w
ork in the mornings.
The more I listened to him, the more I realized that there was something very odd about this story. I asked him if he really believed that he was surrounded by idiots. He glared at me and explained that very few of his employees were worth having.
Sture had no issue letting his employees know how he felt. He didn’t hesitate in the least to call anyone an idiot in front of the whole company. This meant that his employees learned to avoid him. No one dared to have one-to-one meetings with him; he never got to hear bad news because he would often shoot the messenger. At one of the offices, a warning light had even been mounted at the entrance to the building. Discreetly placed above the reception desk, the light went red when he was there and turned green when he was away.
Everyone knew about this. Not only staff but even clients would automatically cast a nervous glance at the light to find out what awaited them when they stepped over the threshold. If the light was red, some people would simply turn back at the door, deciding to come back at a more opportune time.
As we all know, when you’re young you are full of great ideas. So I asked the only question I could think of: “Who hired all these idiots?” I knew, of course, that he had hired most of them. What was worse was that Sture understood exactly what I had implied. What I implicitly asked was: Who is actually the idiot here?
Sture threw me out. Later on, I was told that what he really wanted to do was fetch a shotgun and shoot me.
This incident got me thinking. Here was a man who would soon retire. He was obviously a proficient entrepreneur, highly respected for his sound knowledge of his particular line of business. But he couldn’t handle people. He didn’t understand the most critical, complicated resource in an organization—the employees. And anyone he couldn’t understand was simply an idiot.
Since I was from outside the company, I could easily see how wrong his thinking was. Sture didn’t grasp that he always compared people to himself. His definition of idiocy was simply anyone who didn’t think or act like him. He used expressions that I also used to use about certain types of people: “arrogant windbags,” “red-tape jackasses,” “rude bastards,” and “tedious blockheads.” Although I never called people idiots, at least not so they could hear me, I had obvious problems with certain types of people.
It was an utterly appalling thought to have to go through life constantly thinking that I was surrounded by people who were impossible to work with. It would make my own potential in life so unbelievably limited.
I tried to see myself in the mirror. The decision was easy to make. I didn’t want to be like Sture. After a particularly toxic meeting with him and some of his unfortunate colleagues, I sat in the car with a lump in my stomach. The meeting had been a total disaster. Everyone was furious. There and then I decided to learn what is probably the most important knowledge of all—how people function. I would be encountering people for the rest of my life, no matter what my profession was, and it was easy to see that I would benefit by being able to understand them.
I immediately began to study how to understand the people who initially seem so difficult. Why are some people silent, why do others never stop talking, why do some people always tell the truth while others never do? Why do some of my colleagues always arrive on time, while others rarely manage to? And even why did I like some people more than others? The insights I gained were fascinating, and I’ve never been the same since I began this journey. The knowledge I acquired has changed me as a person, as a friend, as a colleague, as a son, as a husband, and as the father of my children.
This book is about what is perhaps the world’s most widely used method to describe the differences in human communication. This method is called the DISA—an acronym that stands for Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Analytic ability—system. These four terms are the primary behavior types, which describe how people sees themselves in relationship to their environment. Each of these behavior types is associated with a color—Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue. This system is also commonly called the DISC system, where the final letter of the acronym stands for Compliance instead of Analytic ability. I have used variations of this tool for over twenty years with excellent results.
But how do you become really, truly proficient at handling different types of people? There are, of course, various methods. The most common method is to research the matter and learn the basics. But learning the theoretical part doesn’t make you a world-class communicator. It’s only when you begin using this knowledge that you can develop real and functioning competence in the field. Just like learning to ride a bike—you have get on the bike first. Only then do you realize what you need to do.
Since I began studying how people function and painstakingly strove to understand the differences in the way we communicate, I’ve never been the same. I’m not as categorical anymore, judging people just because they are not like me. For many years now, my patience with people who are the complete opposite of me has been far greater. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I never get involved in conflicts, just as I wouldn’t try to convince you that I never lie, but both these things happen very seldom now.
I have one thing to thank Sture for—he awakened my interest in the subject. Without him, this book would probably never have been written.
What can you do to increase your knowledge about how people relate and communicate? A good start may be to keep reading this book—the whole book, not just the first three chapters. With a little luck, in a few minutes you can begin the same journey I began twenty years ago. I promise you will not regret it.
One thing to note: To simplify reading this book, I have chosen to use “him” and “he” consistently when I refer to examples not associated with any specific person. I know that you have enough imagination to insert a “her” or “she” in your thoughts where this may be appropriate
1
Communication Happens on the Listener’s Terms
Does that sound strange? Let me explain. Everything you say to a person is filtered through his frames of reference, biases, and preconceived ideas. What remains is ultimately the message that he understands. For many different reasons, he can interpret what you want to convey in a totally different way than you intended. What is actually understood will, naturally, vary depending on who you are speaking to, but it is very rare that the entire message gets through exactly as you conceived it in your mind.
It may feel depressing knowing that you have so little control over what your listener understands. No matter how much sense you would like to knock into the other person’s head, there’s not that much you can do about it. This is one of the many challenges of communication. You simply can’t change how the listener functions. However, most people are aware of and sensitive to how they want to be treated. By adjusting yourself to how other people want to be treated, you become more effective in your communication.
Why Is This So Important?
You help other people understand you by creating a secure arena for communication—on their terms. Then the listener can use his energy to understand rather than to consciously or unconsciously react to your manner of communicating.
All of us need to develop our flexibility and so be able to vary our style of communication, adapting it when we speak to people who are different from us. Here we find another truth: No matter what method you choose to communicate with, as an individual, you will always be in the minority. No matter what kind of behavior you have, the majority of people around you will function differently from you. You can’t just base your method of communication on your own preferences. Flexibility and the ability to interpret other people’s needs is what characterizes a good communicator.
Knowing and understanding another person’s style of behavior and method of communication will result in more educated guesses about how a person may possibly react in various situations. This understanding will also dramatically increase your ability to get through to the person in question.
No System I
s Perfect
Let me be clear about one important point: This book doesn’t claim to be totally comprehensive with respect to how we, as people, communicate with each other. No book can do that, because the number of signals we constantly transmit to those around us wouldn’t fit into any book. Even if we could include body language, the differences between male and female dialogue, cultural differences, and all the other ways to define variations in communication, we wouldn’t be able to write everything down. We could add psychological aspects, graphology, age, and astrology and still not get a 100 percent complete picture.
According to the American Journal of Business Education (July/August 2013), more than 50 million assessments have been made using the DISA tool. And yet even with all this information communication remains a fascinating and puzzling topic. People are not Excel spreadsheets. We can’t calculate everything. We’re way too intricate to be described in full. Even the youngest child is far more intricate than anything that could be conveyed in a book. However, we can avoid the most blatant blunders by understanding the basics of human communication.
It’s Been Going On for a While
“We see what we do, but we do not see why we do what we do. Thus, we assess and appraise each other through what we see that we do.”
These words come from the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Different behavior patterns are what creates dynamism in our lives. When I refer to behavior patterns, I don’t just mean how a person acts in a single instance (his actions) but rather the whole set of attitudes, beliefs, and approaches that govern how a person acts. We can recognize ourselves in certain behavior patterns, but other forms of behavior we neither recognize nor understand. Besides, each of us acts differently in different situations, which can be a source of either joy or irritation for those around us.
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