Pink and Grey

Recently, a contact on the Gathering of Eagles list posted a link to the forum for an article called "Tribes", by a guy called Bill Whittle. I started reading, and then went on to his other articles... and then it was Tuesday. I remember a sort of a groundswell somewhere in the middle where I took time out to read Harry Potter. Then I went back to Whittle's blog. It was awesome.

Here's a link to the article: http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000129.html

Now, for those of you who returned here after reading it, all I can say is thank you, and I'll do my best not to let you down. My own reaction-- after I removed my lower jaw from the keyboard, bowed repeatedly, and chanted "eeny oony wanah!"-- was to think, damn, if I had a little more confidence and a little less restraint...

They say the birthing process isn't pretty. I'll let you be the judge of that at the end of this article.

In the interests of honesty, if not dignity, I'll begin by wiping the egg off my face in full view of my reading audience. I failed my "detect obvious" check the first five or so times I read that article. You see, when Whittle divides the world into the Pink and Grey tribes, he's setting them up as the Tribe of Feeling Good vs. the Tribe of Getting Results-- not as the Tribe of Emotion vs. the Tribe of Logic. And this is a very important distinction, because it illustrates precisely why I can hear and even resonate with that sort of comparison from Bill Whittle when I can't stand it on a Myers-Briggs test.

I profiled incorrectly, or at least incongruently, on a Myers-Briggs test once, and that wasn't pretty either. I took a modified version of it as part of a workshop a church was offering; we were supposed to divide up by type and do the same exercise one of four ways depending on which type we were. It was an interesting exercise, and I might have just smiled and nodded and written it off as a mild diversion-- except that I got a Xerox of part of the book the organizers were using to run the workshop, and read it on the way home. That was when I found out that the sense of duty and the attention to detail that had landed me in Group C, had kept me solidly out of Group B, where all the creative people in the class were doing all the seeking that had brought me to the workshop in the first place.

I thought I'd been robbed. More to the point, I thought it was my fault. I reacted accordingly. Explosively, but accordingly. The fallout took years to clear.

Proponents of the M-B test will tell you, with a sort of supercilious certainty that you can hear even in the printed version, that it's extremely rare for anyone to profile incorrectly. You are what you are. All I have to say to them is, next time I have to move, you can carry all the boxes full of journaling and writing and exploration and half-finished novels and burning unanswered questions. You do have a dolly cart, I hope?

Actually, that's not quite true. Something else I have to say to them is, quit making stupid assumptions. Just because I have a well-developed sense of duty and tend to serve as emergency back-up memory for most of my friends and family does not mean that I'll best serve the world as an anonymous fact-checker, perfectly content to do the small things quietly in return for absolute certainty of my place in the bureaucratic hierarchy. With the fire in my blood? Are you kidding me?

(Note to Rich and Denise: stop laughing.)


Of course, that's my reaction now-- almost five years later, after my subconscious has had a chance to turn the sour grape juice into something I can drink with a straight face. Yes, I was going down a dark and dangerous path trying to micromanage my way through some really difficult situations, and no, that wasn't particularly good for my creative side. But spending all my time on internal affairs wasn't helping me one bit to get out of those rotten situations, either. Glaringly Obvious Advice of the Day: if you want to reach the stars, you need both the fire and the rocket.

Re-enter Bill Whittle-- one of the few people who can make the Grey tribe sound like people and not like functionaries; one of the few who understands that creativity doesn't belong exclusively to the Pink tribe, and that it can be united with practicality in one package to produce spectacular results. Let me be clear-- probably a third of my wardrobe falls somewhere on the spectrum between "raspberry" and "radioactive azalea", but don't let the t-shirt fool you. I'm not that interested in greater self-awareness or finding validation for my story; I'm interested in solving the doggone problem.

It's not about being special because of what we know. It's about being effective because of what we can do.