Blue sky Red Earth: which are you? Mindex shows how your thinking style can help you get your ideas across better, understand others, and have more influence

T+D, March, 2003 by Karl G. Albrecht

By all indications,

President Lyndon Johnson's cognitive style--his characteristic way of processing ideas--was quite different from that of Robert S. McNamara, his secretary of defense. And both of those men apparently arranged their mental furniture very differently from how General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff did. Johnson's other advisors, such as McGeorge Bundy, had their own characteristic processing patterns. Those differences in thought process--largely unconscious and unrecognized--may have had more to do with the outcome of America's adventure in Vietnam than politics, military strategy; or the dogged determination of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

Johnson, a Red Earth thinker (a category I'll define shortly), had a primary thinking pattern that was right-brained and concrete, or "intuitive," as some people like to oversimplify it. Not a great fan of details, facts and figures, or theoretical propositions, Johnson was a leader who trusted his visceral signals. McNamara, in sharp contrast, was a Blue Sky thinker, meaning that his mental home base was left-brained and abstract--that of an egghead, architect, organizer, planner. He was widely perceived as cerebral, analytical, emotionally detached, and highly structured in his thought processes.

Wheeler, the military man, was almost certainly a Blue Earth, or left-brained and concrete processor. He was a leader who valued decisive actions and concrete results, backed by logical arguments. Bundy, perhaps less distinctive in his mental style, was probably a Red Sky; a right-brained and abstract thinker who valued the grand design and conceptual-hypothetical reflection.

Now, imagine putting all four of those thinkers in the same room and asking them to decide these questions: Can the war in Vietnam be won? Should the American government continue to pursue the conflict, considering the rising casualties, costs, and bitter domestic opposition? One can imagine the difficulty in getting four or more leaders with such different thinking styles to achieve a consensus on that complex issue. Worse, according to McNamara's memoir In Retrospect, those four men never once got together in the same room at the same time to deal comprehensively with the decision. Johnson's radial management style--one issue, one person, one conversation--meant that he was always reacting to the viewpoint of whoever was the last person in his office. McNamara and Wheeler, with different thinking styles, had a strained relationship. Each of them presented Johnson with a different frame of reference, articulated in a different way. Similar differences among Johnson's other advisors worked against the develop ment of any durable consensus.

How we think

For more than 20 years, I've been studying the minds of leaders and a lot of other people. I've sought to understand how they absorb information, what they accept and what they reject, how they form the most important concepts that drive their behavior, how they deal with ambiguity and complexity, the reach of their imagination, how they decide, how they change their minds, and what it takes to persuade them. From measuring and studying thousands of profiles, I've concluded that their thought patterns, and differences in patterns, tell us more about human behavior than virtually any other assessment mechanisms we've developed.

I've discovered, for example, that most of the differences we've been taught to label as "personality conflicts" are actually differences in the way people construct their mental worlds. I've learned that there is such a thing as communication stress, which is the anxiety--sometimes leading to anger and even violence--people feel when they cannot make themselves understood with people who have different processing styles. I've learned that there are many ways of knowing and that each of them deserves respect for its unique value.

I've also learned that it's possible to estimate a person's thinking style in the course of a five-minute conversation, and how to look for other cues and dues that can serve to refine that estimation. And, most important, I've learned the value of getting outside the box of my own preferred thinking style and expressing ideas in ways that people with other styles can process more readily.

Let's sort out the Reds and Blues, Earths and Skies, and see how thinking styles can be defined, analyzed, and put to practical use. Your thinking style is your characteristic way of processing ideas, of making meaning out of your experience. It's the way you take in information, learn, organize your thoughts, form your views and opinions, apply your values, solve problems, make decisions, buy; sell, persuade, lead, manage, plan, and express yourself to others.

Two dimensions of cognition

Though our thinking styles involve a variety of different dimensions, two key variables can serve as a foundation for describing and analyzing our primary thought patterns.

One dimension describes the structure of thought--left-brained versus right-brained. The other dimension describes the content of thought--concrete experience versus abstract conceptualization. Those two dimensions, joined together, give us four distinct combinations, as well as variations between the extremes. Other kinds of preferences can modulate the effects of the four basic styles or patterns.