Sunday 16 October 2022

Why Marriage Is Hard Work - Two Psychometric Models Provide An Answer

This insight crept up on me rather gradually. There is a fundamental tension that is inherent in the necessary ingredients of a successful marriage, and it takes conscious effort to overcome this tension.

Two psychometric models explain this tension well, and their creators are Donald O. Clifton and William Edward "Ned" Herrmann. I learnt about both of these models as a result of short courses that I had the privilege to be nominated for during my career. I probably wouldn't have come across them otherwise.

1. "Strengths-Based Psychology" by Donald O. Clifton

The testing tool invented by Donald Clifton has been known by several names - The Gallup Test, StrengthsFinder, Gallup Strengths Assessment and Clifton Strengths Test.

It describes 34 themes that make up a person's personality.

  1. Achiever - a constant need for achievement
  2. Activator - impatience for action
  3. Adaptability- ability to respond to the demands of the moment
  4. Analytical - objective and data-driven
  5. Arranger - ability to manage all the variables in a complex situation to produce the most productive configuration
  6. Belief - possessing enduring core values
  7. Command - ability to take charge
  8. Communication - ability to make people listen to you
  9. Competition - the desire to win
  10. Connectedness - awareness of the interconnectedness of all beings, and the resulting sense of responsibility
  11. Consistency - preference for balance, fairness, predictability
  12. Context - orientedness due to an ability to join the dots
  13. Deliberative - risk-aware and careful
  14. Developer - ability to see potential in everyone
  15. Discipline - dealing with an unpredictable world through structure that you impose
  16. Empathy - seeing the world through the eyes of others
  17. Focus - having a clear destination
  18. Futuristic - inspiration from what can be
  19. Harmony - ability to find common ground and reduce conflict
  20. Ideation - the ability to find new perspectives to explain phenomena and address challenges
  21. Includer - accepting of all, non-judgemental
  22. Individualisation - ability to draw out the best in each person
  23. Input - tendency to collect facts and objects in the hope that they will one day prove useful
  24. Intellection - introspective, fond of thinking
  25. Learner - excited by new knowledge
  26. Maximiser - in constant quest of excellence
  27. Positivity - contagious enthusiasm
  28. Relator - trusting, sharing, risk-taking in vulnerability
  29. Responsibility - taking ownership of tasks
  30. Restorative - energized by challenge, finds solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems
  31. Self-Assurance - confidence not only in one's abilities but also in one's judgement, natural acceptance of accountability
  32. Significance - need to stand out, to be recognised, a striving to be exceptional
  33. Strategic - ability to see patterns where others see complexity, to see around the next corner, to make selections that work
  34. WOO - Winning Others Over, can break the ice, strike up conversations with strangers and making connections

I learnt about the Strengths-based model in the context of organisational team-building. I learnt to accept that people weren't all the same, that they had different strengths, and that rather than try to fix weaknesses in their people, the aim of a manager should be to put together teams of people with complementary strengths, so that the team as a whole could deliver effectively on all its tasks.

This was a rather refreshing approach to management. I had heard of the approach of "playing to one's strengths" in the context of individual self-development, but I was hearing it for the first time in the context of team-building. Organisations need not worry too much about deficiencies in their people. They just have to make sure that their teams as a whole are able to make up for the deficiencies of the individuals they're comprised of.

For example, I worked in the IT Architecture division of several companies, and our job was to "guide investment and design decisions around technology". Not everyone in our team had identical strengths. For example, some were deep thinkers who could come up with innovative models, but who lacked the ability to communicate these ideas effectively and convince other people. There were other people in the team, though, who may not have had the same ability to create models, but who could create effective visualisations of these models such that they were instantly understandable to decision-makers. Together, these two groups of very different people were effective in creating and communicating innovative solutions to the rest of the organisation. That was a practical example to me of complementary skills being effective in an organisational context.

2. The "Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument" by William Herrmann

To my mind, the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) is a far more insightful and useful model than the two other models commonly used by organisations - Myers-Briggs Personality Types and the DISC Profile. Unfortunately, this excellent test is not available free of charge, and it is usually only administered through organisational sponsorship.

HBDI identifies four unique thinking styles that people tend to use in various combinations. Some people have a single, dominant thinking style. Others have a combination of two, three or all four, with each style having a certain "weight" relative to the other three.

Each thinking style is given a colour code.

  • Blue - Logical, Analytical, Fact-based, Quantitative
  • Yellow - Holistic, Intuitive, Integrating, Synthesising
  • Red - Interpersonal, Feeling-based, Kinesthetic, Emotional
  • Green - Organised, Sequential, Detailed, Risk-aware

These thinking styles are then mapped to the four quadrants of a circle, with blue on the top left, yellow on the top right, red on the bottom right, and green on the bottom left.

Thus, blue and red are in opposing quadrants, just as yellow and green are in opposing quadrants. These pairs of thinking styles are completely "opposite" to one another.

More interesting are the adjacent thinking styles. They have certain common traits. The reason is that the four directions of the circle represent certain modes of thinking.

  • Left - The "left brain", realistic and commonsensical
  • Right - The "right brain", idealistic and intuitive
  • Top - the "cerebral" brain, cognitive and pragmatic
  • Bottom - the "limbic" brain, visceral and instinctual

Adjacent colours therefore have a certain affinity.

  • Blue and Yellow are both cerebral rather than limbic. They think cognitively about things rather than react viscerally.
  • Yellow and Red are both right-brained. They rely on feeling and intuition rather than pure logic.
  • Red and Green are both limbic rather than cerebral. They have instinctive reactions to situations.
  • Green and Blue are both left-brained. They are grounded and realistic.

One of the core themes in a course on HBDI (after all participants have been tested and assessed as to which quadrant(s) they belong to) is the challenge of communication. In an organisation, people need to communicate with others, explain their perspectives on situations, negotiate for resources, convince decision-makers in favour of one or another option, etc. When people have very different thinking styles, they can often talk past one another instead of connecting. This is because people are used to expressing ideas from their own perspective, and this perspective may make little sense to a person with a very different thinking style, who is used to seeing things in a very different way.

Effective communication requires a knowledge of the other person's thinking style, and a formulation of one's argument in terms the other person can naturally understand.

Communication between people with thinking styles in adjacent quadrants is relatively easier than communication between people in opposite quadrants. They can rely on certain common thinking modes to find common ground. It is a far more difficult task for people in opposite quadrants to be able to communicate meaningfully.

It is common for people in the Blue quadrant to believe that they are "superior" thinkers, but the HBDI consultants take great pains to emphasise that this is not so. None of these four thinking styles is "superior" to any other. Each has its own strengths. It is necessary for people to treat their colleagues with respect, regardless of what their predominant thinking style is, and to make honest efforts to communicate with them in a way the other person can understand.

Marriage and the Confluence of the two Models

It struck me somewhere along the journey of my own marriage that the notions of complementary strengths and thinking styles were both hugely relevant to the way my wife and I interpreted life events and responded to them. We have had arguments and conflicts, and we have also had successes and triumphs. This is the distillation of my thoughts.

Marriage is fundamentally teamwork. Two individuals embark on a lifelong project together, and they deal with a multitude of challenges as they go along, with specific tasks and deliverables expected at various life stages. Building meaningful careers, balancing life and work, raising children, buying a home, investing for retirement, dealing with the pressures of extended family, dealing with unexpected events like illnesses, job stress, financial hardship, etc., are part of the never-ending sequence of life events that a couple must confront and overcome together.

It is unrealistic to expect that each of the individuals in a marriage is a perfectly balanced individual with all the strengths required to deal with life's vicissitudes. The most pragmatic solution is therefore for the couple to have complementary strengths, so that between the two of them, they have the ability to deal with a greater proportion of challenges than either of them could alone.

However, complementary strengths come with their own inherent problem, and this is the tension I referred to earlier. Strengths are related to thinking styles, and complementary strengths are likely to be related to thinking styles in opposite quadrants. As we know, communication is difficult between people with different thinking styles, because they see situations very differently, and find it hard to understand or convince the other of their respective points of view.

It may seem ideal for a couple to have identical thinking styles. They can then understand each other most naturally, and the possibility of conflict between them may seem low. But two people who think alike are likely to share the same blind spots. Over the long haul, as they face a multitude of different life challenges, it is possible that they may make some costly mistakes because in their case, two heads are no better than one. Mistakes and failures can then introduce a different set of stresses into the marriage.

It may seem depressing to conclude that there is no ideal marriage, after all. A couple needs to have complementary strengths to be able to negotiate the gamut of life's challenges successfully over the long haul, yet complementary strengths imply different thinking styles, which make communication a challenge.

It needn't be depressing at all, though! The flip side of the coin is that a couple with mutual respect and trust, who put in the effort to understand each other's thinking styles, and who consciously learn to communicate in a way that the other can understand, can get the best of both worlds. They can function effectively as a team, and kick goal after goal.

[If you liked this post, check out a related one - "An Absurd Question, A Cop-Out Answer - Review Of Movie "What's Love Got To Do With It?""