Whole Brain Thinking

OK, time for training again, and another fluffy course to make up the training hours so that we can fulfill another fucking corporate KPI.

This course is not that meaningless but at the heart of it is some overlong exposition of some idea that’s taken too seriously, taken too far. This is “Whole Brain Thinking”. Basically what it means is that they simplistically take 4 modes of using your left and right brain. You have 4 quadrants, and the personality test divides how much you use these 4 modes of thinking. They are:

The blue portion (left brain, cerebral)
The scientist who is always analysing, weighing up stuff, the rational-logical part.

The green portion (left brain, limbic)
The studious, conscientious part, which organises information into very

The red portion (right brain, limbic)
The emotional touchy feely part

The yellow portion (right brain, cerebral)
The imaginative, intuition part, which does a lot of leaps of logic.

So it was fun when at first I told them that I was a maths major, and then they concluded that I was a blue portion. Well it turned out that I primarily use the yellow portion, and a bit of the blue portion (that makes me more intensely cerebral than limbic, which means I’m primarily a thinker not a doer.) Then I’m fairly strong with red, and a little limp when it comes to the green.

I’m not surprised. I know that I’m good at blue because of my talent in maths. I’m also good at red because I have artistic talent. And given that blue and red are in opposite quadrants, I’m probably also good at one other aspect, and that is yellow, because it allows a person to see the whole picture, and probably you need holistic thinking in order to be able to switch between opposite modes of thinking.

But I’m concerned about my lack of green. This probably means that I should never ever touch operations. It probably also means that I have a good chance at being a success in life at anything other than operations. This is very interesting. In fact it means that I’m also fairly suspect as an engineer but don’t tell anybody I said that.

I’m thinking about other people I have to work with. I know that Monty Burns is either OK with the green portion and hopeless with the blue (or was that the other way around?) And he’s definitely crap at the yellow portion as well.

It is estimated that 70% of people use 2 of the zones, 20% use 3 of the zones, 7% use only 1 zone (and people in this category have an unfortunate tendency to piss off all those around them). The lucky few, the 3% who use all 4 zones, usually end up as leaders of men. If I were slightly stronger with red, I would be able to count myself as 3 quadrants.

The instructor did have a few interesting stories to tell. She did say that Singapore is very good and pumping out blue people, and to a lesser extent, green people. Yellow people have it tough in Singapore. I suppose that it’s quite ironic that they call it yellow people since most East Asian cultures are generally unfriendly towards yellow people. This is one major reason why I do not entirely approve of my own culture - I don’t give a fuck about people who say I’m being disloyal, the bare fact is that I often have to choose between being true to myself and being true to my culture. There is always a conflict.

The irony is that in my formative years I was brought up in a place which is yellow friendly. Most of my education were in yellow friendly places. But NS and work were not yellow friendly.

I know that the nail that sticks out will be hammered down but this nail intends to fight back. What usually happens is that when people pick on me I roll with the punches a little while, be very quiet, and try to sniff out their weak points, and then if there’s a way I kick them around a little bit here and there. This is nothing personal but yellow people need a lot of free space so too bad for you if you’re in the way. I can’t really help it but yellow people are rabble rousers. There’s really no point being always submissive, it’s no way to live your life. You have a role to play in society and you just have to do what you have to do. And anyhow the point of being yellow is that you can always find a way out because yellow is also the colour of cunning.

There are other ways of doing things - I think about Gorbachev, who came up in a very repressive and conformist society, and he still very artfully tried to effect a revolution from within. If you study history he gets most of the credit for overthrowing the Soviet system. He’s a person who managed to be a rebel, and yet do it without pissing too many people off. (Yes, he pissed off a lot of people, but that was later, after the USSR collapsed.) But I don’t have as many skills as he does. And you know, at the end of the day it wasn’t a happy ending for him. It wasn’t entirely his fault but Russia became a much more fucked up place after the end of the USSR, the life expectancy dropped by 10 years because everybody was drinking themselves to death. Russia is now ruled by the mafia.

The methodology of using user evaluations to assess whether the trainer gets to continue teaching is inherently flawed because it tilts the balance towards fluffy pseudo-psychological feel-good bimbonic stuff, and people who run one-size-fits-all management programs which have dubious relevance to the organisation can get away with charging really profitable admission fees. I sometimes wonder: is it very much more expensive to get your own guys to run some training themselves?

We haven’t had training programs that address problems that are specific to our company. That will change in due course.

I suppose Singaporean companies are very paranoid that people will find out about their modus operandi, to the extent that I have heard someone fairly senior on my organisation decrying the need to have somebody build an information portal that will be used by both ourselves and our customers. He complained that other companies will just bare a shoulder or two while we will strip naked in front of them and dance around. Be that as it may, if you want external consultants to effect real change in your organisation, you have to take it all off so that he can impregnate you isn’t it?