This is my surrounded by idiots criticism, written by someone who has read the book twice and still hands it to people. It gets three things wrong. It sells a training-room model as a personality test, it invites you to label people who cannot answer back, and it rests on workshop experience rather than published research. I still recommend it. The three problems are real, and none of them stopped the book from giving me a vocabulary that a research paper never would.
The pop-psychology problem
The four colours are a simplified DISC, and DISC does not hold up under testing. Wikipedia’s entry describes DISC assessments as pseudoscientific, with validity that has not been demonstrated. A 2013 German review of one DISC instrument, Persolog, found it largely met reliability standards and did not meet validity standards at all. A 2003 study in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology found the four dimensions were not independent and fitted better as combinations of the Big Five traits.
None of that is in the book in any form a reader can check. The authority behind the method is twenty-five years of seminars, which is what the publisher’s author note cites. That is a real source of insight about people and a weak source of proof about them, and the book does not always keep the difference visible.
The labelling problem
The bigger risk is what happens after you finish the book. You get a label for every person you find annoying, and the label explains all of their behaviour, which is exactly what makes it useless. A model that explains everything you see predicts nothing you can test.
I did this with a colleague I decided was yellow. His lateness became a yellow thing, his missed follow-ups became a yellow thing, and by the third month I had stopped noticing the weeks when he was the most reliable person in the room. The label was doing the looking for me.
The fix is a question I now ask about every guess. What would I see this week that would prove me wrong? If nothing could, I am not reading a person, I am defending a story about them.
The missing research base
Swedish reviewers were blunt about this long before the English edition arrived. Mattias Lundberg, an associate professor of psychology at Umeå University, told Sydsvenskan in January 2019 that the book was nonsense, in a piece whose headline used the same word. In the same month, the Swedish Skeptics association, Vetenskap och Folkbildning, gave Erikson its ironic Bewilderer of the Year award for 2018, listing the book as teaching people to divide others into four types on a theory with no scientific support.
That is a hard verdict from people who test claims for a living. It is also a verdict about the theory rather than the reader. The colour framework can still help you write a clearer email to a busy person, and the two facts do not cancel each other.
What it does well
- It moves the question from the other person’s character to your own delivery, which is the only part you control.
- It gives four names and four formats, which is enough for a team to have a shared word for something they already felt.
- It is short and readable. The English edition runs 304 pages and most readers finish it in a weekend.
- The title is honest about the experience it describes, the meeting where nobody understood you, and Erikson has said plainly that he is not calling anyone an idiot.
Why I still recommend it
I recommend it with two rules attached. First, use a colour as a question and never as a conclusion. Blue is a hypothesis about how someone wants a message, and the next meeting is allowed to overrule it. Second, never apply the model to someone who cannot answer back. Colouring a report in an appraisal, or a candidate in an interview, turns a communication aid into a decision that the person has no way to challenge.
The strongest argument for the book is a practical one. In an Indian office you will meet the four patterns in a single morning, and most people have no shared language for why the same message lands differently on two desks. The book supplies that language in a weekend. The research will not, and the research also will not tell you what to write in the first line of the email.
Read it as a set of working guesses and it earns its place. Read it as a test you passed and it will cost you a colleague. My summary of the book keeps that line visible, the four colours page carries the same caveat in more detail, and the comparison with Surrounded by Psychopaths is where the model gets stretched furthest.
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