Our pedagogy
As lecturers, we need to simplify and paint with broad strokes. Our task is often to make an audience laugh and be entertained for an hour or two. But for you as a customer, it is also important that we convey knowledge, create new insights and encourage reflection. To gain continued trust, we need to deliver value and, in the long run, a result.
We use and refer to many different scientific theories related to motivation, team work and teamwork in our lectures. To easily highlight our differences as people, we also use a pedagogical model that is often criticized by psychologists, namely colors. We want to emphasize that we do not use the DISC model, nor do we divide people into categories or claim that someone is always “like” a certain way. Our task when we use colors as a pedagogical model is to increase understanding that people have the right to be different and that we should not judge someone “who is not like me”. We want to get people to meet with respect and trust and show that we can lift each other up and become stronger together if we get to know each other’s strengths better.
Who is helped by the criticism?
Every now and then a debate flares up in Sweden, something we know of rarely in the same way in any other country, about whether certain educational models that describe human differences are appropriate. Often it is journalists who raise the subject and refer to psychologists in their review. It can also be psychologists who themselves write debate articles on the subject or speak out on social media. Criticism is directed at popular lecturers or authors who use one of these educational models, and those who criticize are often psychologists who themselves lecture and write books. We have often asked ourselves: Who is helped by the criticism?
It may be good to know that the DISC model, so criticized by psychologists, is validated by Den Norske Veritas (DNV), which the Swedish Foundation for Applied Psychology uses to review this type of tool. We ourselves previously used a DISC-like tool called Insights Discovery, which we no longer do because the supplier has chosen not to maintain the previous DNV validation.
Please watch the clip below from the documentary True Story about Avicii where Tim Bergling describes how he came to the realization that he is an introvert with the help of a book written by Carl Jung. He continues: " I have always felt judged for not being an extrovert". "It's not worse to be an introvert... I understood that I shouldn't care what other people think" . He concludes: "Carl Jung, what a fucking king" .
There are many psychologists today who dismiss Carl Jung as “humbug and nonsense”. In times of increasing mental illness, we do not believe that it is the right way to judge models and tools that help people both privately and professionally based on sweeping accusations of lack of scientific rigor. The question remains: Who is helped by the criticism?