Last week I was struck with the thought that whilst I am pretty good at doing the stuff I have to do for other people or by specific deadlines, I am pretty rubbish at making progress on things that I simply want to get done for the sake of it or that I have a more-or-less open-ended time structure for. Sometimes a work task will start off on a pretty much open-ended timeline and I make some progress but then a deadline appears, usually instigated by someone else, and I rapidly make progress to ensure that I deliver it on time. I wrote down a few words on this in my notebook around the idea that I tend to need ‘external accountability’ to push forwards on tasks, did a quick internet search for that pair of words and immediately stumbled on the framework of The Four Tendencies as outlined by US author Gretchen Rubin. I have come across this framework before not least when I read Rubin’s book ‘Better Than Before’ last year as it is covered briefly in that volume (I didn’t particularly like ‘Better Than Before’ and felt it was all a bit frothy and under-researched). It turned out that Rubin had now published another book called ‘The Four Tendencies’ expanding on the framework and, because it aligned with my thoughts at the moment, I thought it was probably one that I should give a try. At the time, I happened to be sitting in a cafe in a bookshop and a quick Google search revealed that there was one copy of the book on the shelves – from that point, the purchase was pretty much inevitable.
A week on I have finished reading ‘The Four Tendencies’. Overall, I think the general concept of the framework is interesting and somewhat thought-provoking. Basically the framework is a classic 2 x 2 matrix with four quadrants defined by whether an individual tends to meet or not meet external and internal expectations. The result is four ‘tendencies’ – the Upholder who meets external and internal expectations, the Obliger who meets external expectations but struggles with internal ones, the Questioner who readily meets internal expectations but fights against external ones and the Rebel who fights against both external and internal expectations. There is a short online quiz that can be used to determine your personal tendency which is supposed to be unchangeable. Even before taking the quiz I was pretty sure I was an Obliger and this is how it turned out. However, I was pretty much convinced that my wife would be an Upholder but she turned out to be the opposite – a Rebel. Both of my daughters came through as Questioners which was not too surprising. The book WAS interesting in terms of helping me to think about the underlying concept of the framework and, in particular, in considering how thinking about the tendencies of work colleagues would influence the way that they respond to instructions, requests for information etc. However, the more of the book I read, the more frustrated with it I became. Most of what Rubin writes is based on her own ‘research’ which essentially entails talking to people and receiving comments from them on her blog and podcast and the book is written utilising lots of example quotes to support the ideas being discussed. But with this approach there is an almost inevitable feeling that there is a lot of cherry picking going on and that examples are chosen to make a desired point when perfectly sensible counter-examples can readily be imagined. Also, the deeper into things I got the more I felt that some of the writing was contradictory and muddled. For example, Rebels are portrayed as more-or-less actively seeking to, and enjoying, pushing back at expectations but I think there must be many ‘rebels’ who don’t actively want to not meet expectations – they just find that they struggle to. In fairness, Rubin does highlight that other factors such as personality traits, mindsets etc sit across the tendencies framework but, to me, this felt like saying that everything in the book could be wrong or could be hugely influenced by other factors not considered.
As an Obliger (supposedly), the secret to meeting internal expectations better is apparently to seek external accountability. This kind of rings true for me, but I am pretty sure that this is only a small part of the solution.
After I read the book I took the quiz again and came out as a Questioner. To be honest I think you could probably get whatever tendency you wanted to get with very small tweaks in the responses given. After all, the quiz is not a properly constructed research tool that has been validated in any way (one of the questions isn’t even worded in a way that makes full sense).
In summary, I like the basic idea of the four tendencies and it is an interesting aspect of personal operation to think about for a while. It just doesn’t have enough meat to it to stretched out to a full book.
Tim O'Hare 