The fifth “I” (Insight) concerns what we learn from taking the Initiative and seeing what happens. This is where the introverted attitude is most needed. As two 20th-century thought leaders, John Dewey (1929) and Kurt Lewin (Marrow, 1969) both noted, we can often learn by doing. This is sometimes identified as a melding of mind and heart. The “doing” (heart) is aligned with an extraverted attitude, while the “learning” (mind) is aligned with an introverted attitude. Both Dewey and Lewin suggested that we often gain useful knowledge about a system only when we give it a “kick” (try to change it). This is a process sometimes called “action science” (Argyris, 1985) or “action learning” (Revans, 2017). It is closely associated with Donald Schön’s (Schön, 1983) process of “reflective practice” and, more recently, David Cooperrider’s model of “appreciative inquiry” (Cooperider and Whitney, 2005). We learn by not avoiding making mistakes (which is inevitable in our VUCA-plus world), but by learning from these mistakes – so that we don’t keep repeating them. We learn by appreciating the lessons embedded in any actions we take—whether successful or unsuccessful.
This means that we must build in tight feedback systems (program evaluation tools and processes) when moving forward with an idea. Our extraverted and introverted Golden Yellows can help create a system that yields valid and useful information, while our extraverted Azure Blues can identify the criteria for determining if we have been successful (with the Golden Yellows ensuring that the criteria are measurable or at least observable). The introverted Ruby Reds can ensure that this process of review is well organized and moving forward so that we can soon return to the field of action and can return, if necessary (which is often the case), to this fifth domain of Insight, for further program evaluation, review, and adjustment.
The Blending of Interpersonal Preferences
While those members of a team with an extraverted Rainbow preference bring together all three of the primary preferences, there are combinations of two (rather than all three) preferences that yield interesting and important variations to the primary preferences. We have once again borrowed from the color spectrum in identifying and describing each of these blends. Orange is made up of red and yellow. Green is produced by combining yellow and blue. When red and blue are combined, purple is produced. We will briefly describe each of these three blends and even suggest ways in which there are slight variations on a specific blend depending on the proportion of each color (preference) in this blend. We begin with Tangy Orange. We will also relate these preferences, as we did in the previous essay, to the Enneagram, an ancient personality typology (Palmer, 1991), and to the Myers-Briggs’ (Briggs-Myers and Myers, 1995) MBTI version of the Jungian personality typology (Jung, 1971)
Tangy Orange: Purposeful Thought and Action
As a combination of Ruby Red and Golden Yellow, the Tangy Orange interpersonal preference and the Purposeful Tangy Orange orientation to the world of organizational life is focused on moving to action (Ruby Red) in a thoughtful, data-driven (Golden Yellow) manner. It is a “tangy” orientation because it can be a bit pungent and bitter, given the challenge of engaging action in the midst of a world that is often volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, turbulent, and contradictory (VUCA-Plus) (Bergquist, 2026).
