What is a Chromatype?

A Chromatype is not just a personality type. It is an entire dynamical system for navigating your surroundings.

A Chromatype is not just a personality type. It is an entire dynamical system for navigating your surroundings, conflicts, and problems.

When you know your Chromatype, you can understand your common patterns of conflict resolution and how they compare with other people’s patterns of conflict resolution. You can understand what “rules you are following” and how these rules of self-constraint and action may not be the same rules that other people are following. If you have aspirations to be a different type, you can understand what trade-offs they are making, so you can fully embody the other system.

This means that you can notice with more precision what other people are doing, and what you are doing. You can speak in their language, or notice what about your style or language would not make sense to another person.

Chromatypes are useful in many different contexts, but they can be uniquely useful in situations in which you are having a conflict with a friend, coworker, or loved one—situations in which disputes cannot be reduced to having conflicting interests (you already know you care about each other and have similar interests) or differences in values (you had already done various values-based checks when deciding to trust each other and becoming friends.)

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There are five Chromatypes:

Blue, White, Green, Red, and Black.

Each of these has its own way of handling intensity and its own way of dealing with risk.

You are not “born” with a Chromatype—rather, you get used to using a Chromatype. As you go around the world, you find that some strategies make sense with your personality, your family dynamics, your work dynamics, and even your appearance and mating preferences. As you use a strategy, you get better at it and keep using it.

Often, so long as things are going smoothly, one does not need to change their strategy. However if one is stuck, then learning about the other Chromatypes becomes very useful, because then you have more tools for surmounting unusual problems.

The system is simple enough—there are only five Chromatypes—five colors. Complexity enters the system in that each of the colors has many characteristics that it can be analyzed on. Imagine different knobs on a PID controller for different settings. For each Chromatype, the different knobs have different minimums and maximums, and different conditions under which they are used.

Each of the types can be competent, passionate, diligent, fast, slow, selfish, hateful, disciplined, paranoid, confused, and messy. “Having passion” or “Being smart” are not the axes on which these Chromatypes differ from each other.

However, it is hard to have a handle on the details of the Chromatypes without general impressions. We will dive into each Chromatype and how it mechanistically relates two important dimensions—speed and debt—but before that I will give an impressionistic mindfeel of each of the Chromatypes using words you may have associations with. (You are already likely to have implicit associations with the colors as colors.)

Blue - Improving the human condition with technology. Useful tools. Medicine. Fixing things. Understanding how things work.

White - Guarding each other from excessive cruelty. Inspirational books. Libraries. Staircases set to industry safety standards. Useful social networks.

Green - Accepting who you are. Loving where you came from and your ancestors. Understanding the strength of rivers, mountains and respecting limitations.

Red - Dancing, fighting, living in the moment, making the most of what you have, not letting things go to waste. Full intensity.

Black - Unflinching about trade-offs and opportunity cost. Honest about reality and mortality.

I intentionally kept descriptions short, and hard to compare with each other. (Their opaqueness and lack of obvious interoperability is why natural conflict occurs.)

You may start having ideas of potential simplifications pop into your head—“Ok, blue is rational, red is passionate, white is nice, black is morbid, green is nature”—but it is not quite like this. Each of them can be each of these things.

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Let’s look at two characteristic and how they relate to each other—speed and debt, so that you have an impression of the dynamics inside each Chromatype for the rest of the post. These are the preferences for each Chromatype, but that does not mean that each type does not have its own special ways of getting itself into trouble.

I use “debt” to mean something beyond monetary obligations. I include social debts (favors owed, promises made), health debts (pushing your body beyond sustainable limits), energetic debts (unexplained “things that happened” and depletion of hopes), technical debts (shortcuts taken), and emotional debts (unprocessed feelings).

Blue - Blue likes to be quick. Because Blue likes to be quick, Blue does not like to take on debts. A debt is a weight, and weight hinders speed. Blue would rather either settle debts quickly, or forget about them, or settle the debts quickly in order to forget about them. Blue values knowledge and fast learning. Move fast and break things could be a Blue slogan (a lot of the tech industry is blue.) Blue wants to maintain forward momentum, and maintain maximum flexibility to work on the next thing that is blocking its way. With forward momentum, unblocked agency, and speed to work and think, Blue can build on top of the previous block and create progress. Blue can be slow to change when it is in a disintegrated form, when it has gotten itself in a situation in which it has neglected too many debts, has not actually paid debts off, or failed to understand the contingencies that make it quick.

White - White cares about states being remembered. It cares less about speed for its own sake, and is happy to trade speed for established historical memory—“taking the time now to save time later.” White is fine taking on debts if there is a reasonable plan to pay them off and cares about consistent and predictable movement of attaining debts and paying them off. When healthy, White can be seen as an effective manager or bureaucracy—distributing goods to participating parties steadily and not leaving people behind. In its disintegrated form, white can demand too much from individuals for the sake of the whole—demanding too much from individuals for the sake of maintaining collective state stability.

Green - Depending on the situation, of all the Chromatypes, Green can be the slowest or the fastest. Green often does not consider itself taking on substantial debt, because Green is focused on balance as a general way of navigating. This means that cumulatively, over time, if Green is healthy, Green can react very well and very fast on instinct, as if it is not reacting at all, rather is being, and create healthy cascading effects seemingly without much cost or disturbance to itself. When disintegrated, Green can be very slow-to-change to a new environment—stubborn, enmeshed where it is and not letting itself be pushed over.

Red - Of all the Chromatypes, Red is the one most willing to take on debt for something very important with a plan that it would find a way to pay it off, even if it does not have a plan yet. Red is willing to take on debt for immediate speed. This is because if there is an option to create a better local world state, right now, through optimized action, Red is willing to take on personal damage to perform the optimized action. Red can be very fast, reacting with borrowed energy, and seemingly leveraging all past expertise into one moment. However, Red then is likely to need to rest from the intensity, slow down to figure out how to pay off its debts, and then in states of non-urgency, gain expertise for the next moment of urgency.

Black - Black is opportunistic, holding back when conditions are not in its favor, and acting on opportunity when opportunity comes knocking. Black takes for granted that despite best intentions, some things are zero-sum, and that each life’s life points do always drop down to zero (everything does die). Every action inherently has both a cost and an opportunity cost. Black approaches speed as a major component of debt—too much time unchanging when you should change means opportunity cost, and too much time resting after a big battle also means opportunity cost. Black also takes self-interest not as something to shy away from, but as the appropriate starting point when negotiating with others given the limitations of what can do with time.

Now, we have a foundation for explaining how this applies to conflict mediation.

You can notice that someone who “plays Red” is much more comfortable with debt than Blue would be. Thus, when they are talking about “too much risk” or “too much debt” they are likely to be talking about radically different things, even if they are good friends and have shared social values.

If you would like to learn more, feel free to comment or schedule a call.