Enneagram Wrap Up

While you don’t want to be too quick to categorize someone, categorization does serve a purpose. It gives you a mental model for dealing with situations, and mental models can be very helpful once their accuracy is sufficiently tuned by real world experience. However, mental models that are just learned from a book can be very risky. Because no idea you get from a book is really yours until you’ve actually tested it, tweaked it, and made it your own, now we need to discuss some of the dos and don’t for using the enneagram in the real world. Like design patterns, enneagram types don’t really exist – rather they are a type and categorization of things that do exist. The distinction is important, because to do well at anything requires that you submit to reality, rather than to a generalization of reality. While the latter is tempting and makes you feel like you have an explanation for everything, it’s fraught with peril, because you don’t. Reality is messy and requires learning when to apply book knowledge and when not to do so. There are many things you can do with a personality test that will give you bad results over the long term, even if those same things worked in the short term. Human beings are notoriously difficult to classify into rigid groupings, whether you are talking about a dozen hunter gatherers living in a rain forest, or 500 programmers working in a sky scraper in New York City. While you can easily create a mental model of the world that works more than half the time, it’s very difficult to create one that works ninety percent of the time, and impossible to create one that does so every time. Further, another issue rears its ugly head – when you classify people and tell them about it, most of them don’t like it very much. In short, if you think any of this stuff is ever going to give you a full explanation of what someone did, full foresight into what they might do, and a perfect understanding of the reasons why, you are sorely mistaken. That doesn’t make a system like the enneagram useless, however. It just means you have to look at things differently. You have to shift your approach so that your mental model is constantly being tested and refined, use the system to improve yourself (instead of trying to control others), and to use the tool to have better interactions with others. Such a system is more useful than one that attempts to offer perfect understanding and predictions, because it actually works in the real world. The enneagram can be a useful tool, provided that you understand what it is intended to provide and what it is not. Used properly, it can give you a better mental model when working with other people, when trying to improve yourself, or when adding members to your team. However, it is not a panacea and has limited capability when you try to use it for prediction, fixing other people, or for dealing with bad behavior by yourself and others. Like any tool, it has its strengths and weaknesses and you’ll find that you need to apply it before you really grasp what they are. Episode Breakdown It’s a model of clusters of behavior, not a predictive algorithm You will not be able to accurately and consistently predict others’ behavior based on their type. It’s good for analysis after the fact and for refining your feedback loops to handle things better next time. It’s not even a good predictor of your own behavior – again it’s a retrospective and feedback loop tool, not a predictive one. You can tell yourself all day that you will respond as healthy person of your enneagram type in a particular situation, but you might not be in a good head space at the time, or you may be in a group of people whose behavior trends in a different direction. Categorization helps you make sense of the world,