How Did You Come Up with Your Names for the Instinctual Biases, and Why?

Responding to a recent question

I was recently asked why I felt it necessary to change the names of the three instinctual biases and how I came up with the words I use.

Here is my response:

At the root is my desire to operate from first principles whenever possible. First principles are fundamental truths, assumptions, or basic propositions that serve as the foundation for a system of knowledge or reasoning. First principles thinking is the practice of actively identifying and reasoning from these fundamental truths rather than reasoning by analogy or accepting conventional wisdom without examination.

Operating from first principles not only puts one on solid intellectual ground, but it also makes life easier. If you have solid first principles, you don’t have to remember all the details—you evaluate the circumstance and extrapolate from the first principle.

In evolutionary biology, for example, a fundamental first principle is generational change through random mutation and natural selection—each generation carries the genetically inspired traits that helped their ancestors increase the chances of reproduction. Most of the behavior we see in people today is in some way influenced by those traits. Understanding how they helped our ancestors survive and reproduce can help us understand why we do what we do today.

When it comes to the Enneagram, I always look for first principles and try to make them as precise and robust as possible.

With the Ennea-types, for example, I was frustrated with the lack of a coherent, concrete definition of what it meant to be a particular type (rather than relying on either the vices or a list of adjectives). So, after a lot of thought, and some inspiration from Claudio Naranjo referring to the types as "adaptive strategies" in “Character and Neurosis,” I came up with the idea that at the core of the type was the “striving to feel” a certain way as a nonconscious, habitual approach to getting our needs met. Ones are “striving to feel perfect,” Twos “striving to feel connected,” etc.

Everything about the types, for me, stems from that need to feel a particular regulatory affective tone as we meet life's challenges. That need shapes the emotions we experience, the thoughts we think, and the behaviors we display. This approach not only makes it easier for me to understand the crux of the types, it makes it easier to teach the Enneagram to my clients. They don’t have to remember a catalog of details about the types; simply remembering that their boss is, say, a Five who is “striving to feel detached” puts the boss’s behavior into context and points to better ways to interact with her.

That same approach applies to how I started thinking about the “instincts” and subtypes more than 20 years ago. The more I studied them and tried to apply what I had learned to my work with my clients, the more frustrated I became. Naranjo's neo-Freudian use of “instincts,” which even he admits is flawed in his introduction to “Character and Neurosis, was problematic both from a scientific and descriptive perspective.

The science of it is just flat-out wrong and outdated--we don't have three “instincts;” we have multiple evolutionary adaptations stemming from a complex stew of psychobiological variables—our genes, prenatal experience, environmental forces, etc.—that shape our non-conscious drives. “Instinct” is a word that is no longer used in real science, and its persistent appearance in the Enneagram literature is a sign of outdated and archaic thinking.

That said, there does seem to be strong observational empirical support for the idea that people have tendencies that can be clustered together in three broad categories or domains, and that we each have a tendency or bias to focus on one of those domains more than the other two.

Further, the descriptions of both the “instincts” and the subtypes did not capture what I observed when working with people—"self-preservation" didn't capture a more general tendency to preserve; "social" was too focused on the need to be part of a group and missed the important parts about tracking group dynamics and information exchange; "sexual" missed not only the display tendencies but, at the time, the need for a broader, more generalized (i.e., non-sexual) need for replication of parts of oneself.

So, I wanted to get at the root of what seemed to be happening at the heart of each instinctual bias in the same way I did with the types.

To do so, I conducted an in-depth MECE ("mutually exclusive, cumulatively exhaustive") analysis, the McKinsey approach for problem framing and solving.

The MECE approach seeks to solve a problem by first clearly articulating the problem, then breaking it down into its fundamental parts in a structured way so those parts can be addressed from the bottom up. Think of a hierarchy chart with main problem in the single top box and lower layers containing the MECE elements of that problem. You continue to create layers until you feel that you have reached sufficient detail to address the problem. Ideally, there are three elements at each level for each element above. Thus, layer one (the top) has one box, layer two has three boxes, layer three has nine, etc. At each layer, the ideas in the boxes should not overlap but capture everything relevant for that level (i.e., be mutually exclusive and cumulatively exhaustive).

Following the first principle from evolutionary biology I described above, I concluded that what were referred to as “instincts” in the existing Enneagram literature were natural selection’s way of, ultimately, increasing the probability of reproduction. (As Richard Dawkins pointed out in “The Selfish Gene,” evolution works with “memes” (reproducible units of non-genetic information, a term he coined) as well as genes. Memes, in this case, can include beliefs, artifacts, art, etc.)

To frame the MECE analysis, I made a comprehensive list of the correlated behaviors and characteristics I saw within each of the three instinctual domains, and in time, I concluded that the most accurate, MECE-friendly terms to capture each domain were Preserving, Navigating, and Transmitting. The words more-accurately capture all the fundamental needs, and the ways we act to satisfy them, that increase the chances of reproduction of our genes or memes.

So, the top level (ultimate) problem that the "instincts" (which—remember—are actually evolutionary adaptations) are passed along to "solve" is "what increases the probability of reproducing some part of myself?"

The penultimate (“next to last”) "problems" that help satisfy the ultimate problem are the three instinctual domains: What behaviors increase the probability that I will have the resources and capabilities I need to survive long enough to create viable offspring (Preserving); I can increase the probability that I will maintain my standing in the group and avoid ostracism (Navigating); and I can increase the probability that I will attract the attention of desirable receptacles to whom I can pass my genes/memes (Transmitting)? The subdomains, etc., address various proximate outcomes in service of the level above them... (See the table in the image as a representation of this hierarchy.)

As readers or listeners to the Awareness to Action Enneagram podcast are probably aware, I'm heavily influenced by the epistemology of Karl Popper. His view was that knowledge progresses through a cycle of identification of and effectively framing a problem; conjecturing to create the best possible explanation (or theory); eliminating errors in the theory; and using that provisional theory until the problem evolves or new knowledge comes along that changes the definition of the problem or identifies a new variation of it. The better the theory, the more utility it has and the more problems it solves.

So far, my theory of the instinctual biases has not encountered any situations that it does not address.

In my view, other theories of the instincts and subtypes don't rigorously and fully define the problems that the "instincts" solve and therefore don't have the utility and robustness that mine does (none of their work would address the business applications that mine does, for example).

While various models of the 27 subtypes could be "right" (which only means that it solves a problem), I believe my approach is more robust, parsimonious, scientifically and logically accurate, and useful--thus solving more problems, faster.