Is the Enneagram Bunk?
No… Well, not quite, but…
“Bunk”: short for “bunkum,” insincere of foolish talk. And the more popular the Enneagram gets, the more foolish talk there seems to be about it. It is not difficult to understand why serious people might consider it to be, at best, frivolous and, at worst, complete nonsense.
When I first started working with the Enneagram 30 years ago, no one knew about it. When I introduced a client to the Enneagram I had the luxury of describing the model to them in a thoughtful, rigorous way and addressing any concerns they might have about the validity or usefulness of the system. They didn’t have preconceptions that needed to be overcome.
Now, however, a growing percentage of my new clients have already been exposed to the Enneagram and, more often than not these days, that exposure has been a negative one. Recently, I’ve had people:
· Compare the use of the Enneagram to a silly parlor game;
· Tell me how much they hate it because the people around them use it to label people, usually in negative ways; and
· Tell me they heard the Enneagram is not “scientific” compared to say the “Big Five” model.
“Is the Enneagram bunk?” is not an unreasonable question.
My answer is “Sometimes, yes; but it doesn’t have to be.”
The first two bullets are closely related, and it is hard to do anything about the superficial understanding and use of the Enneagram, or about its weaponization, beyond pointing it out and modeling better use of the system.
The only way for the skillful and ethical use of the Enneagram to outshine the frivolity is for skillful and ethical users of the Enneagram to become more visible doing it the right way and encouraging others to do the same.
If you work with the Enneagram, how you do so—your ethics, your rigor, your diligence, your professionalism—reflects back on the system and all those who use it. Working with the Enneagram comes with a responsibility—take that responsibility seriously and do it well.
The final bullet is a little trickier…
No, the Enneagram, strictly speaking, is not scientific if by “scientific” one means falsifiable by rigorous testing under controlled conditions. But there is much in life that is not scientific that is still useful and leads to our betterment, such as philosophy, history, the arts, and many elements of the “social sciences.”
It is important to keep in mind that something can be empirically sound (i.e., based on observation and experience) even if it is not scientifically falsifiable, and the Enneagram is based on a lot of people sharing their observations over time and finding consistent patterns in human nature.
However, whether the Enneagram is “scientific” is not what people are actually concerned about when they ask this question. What they really want is some confidence that they are not being tricked into believing nonsense. This is of particular concern in organizations—someone could get fired for hiring a consultant or coach who’s using models that have been debunked or discredited.
This is why it is really important to be clear and specific about what claims you are making when you use the Enneagram, and I think this is where many Enneagram practitioners fall down—they make vague or, even worse, false claims that when exposed to scrutiny undermine any value in what they offer.
For example, people will claim the Enneagram is “an ancient personality typology.” It is not. The Enneagram of personality is younger than I am and while my sons may consider me to be “ancient,” the 1960s generally does not qualify as “antiquity.” That well-known Enneagram teachers are implying that the system is thousands of years old is shameful and undermines the credibility of the model and embarrasses those trying to use it responsibly.
Perhaps even more challenging a problem though is the lack of specificity of the claims made about the dynamics of the model itself. In other words, exactly what are we claiming when we say someone is a particular Enneagram “type”? Few people take the time to provide a clear definition of what they mean when the say, for example, that someone is a “Type One,” instead relying on a list of descriptors about this undefined thing called a “One.”
It brings to mind Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, after struggling to define pornography, giving up and saying he didn’t know what it was, but “I know it when I see it.”
Such fuzziness around definitions is one of the reasons why there is so much confusion about the Enneagram, and that confusion sows doubt about its accuracy, usefulness, and credibility.
In the Awareness to Action approach, we are very clear in what we claim about the Enneagram:
While every human is unique, we also fall into habitual patterns that are commonly seen in people. We know, for example, that while introversion and extroversion are not fixed categories, some people are generally more introverted and others more extroverted and they tend to stay that way over time.
The ATA Enneagram is an approach to the Enneagram that identifies nine habitual adaptive strategies that we find to be consistently demonstrated by people in multiple cultures we work with across the globe.
These adaptive strategies are rooted in a non-conscious need to “feel” a certain way (peaceful, connected, secure, etc.) as an affective baseline state, and that this need to feel that state influences the way we think and the way we behave.
Due to this consistency of strategy, there are identifiable broad patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior and that while there is great variation within those patterns, understanding the patterns can be useful.
While everyone uses multiple, if not all, the strategies, we tend to rely more on one of these strategies than we do the other eight.
While we may grow and mature (or not…) throughout life, our basic personality stays relatively the same over time. (While some people object to this, claiming to be very different people than they were when they were younger, they will grudgingly admit that those people around them are still very similar in temperament than they were years ago.)
Beyond this, we are very careful about any claims we make. (We are similarly cautious and specific about the instinctual biases…)
We don’t make highly speculative and subjective assertions about causal mechanisms (i.e., how someone “became” their type) such as basic fears, original wounds, object relations or attachment patterns, or childhood origins.
We avoid universal claims about the types, relying on qualifiers such as saying that a person of a particular type “often,” “frequently,” “commonly,” etc., displays particular behaviors or characteristics. We say that people are complex and nobody does anything all the time and everyone does everything some of the time—but there are tendencies worth noting and this is why the Enneagram is valuable—it shows us the traps we are likely to fall into most frequently.
The irony is that claiming fewer things and making more-provisional claims reduces people’s skepticism and makes them more willing to accept the Enneagram as a useful tool.
None of this is to suggest that your approach to the Enneagram must be the same as the ATA Approach. But if you want to use the Enneagram in a way that makes a difference, that uplifts the system instead of making a mockery of it, be thoughtful and specific about the claims you are making and make sure they stand up to scrutiny.
Don’t spread Enneagram bunk.