Inexperienced trainers and consultants think they have to know all the answers and that changing their minds will undermine their credibility. Experienced people, however, understand that admitting when you don’t have the answers and being willing to publicly change your mind is a sign of intellectual integrity and expertise.

Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to assessing someone’s Enneagram type (or our own).

It is common for people using the Enneagram to want to start typing everyone (and everything) they see. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because to use the Enneagram professionally, you do have to develop some expertise in assessment, and practice is a necessary component of building expertise.

The danger, however, lies in feeling a sense of unjustified certainty about our assessments. While the Enneagram may look simple when you first encounter it, over time you start to see that it is actually a nuanced model and look-alike profiles are common.

Further, people are complex, showing us different characteristics at different times. Someone may seem assertive and outgoing at one point and passive and introverted at another. As I have written before, everyone does almost everything SOME of the time and no does anything ALL of the time. People can seem different at different times depending on the circumstances.

If typing is so difficult, one might reasonably ask “What use, then, is the Enneagram as a system of classifying personalities?”

It is very useful—if we work hard to master it and understand what the Enneagram is and is not. When seeking to understand people, we have to understand that their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors will vary, but we will also see a trendline over time, and understanding that trendline is helpful.

What the Enneagram is NOT is a predictive model, helping us to know definitively how someone will respond in a particular circumstance, what types should marry what types, or what types will succeed in specific roles. The Enneagram IS a model of patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior exhibited over time. Thus, the Enneagram can be seen as a probabilistic model that helps us to understand that someone is MORE LIKELY to respond a certain way than in other ways, and that can be helpful because it lessens our surprise and frustration when people act in ways that we wouldn’t.

Even more important, however, it is an EXPLANATORY model that helps us understand WHY someone responded the way they did in retrospect. For example, a Nine, who is “striving to feel peaceful,” may act in an easy-going and harmony-seeking manner in one situation to achieve that peacefulness, but become aggressive and angry in another situation because their peacefulness feels threatened and anger intuitively feels like the best way to get it back. While we can’t predict how any given Nine will respond in a particular circumstance, we can estimate responses and we can get a sense of the underlying motivations for whatever behavior we see.

Therefore, it is really difficult to accurately assess someone’s Enneagram type in a short time, since that period may not fully reflect how the person commonly behaves over the trend, and we must be humble and provisional in any claims that we make.

Those making type assessments should also be aware of the many psychological obstacles that can affect our ability to assess others. In addition to classic challenges such as projection and transference, we should watch out for cognitive biases such as (to give just a few):

--Confirmation Bias, the tendency to see evidence that confirms our existing beliefs but ignore evidence that contradicts them;

--The Fundamental Attribution Error, the tendency to make assumptions about a person’s broader character based on one circumstantial trait or action; and

--The Availability Heuristic, the tendency to rely on familiar examples that come to mind immediately when evaluating a situation or decision.

(Find out about these and others in my book, “How to Think Well, and Why: The Awareness to Action Guide to Clear Thinking”).

Finally, I must warn about the “Automation bias,” which is the tendency to value the results of an automated test over our own experience. This is a challenge that has long bedeviled me while working in organizations. I have used multiple online assessments and co-created one that works pretty well, but the reality is that no online Enneagram assessment is 100% accurate, or even close (and don’t be fooled, there is a difference between psychometric validity or repeatability and “accuracy”…).

And while those people who are mistyped due to an assessment may allow confirmation bias to initially interpret the results as accurate, they will eventually see, or at least intuitively feel, the “inaccuracies” in the system and lose confidence in the Enneagram in general.

There is no tool for understanding human nature more powerful than the Enneagram, and it would be shocking if such a powerful tool were as simplistic as many people make it out to be. You will grow much faster and be much more effective using it if you recognize that it is easy to learn but difficult to master and stay humble about your assessments of your clients (and yourself).

This is a shortened version of a blog on Mario’s website.
Read the entire article HERE.

Holly Margl is the award-winning author of Witnessing Grief; Inviting Trauma and Loss to Our Coaching Conversations, An Enneagram Perspective, coach, coach mentor, and trainer specializing in grief, trauma, and the Enneagram.