Last year, my firm’s leadership group debated whether we wanted to have a firm-wide discussion of everyone’s Enneagram.
Most people were ambivalent about taking a test and discussing the results. Even those proposing it seemed ambivalent—it was just a fun idea!
Two of us, though, resisted the idea.
I felt—or maybe knew is better, having read research and reports on the topic—that the tests are meaningless. They were rarely developed by working psychologists or experts, and showed little promise of predicting anything. (Or even delivering consistent test results for the same person over time!)
My colleague, however, didn’t care whether or not the test meant anything. The problem, for him, was that the test might mean something to someone else.
He saw a potential for problems in placing people in categories. As an immigrant who fled his native Colombia during the political violence of the 1908s, he’d seen firsthand how those in power leverage categories for their own ends.
It sounded a little overwrought at first—our architecture firm was in the slippery slope to political chaos?
But I saw what he meant after some thought: place people in categories, and you create opportunities for people to develop heuristics, shortcuts, for how to interact with them.
So should we really be doing this? he asked. A good question!
Taylor Coe 