The Quantum Enneagram Applied: The Need for Change
Bill Dyke
“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet in the bar.”
-- Drew Carey
Last January in “The Quantum Enneagram in the Newtonian Organization” I continued to propose the possibility of a connection between quantum physics, organizations, individuals and the enneagram, and began to explore how the application and implementation of the enneagram in organizations might change.
To briefly review, there are three key areas where I say the intersection of the enneagram and quantum physics will lead us in new directions:
As an aside, these articles are not intended to serve as the quintessential arguments that rules and concepts of quantum physics apply to human beings and human organizations as well as sub-atomic particles; that theory has been brilliantly and demonstratively presented by Margaret Wheatley in her book “Leadership and the New Science.”[1] My intention is to provide a practical way to bring Wheatley’s concepts into the realm of the enneagram practitioner.
The Case for Change
I have stated before that I am hopelessly biased in favor of organizations: I understand them, I have spent most of the post-Cambrian Era working in or consulting with organizations, and I feel that they are in deep trouble. I could write another series of articles detailing the evidence for this “trouble”, but I don’t want to spoil a good friendship with Jack Labanauskas so let me condense my case:
$350 billion is more than most of us will make in our lifetime, and a number of that size is hard for us to put in perspective, so let’s compare it with some other numbers that have been in the news lately:
Bill Dyke
“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet in the bar.”
-- Drew Carey
Last January in “The Quantum Enneagram in the Newtonian Organization” I continued to propose the possibility of a connection between quantum physics, organizations, individuals and the enneagram, and began to explore how the application and implementation of the enneagram in organizations might change.
To briefly review, there are three key areas where I say the intersection of the enneagram and quantum physics will lead us in new directions:
- The enneagram type as a field. I asked, what if that which we call a "personality type" is in fact an energetic field, perhaps nine or so of them, perhaps thousands of years old, and what if we are “driven” to tap into a particular field in such a way that it affects our perspectives and therefore our behavior.
- The enneagram type as a measuring device. Physics is all about measurement; to find out the whole story about a particle, you have to be able to measure it with multiple devices. Maybe the same is true for life in general, and organizations in particular. Maybe that’s why we as human beings are different; why we come in at least nine different models.
- Quantum relationships. Suppose that the profound power and significance of relationships at the quantum level, and perhaps accordingly at the human level, makes the enneagram model more useful and important, but also makes the application of the enneagram to organizations and teams more complex.
As an aside, these articles are not intended to serve as the quintessential arguments that rules and concepts of quantum physics apply to human beings and human organizations as well as sub-atomic particles; that theory has been brilliantly and demonstratively presented by Margaret Wheatley in her book “Leadership and the New Science.”[1] My intention is to provide a practical way to bring Wheatley’s concepts into the realm of the enneagram practitioner.
The Case for Change
I have stated before that I am hopelessly biased in favor of organizations: I understand them, I have spent most of the post-Cambrian Era working in or consulting with organizations, and I feel that they are in deep trouble. I could write another series of articles detailing the evidence for this “trouble”, but I don’t want to spoil a good friendship with Jack Labanauskas so let me condense my case:
- Marcus Buckingham of the Gallup organization wrote a book titled “First, Break All the Rules” [2] in which he defined the states of mind of employees of organizations as “engaged, disengaged and actively disengaged.” In the US, only about 25-30% of employees of organizations are “engaged.” These three definitions/distinctions rapidly became popular and business literature today is full of suggestions for programs designed to encourage your employees to be “engaged.”
- Deloitte and Touche, a well respected international consulting organization, estimated in 2004 that the productivity lost by disengaged employees costs US organizations $350 billion per year. [3]
$350 billion is more than most of us will make in our lifetime, and a number of that size is hard for us to put in perspective, so let’s compare it with some other numbers that have been in the news lately:
|
Lost productivity from disengaged employees
Loss to banks and individuals in the sub-prime housing crunch Federal Deficit (estimated 2007) Value of foreign oil imported into the US |
$350 billion per year
$500 billion per year $400 billion per year $400 billion per year |
Paraphrasing Senator Everett Dirksen, “350 billion dollars here and 350 billion dollars there, and pretty soon it begins to add up to real money.”
In the perspective of this comparison, the loss from employee disengagement merits front page news coverage, but I will wager you have never heard of it. It is an extraordinary and constant drain on organizational effectiveness and undoubtedly contributes to the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries, but it is our society’s dirty little secret. I agree with Margaret Wheatley who believes a major reason that you haven’t heard of it is that we have had little or no success in reducing it, and we tend to pooh-pooh this arena as “soft science”:
“We tried for many years to avoid the messiness and complexity of being human, and now that denial is coming back to haunt us. We keep failing to create the outcomes and changes we need in organizations because we continue to deny that ‘the human element’ is anything but a ‘soft’ and not-to-be-taken-seriously minor distraction. We barely manage to survive the seemingly endless procession of organizational change fads and new ideas, each of which promises to make organizations more effective. CEOs acknowledge that about three-fourths of these efforts have failed. This terrible record of failure is, in my estimation, due to approaches that are predominantly technical and mechanistic. New technology is purchased; new organization charts are drawn; new training classes are offered. But most basic human dynamics are completely ignored: our need to trust one another, our need for meaningful work, our desire to contribute and be thanked for that contribution, our need to participate in changes that affect us.”[4]
Wheatley is not directly addressing the $350 billion money leak (she does not reference the Gallup study in her book) but her analysis and her laments are chillingly appropriate. In considering the severity of the problem, remember that the $350 billion is Deloitte’s number, has the seal of authenticity granted by an international financial giant, and has not come from a Nobel Prize winner, a UN commission or some academic think tank looking to score a grant. It is real, terribly real.
The Real Cost of Disengagement
This is not part of the Deloitte & Touche calculations, but it is an important topic for me. In addition, it is intensely practical because it is prelude to my proposed solution to stopping the financial bleeding associated with disengagement.
For those of us in the heart triad, and maybe a few more (converts), the pain experienced by tens of millions of our friends and neighbors who just don’t care about their jobs (or worse, they hate them – the Drew Carey quotation at the beginning of this article rings true for an awful lot of people) is overpowering. I saw a television ad for WalMart a few years ago where one of their truck drivers looked into the camera and said “I enjoy going to work in the morning! How many people can say that?” Only about one out of four, apparently.
In a previous article I likened the pain to committing suicide one day at a time. I have always been able to do what I do best and make money at it, and I am eternally grateful. Buckingham is clear that of all the areas of corporate behavior Gallup studied, this area – doing what you do best –is the biggest contributor to employee engagement. He also says that less than 15% of employees in the US can answer positively to the Gallup question “At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?”[5]
Now I will tell you my solution to the disengagement disaster: fulfillment. In another article at a later date I will flesh out the dimensions and motivating power of fulfillment, and show why I believe that the key to achieving employee fulfillment in an organization is the quantum enneagram.
Teams
By the time we reach the world of adult organizations, we have all experienced several dysfunctional teams and perhaps a few functional ones. We probably have “decided” whether teams are good or bad. Most will probably vote for “bad”.
Teams are required in organizations. If you are an artist like Van Gogh you can work alone, but organizations are made up of interconnecting talents and skills and responsibilities and require teamwork to be effective.
But as we observed in our comparative financial analysis, organizations are not effective; they bleed money in the form of unnecessary cost at a rate comparable to the growth of the federal deficit.
As an example of this wastefulness: when employees are assigned to teams, which often happens against their will, they know that they can, in effect, withdraw from the team, even though they dutifully attend every meeting and complete every (or almost every) assignment. They withdraw by keeping quiet, withholding information, going through the motions, arguing about who is right, breaking their promises, wreaking revenge on someone they think has wronged them, and committing suicide one day at a time in a job they hate; all in the interests of “pursuing a career.” If you are not a business person, pick one you know and ask them if this description is accurate, and then be prepared to listen for a while. It is a sore subject.
The irony is overwhelming. As human beings, we are designed to work in teams; we are each given our individual piece of the puzzle, our unique measuring device, our personal contribution to make. Teams provide the ultimate opportunity for human beings to be collectively brilliant, to collaborate to create something noble, to work together to achieve something bigger than the sum of the parts. The enneagram model is shining evidence of this cosmic, quantum design.
And we blow it.
When we begin to implement the quantum enneagram in organizations, it will not be sufficient to just train the participants in the structure of the enneagram model and the characteristics and observation talents of each enneagram type (although this will be essential foundational training), it will be just as important to teach the employees the skills around functioning as a team. I suspect that they have never had practical training in these skills, and that we will have a lot of retraining and “retrofitting” to do.
I see many questions arising during the development of this “functioning as a team” training:
The quantum process does not assume that there is a “school” answer, but the potential for redefining the selection and implementation and management of teams is exciting.
Wheatley, of course, captures some of this excitement in her writing:
“But as we engage in this process of exploring diverse interpretations and learning to observe our patterns, oftentimes we discover a unifying energy that makes the work of change possible. If we discover an issue whose significance we share with others, those others are transformed into colleagues. If we recognize a shared sense of injustice or a common dream, magical things happen to people. Past hurts and negative histories get left behind. People step forward to work together. We don’t hang back, we don’t withdraw, we don’t wait to be enticed. We seek each other out, eager to discover who else might help. The call of the problem sounds louder than past grievances or our fears of failure. We have found something important to work on, and, because we want to make a difference, we figure out how to do the work, together.” (Emphasis added) [6]
Real Change
Up to this point, much of what we have taught about the enneagram in organizations has been designed to change what people know. In order to make an impact, to cause behavioral change, we must provide education and training that changes what people do.
Change in the organization comes in two flavors:
So organizational change can be at the organizational level (relatively easy to design, manage and control) or at the individual level (so far, maddeningly difficult to design and almost impossible to control.) One of the major reasons for our failure to achieve effective organizational change projects is that we confuse the two different arenas and/or that we design a project to change the organization and expect it to change the individual.
I am reminded of a “Ziggy” cartoon; Ziggy is standing in front of a vending machine labeled “CHANGE”, and lamenting that “I have put $4.00 into this machine and I haven’t changed yet.” American business organizations have put untold billions into the “Change” machine, and their employees haven’t changed much either.
I shudder when I see the latest “Conflict Resolution” video which portrays employees behaving badly and causing upset, and continues on to show how feelings can be restored by being more understanding and mellow. The video typically goes on to grandiosely point out how more compassion/maturity/tolerance will save the day and eliminate conflict in the future. Now that we have been told how we are supposed to behave, we just need to try harder.
Do the producers of these videos not remember that we are dealing with human beings?
Wheatley points out that true behavioral change in organizations almost always comes from the motivating power of the collective work or mission of the team or group. We change when we are working on something that is bigger than we are, and which demands our commitment, and not before:
“…as people engage together to learn more about their collective identity, it affects them as individuals in a surprising way. They are able to see how their personal patterns and behaviors contribute to the whole. The surprise is that they then take responsibility for changing themselves.
“It’s important to note that the motivation for personal change is not in response to a boss’s demand or a personal need for self improvement. A larger context has emerged because of this collaborative process, and it is this context that motivates people to change. They have developed a deeper awareness of the work, not of personalities or particular parts of the organization. They want the work to be more effective, and they now see how they individually can contribute to that outcome.”[7]
Can you see that having the team members trained in the enneagram model would have an enormous impact and that the individual “personal patterns and behaviors” would take on an entirely new meaning? Can you see how valuable it would be to have a team member who saw things that you did not see and to have his/her observation/contribution make all the difference in the ultimate success of the project? Even though you hated their guts two weeks ago?
Individual contribution. Unique observation. Responsibility for changing themselves. Commitment to collaboration and cooperation. The enneagram type as a measuring device, as an energy field that we tap into to accomplish things the organization has not accomplished before. A way to stop the bleeding, in the organization and the individual employee. Not bad prospects.
The Nature of Quantum
I have a good friend who I accuse of feeling that every problem in organizations today can be solved by improving or applying “leadership.” At one point I would have agreed with him, but I don’t feel that way anymore (I tell him I have “evolved”, just to irritate him. It works.)
The way most people speak of “leadership” comes out of Newtonian thinking, which of course is the overwhelmingly dominant organizational philosophy today. Quantum organizational thinking does not even show up on the radar screen. Wheatley describes the Newtonian leadership model, in an unflattering but generally accurate account:
“This real (quantum) world stands in stark and absolute contrast to the world invented by Western thought. We believe that people, organizations, and the world are machines, and we organize massive systems to run like clockwork in a steady-state world. The leader’s job is to create stability and control, because without human intervention, there is no hope for order. Without strong leadership, everything falls apart. It is assumed that most people are dull, not creative, that people need to be bossed around, that new skills develop only through training. People are motivated using fear and rewards; internal motivators such as compassion and generosity are discounted. Those beliefs have created a world filled with disengaged workers who behave like robots, struggling in organizations that become more chaotic and ungovernable over time.”[8]
In contrast, she defines the quantum world (her “real world”) which underlies the Newtonian world:
“In this (quantum) world, the ‘basic building blocks’ of life are relationships, not individuals. Nothing exists on its own or has a final, fixed identity. We are all ‘bundles of potential.’ Relationships evoke these potentials. We change as we meet different people or are in different circumstances.
“And strangest of all, scientists cannot find any independent reality that exists without our observations. We create reality through our acts of observation. What we perceive becomes true for us and this version of reality becomes the lens through which we interpret events (emphasis added). This is why we can experience the same event or look at the same information and have very different descriptions of it.”[9]
Whew. Challenging stuff. Makes you want to curl up with a warm copy of the Wall Street Journal and forget about all this quantum business.
Except that it keeps making sense, and jibes so well with what we know to be true about the enneagram.
So if you choose, as I do, to trust the quantum model, I recommend the following:
“I would be excited to encounter people delighted by surprises instead of being scared to death of them. Were we to become truly good scientists of our leadership craft (emphasis added), we would seek out surprises, relishing the unpredictable when it finally decided to reveal itself. Surprise is the only route to discovery, a moment that pulsates with new learnings. The dance of the universe requires that we open ourselves to the unknown. Knowing the steps ahead of time is not important; being willing to engage with the music and move freely onto the dance floor is what’s essential.”[10]
______________________________________
__________Enneagram Monthly, issue 146, March 2008
In the perspective of this comparison, the loss from employee disengagement merits front page news coverage, but I will wager you have never heard of it. It is an extraordinary and constant drain on organizational effectiveness and undoubtedly contributes to the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries, but it is our society’s dirty little secret. I agree with Margaret Wheatley who believes a major reason that you haven’t heard of it is that we have had little or no success in reducing it, and we tend to pooh-pooh this arena as “soft science”:
“We tried for many years to avoid the messiness and complexity of being human, and now that denial is coming back to haunt us. We keep failing to create the outcomes and changes we need in organizations because we continue to deny that ‘the human element’ is anything but a ‘soft’ and not-to-be-taken-seriously minor distraction. We barely manage to survive the seemingly endless procession of organizational change fads and new ideas, each of which promises to make organizations more effective. CEOs acknowledge that about three-fourths of these efforts have failed. This terrible record of failure is, in my estimation, due to approaches that are predominantly technical and mechanistic. New technology is purchased; new organization charts are drawn; new training classes are offered. But most basic human dynamics are completely ignored: our need to trust one another, our need for meaningful work, our desire to contribute and be thanked for that contribution, our need to participate in changes that affect us.”[4]
Wheatley is not directly addressing the $350 billion money leak (she does not reference the Gallup study in her book) but her analysis and her laments are chillingly appropriate. In considering the severity of the problem, remember that the $350 billion is Deloitte’s number, has the seal of authenticity granted by an international financial giant, and has not come from a Nobel Prize winner, a UN commission or some academic think tank looking to score a grant. It is real, terribly real.
The Real Cost of Disengagement
This is not part of the Deloitte & Touche calculations, but it is an important topic for me. In addition, it is intensely practical because it is prelude to my proposed solution to stopping the financial bleeding associated with disengagement.
For those of us in the heart triad, and maybe a few more (converts), the pain experienced by tens of millions of our friends and neighbors who just don’t care about their jobs (or worse, they hate them – the Drew Carey quotation at the beginning of this article rings true for an awful lot of people) is overpowering. I saw a television ad for WalMart a few years ago where one of their truck drivers looked into the camera and said “I enjoy going to work in the morning! How many people can say that?” Only about one out of four, apparently.
In a previous article I likened the pain to committing suicide one day at a time. I have always been able to do what I do best and make money at it, and I am eternally grateful. Buckingham is clear that of all the areas of corporate behavior Gallup studied, this area – doing what you do best –is the biggest contributor to employee engagement. He also says that less than 15% of employees in the US can answer positively to the Gallup question “At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?”[5]
Now I will tell you my solution to the disengagement disaster: fulfillment. In another article at a later date I will flesh out the dimensions and motivating power of fulfillment, and show why I believe that the key to achieving employee fulfillment in an organization is the quantum enneagram.
Teams
By the time we reach the world of adult organizations, we have all experienced several dysfunctional teams and perhaps a few functional ones. We probably have “decided” whether teams are good or bad. Most will probably vote for “bad”.
Teams are required in organizations. If you are an artist like Van Gogh you can work alone, but organizations are made up of interconnecting talents and skills and responsibilities and require teamwork to be effective.
But as we observed in our comparative financial analysis, organizations are not effective; they bleed money in the form of unnecessary cost at a rate comparable to the growth of the federal deficit.
As an example of this wastefulness: when employees are assigned to teams, which often happens against their will, they know that they can, in effect, withdraw from the team, even though they dutifully attend every meeting and complete every (or almost every) assignment. They withdraw by keeping quiet, withholding information, going through the motions, arguing about who is right, breaking their promises, wreaking revenge on someone they think has wronged them, and committing suicide one day at a time in a job they hate; all in the interests of “pursuing a career.” If you are not a business person, pick one you know and ask them if this description is accurate, and then be prepared to listen for a while. It is a sore subject.
The irony is overwhelming. As human beings, we are designed to work in teams; we are each given our individual piece of the puzzle, our unique measuring device, our personal contribution to make. Teams provide the ultimate opportunity for human beings to be collectively brilliant, to collaborate to create something noble, to work together to achieve something bigger than the sum of the parts. The enneagram model is shining evidence of this cosmic, quantum design.
And we blow it.
When we begin to implement the quantum enneagram in organizations, it will not be sufficient to just train the participants in the structure of the enneagram model and the characteristics and observation talents of each enneagram type (although this will be essential foundational training), it will be just as important to teach the employees the skills around functioning as a team. I suspect that they have never had practical training in these skills, and that we will have a lot of retraining and “retrofitting” to do.
I see many questions arising during the development of this “functioning as a team” training:
- Who selects the team members? What is the criterion?
- What if additional types/observation talents need to be included during the project?
- How do you express your observations and opinions without arguing for them?
- How do you express your disagreements without making the other person wrong?
- How are the team and task assignments made?
- How can feedback and correction be introduced without bogging down the process?
- Do we need to answer these questions in advance?
- How are the ultimate decisions made?
- Will there be veto power? Wielded by whom?
- How do we learn/decide what works and what doesn’t?
The quantum process does not assume that there is a “school” answer, but the potential for redefining the selection and implementation and management of teams is exciting.
Wheatley, of course, captures some of this excitement in her writing:
“But as we engage in this process of exploring diverse interpretations and learning to observe our patterns, oftentimes we discover a unifying energy that makes the work of change possible. If we discover an issue whose significance we share with others, those others are transformed into colleagues. If we recognize a shared sense of injustice or a common dream, magical things happen to people. Past hurts and negative histories get left behind. People step forward to work together. We don’t hang back, we don’t withdraw, we don’t wait to be enticed. We seek each other out, eager to discover who else might help. The call of the problem sounds louder than past grievances or our fears of failure. We have found something important to work on, and, because we want to make a difference, we figure out how to do the work, together.” (Emphasis added) [6]
Real Change
Up to this point, much of what we have taught about the enneagram in organizations has been designed to change what people know. In order to make an impact, to cause behavioral change, we must provide education and training that changes what people do.
Change in the organization comes in two flavors:
- Change in the Organization. This usually shows up as a change in management reporting structure, operating procedures, best practices, skills training, mission, ownership, physical location, or any of thousands of other possible arenas.
- Change in the Individual. This shows up as a change in individual behavior. Otherwise, nothing has changed. In biology, this is measurable. You observe the stimulus-response pattern of an organism (X stimulus produces Y response). You then apply some type of modification to the organism. If the organism is a human being, you provide training or education. If the subsequent stimulus-response pattern changes (human behavior changes), the modification (training, education) has been effective. Otherwise, change has not occurred.
So organizational change can be at the organizational level (relatively easy to design, manage and control) or at the individual level (so far, maddeningly difficult to design and almost impossible to control.) One of the major reasons for our failure to achieve effective organizational change projects is that we confuse the two different arenas and/or that we design a project to change the organization and expect it to change the individual.
I am reminded of a “Ziggy” cartoon; Ziggy is standing in front of a vending machine labeled “CHANGE”, and lamenting that “I have put $4.00 into this machine and I haven’t changed yet.” American business organizations have put untold billions into the “Change” machine, and their employees haven’t changed much either.
I shudder when I see the latest “Conflict Resolution” video which portrays employees behaving badly and causing upset, and continues on to show how feelings can be restored by being more understanding and mellow. The video typically goes on to grandiosely point out how more compassion/maturity/tolerance will save the day and eliminate conflict in the future. Now that we have been told how we are supposed to behave, we just need to try harder.
Do the producers of these videos not remember that we are dealing with human beings?
Wheatley points out that true behavioral change in organizations almost always comes from the motivating power of the collective work or mission of the team or group. We change when we are working on something that is bigger than we are, and which demands our commitment, and not before:
“…as people engage together to learn more about their collective identity, it affects them as individuals in a surprising way. They are able to see how their personal patterns and behaviors contribute to the whole. The surprise is that they then take responsibility for changing themselves.
“It’s important to note that the motivation for personal change is not in response to a boss’s demand or a personal need for self improvement. A larger context has emerged because of this collaborative process, and it is this context that motivates people to change. They have developed a deeper awareness of the work, not of personalities or particular parts of the organization. They want the work to be more effective, and they now see how they individually can contribute to that outcome.”[7]
Can you see that having the team members trained in the enneagram model would have an enormous impact and that the individual “personal patterns and behaviors” would take on an entirely new meaning? Can you see how valuable it would be to have a team member who saw things that you did not see and to have his/her observation/contribution make all the difference in the ultimate success of the project? Even though you hated their guts two weeks ago?
Individual contribution. Unique observation. Responsibility for changing themselves. Commitment to collaboration and cooperation. The enneagram type as a measuring device, as an energy field that we tap into to accomplish things the organization has not accomplished before. A way to stop the bleeding, in the organization and the individual employee. Not bad prospects.
The Nature of Quantum
I have a good friend who I accuse of feeling that every problem in organizations today can be solved by improving or applying “leadership.” At one point I would have agreed with him, but I don’t feel that way anymore (I tell him I have “evolved”, just to irritate him. It works.)
The way most people speak of “leadership” comes out of Newtonian thinking, which of course is the overwhelmingly dominant organizational philosophy today. Quantum organizational thinking does not even show up on the radar screen. Wheatley describes the Newtonian leadership model, in an unflattering but generally accurate account:
“This real (quantum) world stands in stark and absolute contrast to the world invented by Western thought. We believe that people, organizations, and the world are machines, and we organize massive systems to run like clockwork in a steady-state world. The leader’s job is to create stability and control, because without human intervention, there is no hope for order. Without strong leadership, everything falls apart. It is assumed that most people are dull, not creative, that people need to be bossed around, that new skills develop only through training. People are motivated using fear and rewards; internal motivators such as compassion and generosity are discounted. Those beliefs have created a world filled with disengaged workers who behave like robots, struggling in organizations that become more chaotic and ungovernable over time.”[8]
In contrast, she defines the quantum world (her “real world”) which underlies the Newtonian world:
“In this (quantum) world, the ‘basic building blocks’ of life are relationships, not individuals. Nothing exists on its own or has a final, fixed identity. We are all ‘bundles of potential.’ Relationships evoke these potentials. We change as we meet different people or are in different circumstances.
“And strangest of all, scientists cannot find any independent reality that exists without our observations. We create reality through our acts of observation. What we perceive becomes true for us and this version of reality becomes the lens through which we interpret events (emphasis added). This is why we can experience the same event or look at the same information and have very different descriptions of it.”[9]
Whew. Challenging stuff. Makes you want to curl up with a warm copy of the Wall Street Journal and forget about all this quantum business.
Except that it keeps making sense, and jibes so well with what we know to be true about the enneagram.
So if you choose, as I do, to trust the quantum model, I recommend the following:
- Understand that the training methodology utilized to bring about individual change is more important than training content. The main value and purpose of training teams and groups is the creation and development of expanded team relationships and individual skills and talents, not a deeper knowledge of the enneagram model.
- Understand that the concept of enneagram type is potentially much more fluid than we might now believe, and that it is much more dependent on relationships with others.
- “Keep a loose hand on the reins.” Understand that the quantum world is full of surprises and new perspectives. Quoting Wheatley:
“I would be excited to encounter people delighted by surprises instead of being scared to death of them. Were we to become truly good scientists of our leadership craft (emphasis added), we would seek out surprises, relishing the unpredictable when it finally decided to reveal itself. Surprise is the only route to discovery, a moment that pulsates with new learnings. The dance of the universe requires that we open ourselves to the unknown. Knowing the steps ahead of time is not important; being willing to engage with the music and move freely onto the dance floor is what’s essential.”[10]
______________________________________
- Wheatley, Margaret. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2006)
- Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, First, Break All The Rules (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999)
- “It’s 2008: Do You Know Where Your Talent Is?” Deloitte Research Study. (Deloitte & Touche USA LLP, 2004) Available at www.deloitte.com/us
- Wheatley, p.164
- Buckingham and Coffman
- Wheatley, p.149
- Ibid. p.144
- Ibid. p.170-171
- Ibid. p.170
- Ibid. p.162
__________Enneagram Monthly, issue 146, March 2008
