An interesting irony - personality & consulting

There are many different ways of understanding personality. There's the Myer's Briggs typography that's quite popular (aka the MBTI) and there's the ancient sufi system known as the 'Enneagram' that describes nine different types of personality.

I had a use for the enneagram recently. I recently wrote a book about consultancy, that involves discussing management and it was very useful to use the enneagram types to discuss the different ways different people react to things. I have a whole chapter in 'Collaborative Consulting' discussing the different ways different enneagram types react to change, and how knowing this can be helpful in managing change.

What's interesting, to me, about the enneagram is that it has been proven that human beings don't actually fall into 'types'. Exhaustive psychological research has shown that our personalities actually lie along the five dimensions of the 'big five' model of personality -  openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

This doesn't, strangely, invalidate personality typographies like the enneagram because, even though human beings don't cluster into types, human beings think in terms of types. The way our brains work is to recognise patterns (even when they're not there!), so we identify, and base our behaviour on these types (or stereotypes).

I think it's a nice irony that psychology proves the enneagram is wrong, but psychology also proves that the enneagram is useful, despite being wrong.

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