A Personal Introductory Note

I am quite sure that this is not the first product in history that started its life with a great big, synchronistic, coincidence. I had been given a book on the Enneagram (in fact Helen Palmer's first offering) in about 1996 when I visited June Jones in Port Elizabeth. She said that I may find it interesting. It took me all of four years to find it, let alone find it interesting. It got put on a shelf and forgotten about. What got me to take it out one day and read it in Kirstenbosch while I was waiting for a friend to finish work, I will never know. I was in the throws of rewriting the 16PF interpreter at the time and became riveted by these nine composite personalities that Ms Palmer described and the apparent coherence of behaviour within each one. Given that I could imagine a person who I knew personally falling quite accurately into each personality cluster, I was also amused. How could she get this clustering so right?

I went out into the world with new eyes and started looking for what I could find on the internet, sure that this set of composites could be a very useful part of the 16PF reports. It was not long after this that Pierre Bester, whom I had known in the SADF, approached me to discuss what I had learned about the Enneagram. He and Colin Adam had independently met Prof Robert Suidinski, visiting from Florida in the US, and who had spoken about the Enneagram on a radio morning slot. One thing led to another and Adfen, then a personnel placement agency, began its transformation into the Enneagram based coaching and organisational development consultancy that it has become.

It seems that the Enneagram found us and we all had just the right expertise to start using it from the outset.

The E-Scales

The E-Scales, as it exists today, is an internet-based assessment questionnaire and a background interpretation system that produces three distinct narrative reports. It is all automated and payments are effected by credit card or direct transfer although the system is only available to accredited users who have an account with Adfen. I will come to the reasoning behind this security structure presently. In its inception, it was the South African Enneagram Profiler (SAEP) and was envisaged as a desktop interpreter in the same vein as the CB Personality Profiler. The desktop system still exists although it has long ceased to be a real product for Adfen. I keep it as a historical edifice of how it all began.

The decision to use a "flat" questionnaire was made on the back of being able to go to the items and discuss them with the respondent and it is far easier to do this with a simple structure. A second form of the questionnaire, employing more complex questions, similar in layout to the 16PF, existed from the outset but was never really put out there. A lot of work was done on the items and by 2004, the simple one hundred item checklist had been extended by fifty items and was being used on high profile clients like Shell and Grand West to bring increased personal awareness to people in management positions, The most significant thing we leaned was that self-awareness is hard to sell to business folk. The second was in the form of a question: So what?

So what indeed. I can tell you what makes you tick; I can predict events in your childhood; I can tell you what turns you on et cetera. Does it tell you how to improve your performance? Can it suggest ways in which you will experience more job satisfaction? Well, the answer at that point was simple: "Not directly." Yet that had a rider: "Yet, it could if I worked out how to do so." It was in creating an answer to that question that we spent the next three years. During that time, the questionnaire was further refined and the other reports polished and the outcome was a (a) Feedback report, (b) Coaching Report and (c) Leadership report. Both the feedback and leadership reports are couched in "You" language while the coaching report uses "Ms X shows a" language. A collaborative effort gave the coaching report a fullness with step by step coaching suggestions included.

It must be noted that unlike the majority of Enneagram authors, the general philosophy behind all our reports is strictly not based on "uni-typing". Simple categorisation of individuals is much too reductionistic for what we are doing and we take it for granted that any person exhibits a complex combination of these patterns. It is often the way in which they integrate them together in one body (so to speak) that makes the individual who they are. The double paragraphs (as we call them) are attempts to suggest how this integration works but, as with any psychometric instrument, we strongly suggest that this be carefully discussed with the client and the real integration method carefully noted. Because the questionnaire is a "flat" behavioural checklist, the face validity is naturally fairly high and, while wide open to faking, puts the elements of the nine behavioural clusters together in a way that many of our clients have not inferred before. While we have had very few flat disagreements with the reports, they do occur in rare cases, Here, the respondent is probably in denial of their process and may even assume that their specific combination of characteristics is "bad". At this point the good old "one point is no better or worse than another point" discussion gets used and we begin to explore the denial.

It is quite easy to forget that the Enneagram exposes nine abberant states (in terms of the initial philosophy) because it describes the behaviour that a person shows as a result of an ego defensive strategy. This (according to Ischazo) is a departure from essence and the result of wounding. As such, the "fixated behaviour" is naturally unhealthy. The literature describes the unhealthy state and the relatively healthy state and we wanted to find a way of differentiating an individual between these two. The most obvious method was to include a measure of "life-satisfaction" in the scales which we simply called the stress scale. It is closely aligned with factor C of the 16PF which Cattell called Ego Strength. This scale has been used in all versions of the test and has proved successful in achieving what it set out to do. This scale, however, even further complicates the unassisted understanding of the analysed results. »