Nine Sapiens©:
A New Approach to the Enneagram
What is the Enneagram Personality Model?
The Enneagram is a model that describes personality in terms of nine basic types. Each type represents a distinct way of dealing with life’s challenges, of thinking and feeling, or of approaching relationships.
It provides a compass to navigate our core traits, those that determine our perception and decision-making, our communication style, our way of interacting with our teams, our motivation to perform, and our leadership style. It is a map to help us make sense of why we do what we do.
The Nine Sapiens approach to the Enneagram
Although born from a synthesis of philosophical and religious traditions, the existence of the nine Enneagram types has been supported by a growing body of scientific evidence (Sutton, 2007).
​The Nine Sapiens approach to the Enneagram integrates the traditional model with recent discoveries in the fields of behavioral genetics, neurobiology, and evolutionary psychology, grounding this powerfully intuitive tool into peer-reviewed scientific research.
Why is this useful and why should you care?
This model can work as a "shortcut" to greater level of self-awareness without having to learn complex "psychological" language. It is an invitation to value our strengths, to appreciate them, to build on them and not to take them for granted.
It offers a direct opportunity to visualize our blind spots, to clarify our areas of development, to improve our relationships and to identify strategies that will help us become more effective as leaders.
It also provides a "map" to understand others, to visualize the "landscape" of personalities that surrounds us, and to understand the distinctive contributions each can make to the team, beyond their formal role, exploring a whole new dimension of diversity & inclusion.
Finally, it allows for a deeper understanding of not only the WHAT, but also the WHY of personality, and the meaning of many of our emotions, motivations, or behaviors, offering a unique perspective on the adaptive purpose of personality.
Final words:
Today there is a broad consensus that personality is roughly 50% nature, a product of our genes and our neurobiology, and 50% nurture, that is, a direct result from our micro and macro experiences in permanent interaction with our genes. Still, psychologists agree that there is a third determinant: we can decide who we want to be, as leaders and as human beings, and make a conscious effort to develop, evolve, and change.
Our conviction is that we have created a simpler, deeper and more actionable approach, that will enable those who want to become better leaders, to create teams with a foundation of trust, or simply to grow as individuals, integrating previously unknown areas of their own self.
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We invite you to discover NINE Sapiens.
Why is the base on the
Enneagram?
The Enneagram, used as a personality model, has a much more scientific origin than is often recognized. The author who first formulated it as a typology was Claudio Naranjo, a psychiatrist who was trained at Berkeley and Harvard, and who collaborated with the most advanced researchers of his time in the study of personality.
The central elements of the enneagram model; that is to say, the existence of the nine types as a network of traits, motivations and behaviors, have been supported by a growing body of scientific evidence (Sutton, 2007).
Our theoretical building is based on, or informed by scientific evidence.
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