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I don't know about this Trimble outfit, but many of my friends and relationship partners have found value in similar tests like enneagrams. In my experience, they do help distill relationship dynamics into a smaller set of more understandable patterns. No, it's not rigorous hard science, but neither is most of what we might speak about with a therapist. They can be great frameworks to build on, if you trust the people you're building with.

Then again, the power dynamics when a company tried to work with you on them, I can easily imagine that as threatening. After all, my friends care about both my personal growth and our interpersonal growth -- a company mainly cares about how I can most benefit them.

Anyhow, I suppose I'm defending the class of methods (as I've experienced them), outside the context :)




There is a big difference between using the Enneagram to get to understand yourself and others better and using it to judge people. No profile is 100% correct, but some companies act like they always are.

It's similar to unit test code coverage: a great tool to point to areas that might use some attention, but a bad tool to determine whether a commit should be rejected.




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