- Home
- Preface
- Introduction
- Three Zones and Nine Sectors
- Wings and Moves and other functions
- Biblical Journeys
- Prayer
- The Enneagram
- From the Enneagram to the Strategy Board
buy from amazon.com
buy from amazon.co.uk
From the Enneagram
to the Strategy Board
The enneagram is generally presented as a system of three parts:
-
a list of nine types of people, variously described
-
their arrangement in a circle in a specific order
- their further interconnection by a distinctive irregular pattern of internal arrows.
Over a hundred books have been published on this material in the last twenty years. It has been presented variously as a tool for personal growth, a program for business management, and a resource for spiritual direction.
In all of this, each part of the system has been endlessly described – but never explained.
In the gap where the explanation should be, all kinds of popular myths have flourished. The most widespread is the idea that the enneagram was passed down as secret knowledge among eastern sages before being brought to the west by a handful of privileged teachers – a myth which can be endlessly embroidered, to the delight of some and the consternation of others.
Scratch the surface of this myth and it simply disappears. There is no evidence for the enneagram’s distinctive diagram existing in any source or tradition earlier than the twentieth century. The only correlation with its list of nine types of people before the twentieth century is in the soundly Christian work of the desert fathers on ‘the theology of the passions’ – the origin of our contemporary list of ‘seven deadly sins.’
Into ‘the gap where the explanation should be’ comes the present text.
From first principles – from the first page – it explains as it describes.
This appendix describes the ‘real’ history of the enneagram – and then its development, from the enneagram to the Strategy Board.