Creating Unity Through Conflict:
The Legacy Of Profound Curiosity and the Enneagram

by Dr. Paula Raines

When we are faced with a conflict at work, our thoughts and energies often go into trying to manage the situation - some people go into panic mode or try to soothe bruised egos, others may focus on winning their point at all costs. But what if we could approach any conflict knowing ahead of time how the different individuals involved will likely react and use that knowledge to create a win-win outcome?

One of the keys to better conflict resolution is for individuals to develop "profound curiosity" about each other: the desire to truly understand how another person sees the world - their values, pressures, feelings, perceptions and goals. When people become as interested in learning the other person's perspective as they are in making their own views known, conflict becomes less about getting your own point across and more about opening up to new ideas, options and solutions to a potential problem.

Individuals who develop profound curiosity train themselves to initially put aside their own agendas and focus first on trying to understand one another's point of view. By asking questions that delve deeply into how the others see the same situation, they invite greater connection and intimacy. As a result, antagonism often gives way to partnership.

Profound curiosity requires a person to suspend judgment, withhold placing blame and to not make assumptions about another's motives. A tool that can be used very successfully to develop this skill is the Enneagram, a personality system based on nine distinctly different character types. The use of the Enneagram in business has increased dramatically in recent years. The power of the Enneagram is attested to both by the proliferation of books on the subject since 1987 ( there are currently more than 150 English titles and dozens more in other languages) and by the fact that leading organizations around the world including the CIA, Boeing, The Vatican, the United States Postal Service, KLM and many others use the Enneagram to understand and manage conflict from a dramatically different perspective.

Using the Enneagram, you can learn how the nine types can view the same situation and the unique value each individual perspective brings. This tool helps people stop fixating over the right or wrong of a disagreement and adopt the attitude of profound curiosity, which can broaden expectations of how a situation can be resolved and increases creativity and innovation.

The Enneagram is depicted as a circle with nine points representing each of the character types. One Enneagram truth is that no one character type is better than the others ... just different. The point is often made by Enneagram teachers that, on a circle, all points are equally distant from the center.

The circle also represents the holistic view that, regardless of its placement, no one Enneagram type possesses a perspective of more than one-ninth of reality. In essence, for the totality of any situation to be understood, all points of view must be considered. One of the main goals in learning the Enneagram is to enable individuals to move beyond their own character "fixations". The ability to move beyond your own character, or type, greatly contributes to an increased capability to generate far more options in any given situation than can be discerned individually.