Attention Filters and Enneagram at the Agile Tour Aix-Marseille 2017

As an Agilist, the end of the year is punctuated by the Agile Tours. I had the honor of participating again in the Agile Tour Aix-Marseille, on December 7, 2017, which had already left me with very good memories in 2016: I had presented the Ball Flow Game Revisited and the Kanban Values.

This time, I had the chance to share 2 of my current topics:

• the Agile Rocket, another way of talking about agility in metaphorical form. Find them slides from my session “Agile Rocket: Cooperate Module”.
• I'Enneagram, a personality typology model that I particularly like, through the session “Communicate better by discovering your attention filters”

I will describe in this article my workshop on attention filters which, I hope, was able to arouse the curiosity of the participants! 😉

The pitch

A now recurring element in Agile Tours: the pitch of the speakers. The idea is to present your session in 30 seconds in order to arouse the curiosity of the participants!

This exercise is always a little stressful for me, but here is the one I came up with:

In my session, I propose to talk about attention filters. Why is that ? Because what we pay attention to is a reflection of our way of thinking, reflecting, behaving and therefore communicating. Indeed, one of the illusions of communication is to believe that what is important for us is necessarily important for the other!

At the same time, you will discover a personality typology model that I hope will help you to know yourself better, understand others better and make your interactions more effective.

The workshop

Having 2 hours for my session, the workshop structure was as follows:

• (40′) A practical part where participants will discover the content themselves
• (20′) Debriefing
• (60′) Presentation of the model and Questions/Answers

In this first phase, the participants will be divided into 3 subgroups in order to discover 3 attention filters at a time.

For example :

The goals and opinions of others, which can save me discomfort.

In the form of a puzzle, they will have to associate:

• A main motivation: what drives the person to do what they do
• A cult value
• A main tendency (under stress)
• What the person seeks to avoid at all costs
• A communication style
• Common words or thoughts

It looks roughly like this:

By having 9 to discover, each group will turn on the attention filters of the others every 15 minutes. I then ask them to simply check the consistency of the associations already present and to make changes if necessary. I do not particularly give more information on the content before launching the workshop, the interest being to encourage exchanges between participants.

At the end of the last 15′ timebox, I invite the participants to launch the debriefing phase.

Debriefing

Each group comes to display on the stick wall his results. It is then easier to debrief together by having all the elements in front of you! 😉

Rather than providing answers, I try to tell a story using the attention filter. This allows participants to better understand the path, to correct themselves – knowing that they had the choice between 3 options each time – and to generate exchanges.

When I went over the 9 attention filters, I kindly share the fall of the workshop:

You may have noticed that the description I made of each personality was more from the angle of faults than of qualities. You should know that I was equally mean with each one, which means that if you have the impression that I was harder with one than with another, it may be that there is an eel under rock! 😛

We can then see a few smiles appear on the faces and a certain relaxation in the atmosphere. 😆

I share with the participants one of the other illusions of communication in my opinion:

Believing that because a tool has worked with one person, it will necessarily work with another.

I then ask them if the exercise was easy for them. We agree on the fact that it took some effort to fully understand a personality and that's when I invite them to tell me how to better communicate with a person whose attention filter is:

Sources of apparent and hidden danger in the world and in others.

The responses I get are:

• You have to be clear, precise
• You have to reassure her, secure her
• You have to talk to him about concrete, well-defined things
• …

Nothing that doesn't come from me, everything that comes from the participants! I then allow myself to make the remark to them so that they realize that they have all the answers, they only need to make the necessary effort! 😉

I then move on quietly to a description of the model.

The intention and messages of the workshop

My first intention was obviously to discover this exciting model that is the Enneagram.

Now, it was also important for me to convey certain messages through the workshop:

The Enneagram is above all a tool intended for self-knowledge and personal transformation.

One thing that may be difficult to accept is that you cannot change others. On the other hand, we can change the way we interact with them, which means that the change starts with us!

To discover oneself is to understand what drives us, what bothers us, makes us uncomfortable, but also what can irritate others in our home. Isn't there already enough to do on our side before going to the others? 😛

The Enneagram is a model of personality typology focusing primarily on motives individuals rather than their behavior.

The exchanges between participants clearly show that the characteristics cannot always be directly associated. Indeed, all these elements are only behaviors and the arguments that emerge come to go back to the intention of the person, to his motivation. Thus, we then understand that the same behavior can be associated with different motivations.

Despite temptation, allow others to discover themselves.

We can see that it is not so easy to type a person. Indeed, we only see behaviors and it is only with time and a good knowledge of the model that we can detect repeating patterns that can help us trace motivation.

To tell a person that he is of such and such a type is to impose a partial vision of his personality, with, moreover, a high probability that it is erroneous. It is also preventing him from self-observing and freeing himself from his limiting automatisms.

Allowing others to discover themselves is also accept that they don't want to.

Finding out your type can sometimes be painful for some people and should not be forced upon them. This is why in the process, I invite participants to put themselves in the shoes of a person with the attention filter in order to distance themselves during the study.

During the debriefing and especially during the fall, it's my attempt to give people indications on the types to deepen without them having to communicate them openly: it's my gift, let's say!

The Enneagram is an incredible compassionate tool.

To believe that what is important for us is necessarily important for the other is to be wrong 8 times out of 9 according to the Enneagram!

To discover that we do not all see the world in the same way is to understand that the intentions of others are not necessarily against us, but maybe for them ! Giving ourselves the opportunity to understand is obviously not to justify certain behaviors, but it allows us to distance ourselves from events and limit our judgments vis-à-vis others.

The Enneagram doesn't put people in boxes because a type does not fully describe an individual.

Throughout the workshop, the remark often emerges on the fact that the participants recognize themselves in different places. You just have to keep in mind that we are all capable of “doing” everything if we talk about behaviors but that we have automatisms “under stress” that we activate more easily than others.

Indeed, an individual is a complex mixture that cannot be reduced to its automatisms. The Enneagram, rather than putting people in boxes, is intended to raise awareness of the box in which we have locked ourselves (our limitations) and to allow us to express our full potential!

Communicating better with others is take the time to get to know them.

In my opinion, there is no miracle tool to better communicate with others. The effort that was made during the workshop to understand the different attention filters, and therefore different personality types, is for me one of the best ways to interact more effectively.

Conclusion

The Agile Tour Aix Marseille has, in my opinion, become a staple of Agile conferences at the end of the year, both in terms of the atmosphere and the richness of the exchanges between speakers and participants. This one was very special for me because it was the last as a Gooodien! 😥

The workshop itself received very good feedback and I myself was surprised at the enthusiasm that the subject was able to arouse among the participants! This encourages me to continue this momentum to promote and develop this tool within the Agile community.

If you are interested in organizing a session at your place, do not hesitate to contact me. Several sessions have already taken place in different companies and communities with success! 😀

A big thank you to the ATAM organization for its welcome, its confidence and for this high quality conference! 🙂

I wanted to especially thank Patricia Chabreuil for his help and benevolence in the construction of this workshop. You can find his works on the website of the French Institute of the Enneagram.