🐉🔥 Tuesday’s Spark & Fire landed on one Enneagram type by accident.

And somehow, that accident opened something much bigger.

We landed on the Investigator.

And I didn’t explore it alone.

Sanne.

Nicol.

Robin.

Different perspectives.

Different experiences.

Different ways of seeing the same pattern.

And that is exactly where the real value lives.

Not in the framework.

But in the diversity around it.

At first, I thought:

Will this even be enough?

One type. One page. One small corner of the book.

But the deeper we went, the more something important revealed itself.

Not just about Investigators.

About leadership.

And in truth, this is not new terrain for me.

In my book and programs, I go deeply into the danger of labeling people too quickly.

Because everything I create is rooted in inclusivity  not reducing people to labels, but creating space where they can be fully seen.

Because there is a difference between recognizing a pattern

and reducing a person to one.

I’ve experienced this myself.

Moments where I was reduced to a type, a style, a single lens.

Where parts of me were recognized  and the rest quietly ignored.

And that disconnect stays with you.

This is also the method behind that work.

We begin with frameworks  because they help us see.

They give language to what was previously invisible.

And in my programs, we don’t stop at learning the types.

We explore the diversity of thinking.

How people level up and down.

How the same behavior can come from completely different inner worlds.

So that, over time, we learn something deeper:

how to differentiate ourselves from others,

how to stop projecting our own lens onto them,

and how to stay curious instead of certain.

Because that is where real leadership begins.

But we are not meant to stay in the framework.

We learn to step beyond it.

To loosen the structure.

To return to something deeper.

Our dragon identities  🐉 the part of us beneath patterns, roles, and learned behavior.

Just like Agile was never meant to be followed as a rigid system,

but as a path toward thinking, adapting, and owning our way of working.

Because the real lesson was not:

“Here is how to label people.”

The real lesson was:

how quickly leadership becomes dangerous when we confuse understanding with boxing.

There is a difference between seeing someone’s style

and assuming you now know their soul.

And there is a difference between using a framework to ask better questions

or using it to stop being curious.

That’s where so many leaders go wrong.

They learn a model.

A type.

A color.

A communication style.

And instead of becoming more open, they become more certain.

But certainty is not the same as connection.

Because underneath the pattern, there is always a dragon.

Underneath the overthinking, there may be fear.

Underneath the skepticism, there may be dismissal wounds.

Underneath the resistance, there may be someone who has spent years being told they are “too much.”

That changes how you lead.

Because then the question is no longer:

“How do I handle this person?”

It becomes:

“What is this person protecting?”

“What do they need to feel safe enough to stay present?”

“What helps them bring their gift  instead of only their armor?”

And something else became very clear that night:

skepticism is not the enemy.

Unheard skepticism becomes sabotage.

Shamed skepticism becomes cynicism.

But welcomed skepticism can become wisdom.

Sometimes the person slowing the room down

is the one trying to stop the whole system from collapsing.

And sometimes the most powerful thing a leader can do

is not shut that person down

but create enough safety for their voice to become contribution.

🐲 A dragon truth from Tuesday night

When leaders use frameworks to control people, trust dies.

When leaders use frameworks to understand people, possibility opens.

People are never just “a type.”

They are a story.

A survival strategy.

A wound.

A brilliance.

A becoming.

And if we lead as if the framework is the whole person,

we will miss the very thing we were trying to understand.

That’s why I keep coming back to the dragons.

Because dragons remind us that what looks difficult on the surface

is often guarding something powerful underneath.

And great leadership is not about slaying that dragon.

It is about creating enough space, safety, and truth

that it no longer needs to breathe fire at everything in the room.

💚 Leadership is not about knowing people faster.

It is about seeing them more deeply.