From a Teaching to an Institute

Where Oscar Ichazo taught the Enneagram within his own Arica School and Claudio Naranjo transmitted it informally to a circle of students in Berkeley in the early 1970s, Riso and Hudson built an organization around it. They founded the Enneagram Institute to teach, certify and publish within the framework they had developed, formalizing what had previously passed through oral teaching and small groups into a structured training and certification program, workshops, and a body of published reference material anchored by their two major books.

Alongside the written framework, Riso and Hudson developed the Riso Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator, a self report questionnaire designed to help a reader identify their own type from a standardized set of questions rather than through a teacher's individual assessment or lengthy self study alone. The instrument extended the system's reach well past the settings where it had previously circulated, into workplace training, coaching and popular psychology more broadly, a shift in audience and format that tracks the same move from oral lineage to published, institutionalized system evident in their levels of development and Hornevian group additions. Whatever else separates Riso and Hudson's version of the Enneagram from Ichazo's original teaching, the two books, the Institute and the assessment together account for most of how the system is actually encountered by newcomers today.