Do Social Change: Deepa Iyer's Social Change Ecosystem and the Enneagram's Instinctive Triad by Eric Hepburn

July 6, 2026 - We begin a four-part series exploring Deepa Iyer's social change ecosystem — from her book Social Change Now, the Unitarian Universalist Association's common read — through a developmental lens drawn from the Enneagram's three centers: gut, heart, and head, plus spirit.

This episode explores the instinctive (gut/body) triad: the people whose call to justice arrives as anger, and the three ecosystem roles where that energy finds its work — Frontline Responders ("do something"), Disrupters ("do something to interrupt"), and Experimenters ("do something different"). Along the way: the seven-to-one negativity ratio in human attention, how privilege changes the cost of standing up, the story of the 2015 Confederate flag removal at the South Carolina State House, and how spiritual discernment lets the body answer, step by step, whether we are moving toward justice.

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Listen: On The Pulipiteer Podcast

Watch: On the San Gabriel YouTube Channel

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Pulpiteer Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for readability: transcription errors corrected, filler words reduced, punctuation repaired. Bracketed items are editorial.

[00:00:00] Eric Hepburn (host intro): Welcome to the first episode of the third season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode. Today's episode is called "Do Social Change." It is the first of a four-part series exploring the social change ecosystem work of Deepa Iyer. We'll begin with our Great World House segment, and then our Voice of Wisdom, read by Emily Egger.

The Great World House

We now pause to honor the Great World House, of which we are a part — lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.

America is two hundred and fifty years old. And birthdays are a good time for reflection, for taking stock.

America was born in the age of the steam engine. When America was a hundred years old, the internal combustion engine age began — and that technology has been around long enough that we're now living in the unintended consequences of its widespread use.

When America was born, messages were carried by hand, or by horse, or by ship. When America was fifty years old, the telegraph was introduced; when she was one hundred, the telephone; when she was one hundred and sixty-five, the digital computer; one hundred and eighty, the satellite; one hundred and ninety, the internet; two hundred, the cell phone. Which made me realize that the cell phone is fifty years old — the first briefcase versions, not the little one, not the smartphone; they're a little newer than that.

When America was one hundred years old, things like psychology and political science had just started to become fields of study. When she was one hundred years old, discoveries like DNA and evolution changed how we saw ourselves and the world.

Why am I telling you this? We have had major evolutions in our ways of doing almost everything. Why haven't we had the next constitutional convention that the founders knew we needed? Why haven't we been willing to evolve our system of government?

I'm just going to leave you with that question.

A Voice of Wisdom

Let us enter a still place within, opening our hearts and minds to receive this Voice of Wisdom. After the words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence, preparing ourselves for the Word unfolding among us.

Today's Voice of Wisdom comes from Don Riso and Russ Hudson's work on the Enneagram:

"The body plays a crucial role in all forms of genuine spiritual work, because bringing awareness back to the body anchors the quality of presence. The reason is fairly obvious. While our minds and feelings can wander to the past or the future, our body can only exist here and now, in the present moment. This is one of the fundamental reasons why virtually all meaningful spiritual work begins with coming back to the body and becoming more grounded in it.

"Moreover, the instincts of the body are the most powerful energies that we have to work with. Any real transformative work must involve them, and any work that ignores them is almost certain to create problems. The body has an amazing intelligence and sensitivity, and it also has its own language and its own way of knowing."

The Sermon: Do Social Change — Eric Hepburn

So let's start like this. Some of you who were here two weekends ago saw the Unitarian Universalist Association's General Assembly service. Every week at the beginning of service, we remind you that this church is part of the Unitarian Universalist Association. And one of the things that association does every year is pick a book that they call their shared read, and they promote it for all the congregations to read, so that there's some shared experience that links us all together in the work that we're doing. And as we remind you weekly, part of the movement is to build a just, sustainable, and peaceful world.

The congregational shared read across the UUA this year is this book: Social Change Now, by Deepa Iyer. A few months back we did an all-ages service, and we read you the children's version of the book and talked about all the different social justice roles that people might play. If you get curious about that, there's still a display about it right back there, in front of the AV table, that has the names of the different roles.

Now, I'm going to preach on this topic for the next four weeks, but I'm not going to regurgitate the book to you. It's not that kind of class. It's the kind of class where, hopefully, if what I say resonates for you, you might go pick up the book if you're interested in what she wants to teach. But I'm going to talk about how it resonates with my own doctoral work, and what I think I want you all to get out of it — or why, for some of you, you might want to pick up that relatively short book and read it.

So I had to figure out — there's a multiplicity of roles; I'm going to forget the number, but I believe it's around nine [ten, in Iyer's framework] — and I can't preach nine sermons on the thing, one per role. That'd be crazy talk. And I also didn't want to give you — you've already had the condensed one-sermon version at the all-ages service, where we covered them all real quick. So I had to come up with a way of making it last four weeks, but also a way that hopefully dissected it in a way that made sense for people.

Here's the system we're going to use. For those of you who took the class I offered a few months back, this will feel familiar. The Enneagram is based on three triads. For simplicity, we're going to call them the gut — the body, the intuitive triad; the heart — the feeling, the emotional triad; and the head — the cognitive, mental triad. The Enneagram breaks people up into these three big camps. And the Enneagram is about where your motivational energy comes from.

Now, there are lots of different systems for carving up human beings and telling you what you're like and what you're about. There's Myers-Briggs; there's a whole bunch of different ones. You can go take a test and it'll tell you where you're at right now. Some people take that test and they think, "this is who I am forever and ever," and that becomes its own problem. But I'm hoping you'll find this tool useful.

So the four weeks we're going to do of this: today is Do Social Change — it's when you're driven from the gut. Then next week we'll do Feel Social Change, which is from the heart — it's when emotion is driving your social justice engagement. Then we're going to do the head — when your head is leading. And the last one is spirit. So we've got the three parts — gut, heart, and head — and then spirit. That's how we're going to structure this.

So we're going to start with the gut — the body, the instinctive triad. And when I say triad, all I'm saying is that they decided to cut the thing into three parts, and each one of those is a triad. It's not mystical language. It's just: when you cut something into three parts, you get three triads.

Now, the Enneagram does something interesting. You've heard me preach — those of you for whom it's not your first time — about the seven-to-one ratio among human beings. We are seven times more sensitive to negative stuff than positive stuff. Evolutionary theorists have written a lot about this: the cost of missing a potential meal or a mate is way lower than the cost of missing a potential life-threatening predator. You've heard people rationalize about why that might be. But the truth is that we know through measurement that this seven-to-one ratio is true. We're just seven times more tuned in to bad stuff happening than the good stuff that happens.

It's why we have resulting cultural phenomena like "if it bleeds, it leads" — because that's the thing that glues the eyeballs to the TV. That's the thing that wins the attention economy: the bad news, the negative stuff, the stuff that makes you feel like you either want to fight or flee or fawn or freeze — those are the four responses to danger. The things that trigger those responses in you tend to get our attention.

And what's interesting is that the Enneagram, as an evaluative system, leans into that. It says: look, I can try to tell you about the positive aspects of these different triads, but you're not going to recognize it. So what I'm going to tell you is what it looks like when it's bad — because you're going to see that immediately.

So here's what you need to understand about the instinctive triad: it's motivated by underlying anger and rage.

If, when you look at the news, your primary instinctual response is that you're pissed off — I might be talking to you right now. Or I might be talking to some part of you. If the thing that you're carrying from one day to the next is just this bubbling, boiling cauldron of seething anger that you struggle to manage — that's your gut calling you to social justice action.

So, in my analysis of Deepa Iyer's work, there are people who are mostly driven from that anger — managing that anger and figuring out how to do something positive with it. We're going to flip it: it's a negative feeling, but the goal of social change work is to take the energy from that and figure out how to do something positive and non-destructive with it.

There are three ways that instinctive types tend to show up to social justice work. Now, I'm going to say this one more time: this is not Deepa Iyer's theory. This is my theory about her theory. I don't want to misrepresent.

The three types are: Frontline Responders — and I categorize frontline responders as do something. "I'm mad. I've got to do something." There are Disrupters, which adds a qualifier: do something to interrupt. Disrupters want to do something to interrupt what's happening. You see somebody being mistreated — you want to interrupt that situation. Your boss just said something racist in a meeting, and you're like, "not okay" — in the meeting. React, disrupt, interrupt patterns of oppression, patterns of injustice that are happening. And then Experimenters. Experimenters add a different qualifier at the end of "do something": they want to do something different. "We tried that, and we know it doesn't work. And I'm so mad because we keep doing it again and again and again. Please, can we do something different and see how that feels? Because I'm tired of being angry all the time at us making the same mistakes over and over again."

Okay. So there are these three roles — Frontline Responders, Disrupters, and Experimenters — that I think resonate with this gut energy the most. Most of the people I've met in social justice work who fit these roles tend to fall into this anger category. You can feel it seething under the surface. They're just mad. Now, they're working real hard, like all of us do, and like all good humans do, to turn that anger into something pro-social. This isn't demonizing frontline workers or disrupters or experimenters for the energy that motivates them. This is being honest about what that energy is, where it's coming from, and the challenges of focusing that kind of energy into productive social justice work. I don't know about you, but I have run into situations where that anger gets misplaced onto collaborators in the work instead of into the work itself.

And I think one of the gifts of Deepa Iyer's work is that she takes these categories and shows you what a good, healthy version of each looks like. So if the description starts to resonate with you, but you want to know what it looks like in a good case — what it looks like when that negative energy of anger gets channeled in a positive way — I think her book could help you flesh that out for yourself.

If you're a Frontline Responder, you probably already know. I can look out at the crowd and see a few of you out there who I would probably put in that category. Most days, the email comes in, or the text comes in about the march, and you don't ask if — you ask, "what do I have to move on my calendar so I can show up?" Or something happens, and you're the one making the calls to organize the march. But it doesn't have to just be that. It might be that you're a frontline responder in your workplace, or in your kid's school community. It's not always at that layer or that level. But something's happened, and the way you want to respond to something happening is: "I'm going to act. I'm going to act to increase the visibility of it. I'm going to act to build critical mass around it."

And one of the things that frontline responders do when they mature into the role: they move beyond just inviting other people to join them, to helping those people navigate the situation. They do things we typically associate with community organizers, and they do that stuff well. They make sure that if Sammy gets arrested at the protest, there are five of us at the jail who are going to sit in chairs and wait until Sammy is with us, and we walk out together. They make sure that everybody's got everybody's cell phone numbers at the beginning of the action. They make sure there's a contact and call list for emergencies. They make sure they know which lawyer in town is going to get called if somebody gets arrested or beat up or something bad happens. They put together the networks that make social actions work — when they're high-functioning. When they're low-functioning, they're the people who show up and just scream vitriol at everybody they disagree with, because they've got to do something with all that anger, but they haven't figured out what good to do with it yet. And we've probably all seen that, too.

Disrupters: do something to interrupt. It's really important — if you're one of those people who's wired at the gut level to notice when the thing has started to veer off course — whether that's inappropriate comments around gender or authority or race or sexual identity or orientation — and it's happening at your kid's school, it's happening in your workplace, it's happening in your book group or your golf group or your retirement community. It doesn't matter where. But when that thing comes up in real time, and you're the one who's like, "not okay, not okay" — that is a really important voice to listen to.

Now, not all of us are wired that way. But if you're wired that way, and you're tired of shoving it down because you were taught that it wasn't polite, I'm inviting you to take the lid off. I'm not inviting you to take the lid off so that you can be unkind to people in response to their unkindness. I'm asking you to take the lid off because they need your sense of what is right and healthy and okay as feedback in their lives. Not because you need to change them, but because they need to see what it looks like for someone to stand up and say, "that's not okay." Not with anger — the mature version has metabolized the anger into a willingness to stand. The mature version has metabolized the anger into a willingness to put one's own self and social position and standing at risk — to stand up and say, "there's a power dynamic in this room, but I'm going to stand up anyway and say what just happened was not okay. And I'm going to say why it wasn't okay. And I'm going to do it with love and compassion for everybody in the room. But I'm still going to stand up. I'm not going to sit quietly and hope it'll fix itself."

That's what disrupters do. And if you feel that call within you, I'm inviting you to start exploring what it feels like to stand up from time to time.

Now, one of the important things that Deepa talks about in the literature, and that I will point out: there's a scale of privilege in the universe, which means that the differential costs for some people standing up versus other people standing up are not the same. I'll give a gender example. You are the only woman on the leadership team of your organization, and something sexist is said in the meeting. There are eleven men in the room and one woman. The cost for one of the eleven men to stand up and say "that was sexist and it's not okay" is super different than the cost for the one woman in the room to stand up and say "that was sexist, it's not okay." Is everybody in track with that? Does that feel right to you? Can you see that play out in your mind's eye — that those are radically different things? And it works similarly across status, across race.

There's a great story in the book. I wish I remembered what year it was [2015] — a young woman of color activist [Bree Newsome] climbed the South Carolina flagpole to take down the Confederate flag that was hanging from it. It was a civil resistance act. And what I love in the book — the way they talk about this difference of privilege and how it can play out for disrupters — is what's little known: while this young woman of color was doing this amazingly brave thing in climbing the flagpole, she had a confederate — a helper — who was a white male, who stood guard at the base of the flagpole. And when they threatened to tase her, and electrocute her, and make her fall off the flagpole, he stood there with his hands on the flagpole and said, "you're going to have to electrocute me, too."

And the theory in the book — and I believe this, because of what I've seen in the world — was that it made it a lot harder for those white officers to pull the trigger on that Taser, to have that white guy standing there saying, "nope, I'm putting my body between yours and hers." Because privilege matters, and racism is still real. Because privilege matters, and racism and sexism and homophobia — all that stuff is still real. And there are still people less privileged than you, almost no matter your status, who need your help. Who need you to be the one to stand up and say, "that wasn't all right."

Sorry, Michelle — that wasn't all right. I'm just kidding. You know, every service needs these kinds of moments as a lubricant, when Eric starts to get too serious about himself.

So, the third category: Experimenters. I struggled with this one, because sometimes I think experimenters are coming from the head — they're mostly thinking people. But I've met a lot of them who really are acting from the gut. Not only in the motivational-energy way — that resonant anger that's driving them — but also in the sense that they really can't tell you whether the new thing is good until they try it, in the present, in their body. They're like, "we have to try a new way — and when we live the new way, then I can answer the question about whether it's working or not." Now, when we get to the head people in a couple of weeks, you'll see that the Visionaries are happy to cast a vision; they have no idea what it's like to inhabit that vision. But the experimenters are the ones who say, "I don't know how we're going to get there. I don't have a roadmap. But I know that if we try different things, and we're present in our body while we try them, our body can help us answer the question about whether we're on the right path."

This is similar to the ideas about spiritual discernment that I've been sharing with you all — this idea that when we center, when we allow things to become quiet, we can feel — in our spirit, mind, heart, and body — we can feel through it that we're moving in the right direction. We've been taught to mistrust that we have such a sense. Our culture teaches us to mistrust that we are capable of such recognition. But it is, to my mind and my study, one of the deepest spiritual truths that comes through almost every major tradition: that through meditation, practice, stillness, worship, we can become quiet and still enough to hear the voice of the divine in us — the voice of the divine that we are, that is part of us — and it can help guide us in these troubling times.

Lou and Chuck asked the question during their service last week: how do we stay grounded in our values? How do we do that when the world is such a mess? And one of my answers is: not to retreat into spiritual practice away from the world, but to use spiritual practice as a way to be able to feel the answer to the question of, "is this step in the right direction?" And then, "is this next step in the right direction?" And if we do that in real time, in each moment, our gut starts to help us answer the question about whether we're moving in the right direction. Are we moving toward justice? I think that's at the heart of what experimenters do. They're like, "don't give me a big fancy novel about what the future utopia is going to look like. Let's change this thing on the ground about how we really do stuff — and feel it. Let's feel how that change works, and we'll know if we're on the right track or not."

So. If you find yourself carrying a lot of anger or rage, I want to suggest to you that one of these three roles — or maybe more than one of them — [is calling you].

Now — these systems of dissecting things are useful analytical constructs. But I really want to emphasize the importance of not mistaking the map for the terrain. The terrain is: we have this deeply interconnected existence, the edges of which we are just starting to become aware of. That's the terrain. The map is all these different ways we have of cutting up that terrain so that we can figure out how to navigate, or build a city, or make a road or a railroad track, or fly an airplane. Super useful. Super helpful. Just don't mistake the map for the terrain.

So — maybe you're a frontline responder–disrupter. Or maybe you're a disrupter–experimenter. Or maybe you're none of those. Or all three of them. It's all okay. I'm not trying to make a pigeonhole and ask you to fit into it. But I am saying that these typologies — just like all the different typologies, the warrior-hero myth, all of them — they can be useful. The question for you — each of you, individually — is: did I hear something in one of these roles that resonated for me, in a way that invites me to get curious about it more deeply? And if you didn't find one today, that's okay. Maybe you recognized a friend or a colleague in one of those descriptions, and this will help you understand how to support them better.

Frontline Responders: when it happens, you feel the need to do something. Learn to trust that need. It is a real need. It is a gut need, and a soul need, a spirit need. Learn to trust it and to say yes to it — when you feel like, "I need to do something."

If you're called to be a Disrupter — "I need to do something to interrupt" — reclaim your self-trust, and act. Yes, there is risk there. And you have been taught that the easiest way through life is to just avoid the risks. And some days it's true — there are some moments when that's probably the right choice. But I know it's not all the time. It's not all the time that the safe way is the right way. It's not all the time that minimizing the risk is the right move. Sometimes the right move is to stand up, with courage, and acknowledgment, and acceptance that there might be consequences for you — and to say: "I didn't know where the line was until today. But you just crossed it. And somebody has to stand up and say so. And I'm going to."

Now, maybe your reaction to something going wrong isn't the need to interrupt. Maybe it's the need to find the next new way. Maybe you're an Experimenter, and maybe you're like, "that weird thing happened — we have to find a way to redo the structure of our meetings, or whatever it is, so that doesn't keep happening. Let me think about that. Let's try something. What if we change the order of the meeting, or change who makes the agenda? What if we do something different? Let's do something different and see how that feels. Because this doesn't feel right in my gut, the way we're doing this."

So: if you find yourself in the instinctive triad of the Enneagram — if you find yourself driven, and experiencing anger and rage at the way things are — my answer to Lou and Chuck's question from last week, about how you find hope, is this: you start to answer, for yourself, the question of "how do I metabolize this anger into action that feeds me and feeds my community?"

Because it is possible. It is possible for that burning sensation in the pit of your stomach to do something other than irritate you.

May it be so.

[00:33:27] Eric Hepburn (host outro): Until next time — thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give. The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted on Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, and Keith Hutchinson. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn. See you next time.