Diversified Teams

Abstract

Problem-solving teams can be constructed and organized using personality questionnaire information mapped on to Jungian cognition theory. This opening chapter records the method’s documented successes with engineering student design teams, advises the reader how to use the book, outlines the underlying approach, and discusses why and how the method improves team performance. This approach to composing and analyzing “cognitively diverse” engineering student design teams has been developed since 1991 in Stanford University’s Mechanical Engineering Design Division, in which graduate student teams design, build, demonstrate and present projects motivated by industrial, medical and social problems. Its application tripled the fraction of Stanford teams awarded Lincoln Foundation graduate design prizes.