Strategic Diversity Assessments for Students in the School of Engineering Technology
Collaboration involves a complex basket of skills. No individual is equally proficient in all of them. Indeed, we migrate toward our comfort zone. The challenge, of course, involves understanding how we can measure and communicate the strategic diversity within a team. To help us solve this challenge, we reached out to Human Insight, a company founded on the work of Peter Robertson, a Dutch psychiatrist. Our collaboration began over a year ago.
While Human Insight’s work has been validated over the past 20 years in large companies across Europe, the approach is relatively little exposure in the US. Now, through its partnership with Purdue, human insight is offering this assessment to clients in the US.
This article from the Harvard Business Review explores the power of the approach developed by Human Insight, called the AEM Cube.
This fall, working with Ken Burbank, ahead of the School of Engineering Technology, we provided this assessment to entering freshmen in the School. In addition, Ken extended the invitation to participate in an assessment to members of the School’s Industrial Advisory Board.
We see this type of assessment is being valuable on a number of different levels. First, research demonstrates that strategic diversity – cognitive diversity – is critically important within a team addressing complex challenges. So balancing the team becomes an important approach. Equally important, our students need to understand their cognitive profile and how that operates within a team context. The School of Engineering Technology is leading the way in experimenting with this new approach to developing the engineering talent we need for tomorrow.
The Founder of the Lab at UNA and co-author of Strategic Doing: 10 Skills for Agile Leadership, Ed’s work has focused on developing new models of strategy specifically designed to accelerate complex collaboration in networks and open innovation. He is the original developer of Strategic Doing.