Introducing Cognitive Diversity to Purdue Students
Purdue students have a difficult time with team assignments. Too often, unproductive members of the team drag down productivity and increase the frustration of other members. Until now, Purdue faculty have not had a systematic approach to providing students with the skills to manage complex collaborations. The AEM-Cube(TM) – developed by our European colleagues at Human Insight – is an assessment of those cognitive preferences. Individuals taking the assessment will learn about how they can best contribute to a team; even better is a whole team taking the assessment and adjusting their assignments and self-management accordingly. Struggling teams will understand why they’ve gone off the rails, while already-strong teams will understand what they need to do to reach their most ambitious goals.
We are now working on plans to expand the application of AEM-Cube to Purdue undergraduates. In the Fall, we will be providing the assessment to 400 undergraduate engineering students. We are working on a like number of undergraduate business students. In addition, we are launching a research project to explore what we are finding about the cognitive differences between engineering and business students.
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.