The Collective Mind Method

As a management consultancy specialising in the project management environment, we have gained a very clear picture in recent years of the effects of the temperament and soft skills of individual employees on project success. Diversity and extreme effects are good if you know how to use them correctly. The Collective Mind Method is a medium that we have successfully used to bring together the different types of people involved in a project at a common level of communication and to guide them from there to a unified vision of goals, content and tasks in the project. A prerequisite for the successful implementation of the method is that all employees in the project environment analyse their own personality type at the outset. The Myers-Briggs type indicator model, for example, can be used for this purpose.

In most cases, your project will have a mix of up to 16 different personality types, with varying degrees of introversion and extraversion, intuition and realism, emotionality and logic, and judgement and flexibility. While some prefer to deal with the finer details of the individual tasks (‘how level’), others already consider the end date of the project (‘goal level’).

The Collective Mind Method takes the approach of bringing these different levels together at the ‘what level’ in order to gain a collective understanding of the project environment, objective and task content. By initially determining the individual personality types, it is possible to understand the individual communication levels of your project members and create the basis for a joint exchange at the ‘what level’. Project teams that operate with a collective mindset and can address issues at the ‘what level’ are able to organise collaboration more consciously, prevent potential conflicts and make room for individual preferences.