Your Superpower is your contribution, the role that you’re put on this Earth to fill. It’s what you do better than anyone else.

Everyone has unique strengths – those things that come effortlessly and naturally to you. From Superpowers to Great Teams, a new online class offered by IDEO U in partnership with SYPartners, guides learners through a discovery process to identify their unique strengths—called Superpowers—and learn to amplify them.

Drawing from the archetypes and attributes of effective leaders, these superpowers range from empathy—a strong ability to understand the needs of others—to systems building—understanding all of the pieces of a process—to creative thinking, grit, and decisiveness, among others. Tapping into your superpower will not only help you to bring your best self to work, it will allow you to create the conditions for the people around you to thrive. Knowing yourself and how you relate to others is key to building strong relationships, great teams, and thriving organizations.

Superpower: Complexity Busting

Complexity Busters love to tame unruly thoughts. With X-ray vision, they cut through layers of information to find the most important ideas. And they manage to strip away the extraneous stuff without dumbing down the thinking. They’re great to tap when the team has a huge amount of research but isn’t sure what it all means. Or when a team has generated a pile of ideas but isn’t sure what steps to take next.

Collaboration Tips

• Complexity Busters are best at articulating the overall gestalt of an idea. Don’t ask them to write detailed specs.
• Think about pairing a Complexity Buster with a Systems Thinker. They’ll have a good balancing effect on each other.

Identify your superpower, build stronger work relationships, and learn how to set the conditions for thriving, collaborative teams in our new class, From Superpowers to Great Teams.