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: Pattern Mapping

Pattern Mappers look at the world as if it had a secret overlay showing all the connections between and among things. They are always in a mode of inquiry—asking questions, mapping similarities, chasing after the logic. They can help the team find shortcuts at the start of a new endeavor by quickly deducing what’s truly new and what’s actually quite familiar to something the team has already seen or done before.

Collaboration Tips

• When a Pattern Mapper is asking questions and you’re not sure of the answers, it’s a good signal that there are things you haven’t fully thought through. Use that moment to refine your thinking and inject more rigor.
• Pattern Mappers will keep noodling on something seemingly illogical until they crack the code. Don’t be surprised if they reopen a conversation a few days or a few weeks later. It won’t seem like a non sequitur for them.

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.