Technology has changed since 1921. Has your profiling tool kept pace?
Theory matters. What you can do with it matters more.
In 1921, Carl Jung published Psychological Types, introducing ideas about human differences that would influence psychology and many of the profiling instruments that followed.
More than a century later, his thinking still matters.
But the world in which we apply it has changed beyond recognition.
The way we work has changed. Organisations have changed. Technology has changed. Teams are increasingly dispersed, diverse and interconnected. And AI is now transforming what people themselves are required to contribute.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether the underlying theory still has value.
It is:
What can we actually do with it?
THEORY ISN’T CAPABILITY
I’ve always been fascinated by the difference between understanding how something should work and making it work in practice.
Perhaps that’s the engineer in me.
Think about James Watt and the steam engine.
Watt’s great contribution wasn’t that he understood a theory nobody else understood. It was his ability to apply observation, experimentation and engineering to make the steam engine dramatically more effective.
The science explaining precisely what was happening developed alongside and after much of the engineering.
Application matters.
The same is true of people.
Knowing someone’s psychological type is interesting.
Understanding what that means when they communicate with a colleague, respond to pressure, lead a meeting, make a decision or become embroiled in conflict is considerably more useful.
That’s where profiling becomes practical.
And that’s where Perfect Teams® begins.
FROM PERSONALITY TO CHARACTER
Many profiling instruments help individuals understand themselves.
That’s valuable.
But a team isn’t simply a collection of individuals.
It is a system of relationships.
At Perfect Teams®, we’re interested in character: the underlying characteristics people bring to the team, how those different characters interact and, critically, what might be missing.
Because the objective isn’t to label people.
It’s to make the team more capable.
Used properly, profiling should help us answer three practical questions.
1. Who am I?
Self-awareness comes first.
Understanding our natural characteristics, motivations, strengths and potential weaknesses gives us greater choice over how we behave.
It helps us recognise why some things come naturally while others require more effort.
And it gives us a framework for understanding why somebody else may see precisely the same situation completely differently.
That’s useful knowledge.
Applying it is capability.
2. What happens when we work together?
Put two different characters together and something happens.
Sometimes they complement one another beautifully.
Sometimes they drive one another mad.
Neither necessarily means somebody is right or wrong.
They may simply communicate differently, process information differently or approach problems from different perspectives.
Understanding those differences allows people to adapt.
One Perfect Teams® user described the value very simply: once he could see the different characters he worked with, he could adapt the way he communicated with them.
That’s where individual awareness starts becoming team capability.
3. What’s missing?
This may be the most interesting question of all.
Teams frequently recruit in their own image.
We like people who think like us, communicate like us and make sense to us.
The result can be a group of very talented people with remarkably similar strengths—and remarkably similar blind spots.
Profiling the whole team allows us to stand above it and see the pattern.
Where are we strong?
Where are we vulnerable?
Whose voice dominates?
Whose perspective is absent?
What’s missing in this team?
That question has become one of the most useful applications of Perfect Teams®.
NOBODY IS PERFECT. BUT YOUR TEAM CAN BE.
Individually, we all have strengths and weaknesses.
That’s not a defect. It’s why teams matter.
The objective isn’t to create twelve identical people who communicate, think and behave in exactly the same way.
It’s to build an interdependent team in which different characters contribute different strengths to something larger than themselves.
Carl Jung gave us an extraordinarily powerful way of thinking about human differences more than a century ago.
The challenge for the twenty-first century is not simply to know the theory.
It is to do something useful with it.
That’s the distinction we’ve spent years exploring at Perfect Teams®.
Because understanding people is valuable.
Building their capability to work together is where the value is created.
You can’t download capability.™
What’s missing in your team?
Perfect Teams® helps leaders understand the characters around the table, identify strengths and gaps, improve communication and build greater team capability.
If you’re a consultant or coach interested in using the Perfect Teams® methodology within your own practice:
Explore the Licensee Journey →
Originally published 29 September 2020. Updated August 2026.
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