Team Strengths and the Card Deck That Once Mapped Medieval Society

Deal a hand of cards today and nobody at the table is thinking about the clergy, the nobility, or who owes rent to whom. But there was a period in European history when picking up a heart, a diamond, a spade, or a club meant something quite specific about where you stood in society. The symbols we now shuffle without a second thought used to carry the weight of an entire social order. Then, card by card, border by border, that meaning came loose.

StrongSuits is a card-based team development tool that uses playing cards and games to help teams have better conversations about how they work together. It's designed to build the kind of psychological safety that lets people bring their real strengths to the table. What makes it distinctive is what it's built on, and that's a story worth telling on its own terms, alongside the rather different story of how the suits themselves came to be.

Where the Suits Came From

16th-century Mamluk playing cards (kanjifah), Wikimedia

Playing cards arrived in Europe in the fourteenth century, most likely carried by traders from the Islamic world. The Mamluk deck they brought with them grouped cards into four suits: cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks. These were practical categories, drawn from the world of the court and the military, nothing more symbolic than that.

The suits changed again when the deck reached German-speaking Europe in the fifteenth century, turning into hearts, bells, leaves, and acorns, images pulled from rural and hunting life. And something else happened alongside the redesign. These new suits started to loosely map onto the four estates of medieval society: the clergy, the nobility, the merchants, and the peasantry. A deck of playing cards had quietly become a small, portable model of the social order, one you could carry in your pocket and deal out at a table.

The French simplified those shapes into the ones still in use today, largely to make printing faster and cheaper. For a while, though, the social meaning travelled with the new shapes. Hearts stood for the church. Diamonds, sharp-edged and valuable, stood for merchants and trade. Spades, named after the word for a pike or sword, stood for the military nobility. Clubs, originally a trefoil, stood for the peasantry and the working land. Four suits, four ways of belonging to society: those who prayed, those who fought, those who traded, and those who worked.

Where the Meaning Ran Out

By the time the deck reached England, almost none of that survived. The suits became conventional. Nobody dealing a hand of whist was thinking about clergy or peasants. The shapes had become just shapes, stripped of the meaning they had briefly carried across the Channel.

But in other traditions, particularly in tarot and the esoteric currents of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the suits continued to be read as the four elements, the four temperaments, the four fundamental patterns of human character. This wasn't a continuation of the estates mapping so much as a separate set of people, in different places and centuries, reaching for the same convenient number for their own reasons. Four kept turning out to be a workable way to sort human variety into categories small enough to remember and large enough to say something real.

Somewhere in that six-hundred-year drift, the suits stopped meaning anything at all. Which raises an obvious question. StrongSuits, the card-based team development tool I work with, also organises itself around four suits. Is that a continuation of any of this?

Not really. It's a separate, more recent piece of work, built from research done mostly in the twentieth century, that happens to land on the same number. Both are worth telling on their own terms, so here is where StrongSuits actually comes from.

A Different Deck, Built for a Different Reason

When Dave Corbet designed the four suits used in StrongSuits, he wasn't reaching into medieval symbolism. He was drawing on research from organisational psychology, most of it decades old and well tested.

The most direct influence is the work of William Moulton Marston, whose 1928 book Emotions of Normal People proposed four behavioral patterns based on two distinctions: whether a person tends toward active or passive engagement, and whether they perceive their environment as broadly favorable or unfavorable. From these two axes, Marston derived four patterns: Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Compliance. This became the theoretical foundation for what we now know as the DISC model, one of the most widely used behavioral frameworks in organizational life.

Linda Berens developed Marston's thinking further, focusing specifically on how people interact with others rather than on underlying personality traits. She identified four interaction styles. Some people prefer to have a plan and know what is going to happen before they act. Others want to focus on results and simply get things done. Others again prefer to get along, taking time to integrate different perspectives before moving forward. And others lead with inspiration, wanting to energise and persuade those around them.

These four interaction styles map directly onto the four suits in StrongSuits: Spades for drive and getting things done, Clubs for relationship-building and integration, Hearts for passion and inspiration, Diamonds for precision and upholding standards. The suits are not arbitrary. Each one represents a coherent cluster of strengths that belongs to a recognizable way of showing up in the world.

Understanding these differences matters because of what happens when people do not feel safe to show them. When Google launched its internal Project Aristotle research in 2012, studying more than 180 teams to find out what made the best ones effective, the result was not what anyone expected. Individual talent, team composition, and collective expertise all mattered less than one thing: whether people felt safe to speak up, share mistakes, and bring their real perspectives to the work. This built directly on the research of Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who had been studying team psychological safety since the late 1990s and whose framework underpinned Google's findings. For many HR professionals and coaches, this is now familiar ground. What StrongSuits offers is a practical way into it: a structured, low-threat starting point for the kind of honest conversation about strengths and working styles that psychological safety requires but rarely just happens on its own.

Strengths as the Unit of Currency

Once the four suits were established, the task was to identify the thirteen strengths that belong to each one. This was not a casual process. The development of the StrongSuits deck drew on a wide range of workplace competency frameworks: the University of California core competency model, the UK Civil Service competency framework, Harvard University's competency dictionary, and research published in the Harvard Business Review by Zenger and Folkman, among others. A long list of over a hundred positive workplace qualities was assembled and then refined, with thirteen strengths selected for each suit.

The focus on strengths rather than traits or personality types reflects a deliberate choice, informed by the work of Martin Seligman and the research of the Gallup organisation. The evidence consistently shows that people who are able to play to their strengths are more productive, more engaged, and more energised at work. Employees whose managers actively understand and work with their strengths report significantly higher levels of engagement. Starting with strengths, rather than gaps or weaknesses, is not wishful thinking. It is simply a more effective way to develop people and teams.

Why Opposite Strengths Matter on a Team

One of the most distinctive features of the StrongSuits deck is that the strengths are arranged in pairs of opposites across suits of similar color. The six of hearts is Optimism; the six of diamonds is Caution. The strengths that feel most natural to one person can be the ones that feel most alien, or most irritating, when they encounter them in a colleague.

This is where the work of Meredith Belbin on team roles, and research by McKinsey on diverse teams, becomes relevant. The evidence is clear that greater diversity in a team leads to greater creativity, productivity, and resilience, but only when that diversity is recognized and valued rather than becoming a source of friction. By surfacing the fact that different strengths are genuinely complementary, StrongSuits helps teams move from tolerating difference to drawing on it.

The opposite-strength structure also provides a framework for understanding what Daniel Ofman called the core quadrant: the pattern by which our greatest strengths, when overplayed, tip into behaviors that undermine us and generate friction with people who lead with the opposite strength. Each StrongSuits card carries this overplayed version on its reverse. Optimism flipped becomes wishful thinking. Caution flipped becomes anxiety or paralysis. Knowing this about yourself, and recognising it in others, is the beginning of a very different kind of team conversation.

A Shared Language, Not a Filing System

As we like to say at StrongSuits, cards come in boxes, people don't. The suits give a team a shared language and a place to start a conversation, not a set of drawers to file each other into. That distinction runs through every version of this story. Medieval French card makers landed on four because it mapped onto their social order. Tarot readers landed on four because it mapped onto the elements. Marston landed on four because two simple questions naturally produce four quadrants, and Berens found that four working styles accounted for most of the variation she saw in how people operate on teams.

StrongSuits makes that same starting point easy to reach, without requiring anyone to read a long technical report or sit through a multi-hour psychometric process. You pick up a card, you play a game, and a conversation starts that might not have happened otherwise. Its four suits are assembled from named, twentieth-century research, and that is what makes them work.

StrongSuits is a card-based team development tool designed to build psychological safety and high-impact team conversations. Find out more at StrongSuits Team Development | Barbara Ormsby or go to Home - StrongSuits.