The Six-Hundred-Year History of Strengths-Based Team Development

Why the suits in StrongSuits are no accident.

Pick up a deck of cards and you are holding something that has been used to make sense of human beings for over six hundred years. Long before personality questionnaires, leadership competency frameworks, or team development programmes, people reached for playing cards to map the qualities that make us who we are. StrongSuits continues that tradition, but this time the psychology behind it is rather more rigorous.

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 was designed specifically to build the kind of psychological safety that allows people to bring their real strengths to the team. What makes it distinctive is what it is built on, and that story turns out to be older than you might expect.

How Four Suits Came to Carry Meaning About Human Qualities

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

Playing cards arrived in Europe in the fourteenth century, most likely via traders from the Islamic world, where the Mamluk deck already grouped cards into four suits: cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks. These were functional categories, reflecting the world of the court and the military. But when cards spread into Europe, something interesting happened. Different cultures translated the suits through their own social lenses, and the suits began to carry meaning.

In fifteenth-century Germany, the suits became hearts, bells, leaves, and acorns, imagery drawn from rural and hunting culture. More significantly, they mapped loosely onto the four estates of medieval society: the clergy, the nobility, merchants, and peasants. The deck became a miniature model of the social world, each suit representing a different way of moving through life.

The French rationalized these suits into the shapes we use today: hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs, largely for ease of printing. But the social symbolism carried over. Hearts represented the church and the spiritual domain. Diamonds mapped to the merchant class and the world of commerce. Spades, derived from the word for sword or pike, stood for the military nobility. Clubs, originally a clover or trefoil, came to be associated with the peasantry and the rough wooden cudgel of the common laborer.

This was not merely decorative. The French were mapping out what they understood to be the fundamental categories of human society: those who pray, those who fight, those who trade, and those who work the land. Four modes of being, four ways of contributing to the whole.

By the time the deck reached England, much of this intentional symbolism had dissolved. The suits became conventional, their meaning forgotten. 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.

The idea that four distinct categories can capture something essential about how people differ is, it turns out, a very old one.

Where StrongSuits Picks Up the Thread

StrongSuits did not set out to revive medieval estate theory. But when its creator, Dave Corbet, came to design the four suits of the StrongSuits deck, he was drawing on research traditions that arrived at a strikingly similar conclusion: that human beings cluster into four recognizable patterns of interaction, and that understanding this makes it possible to build better teams.

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.

The Power of Opposite Strengths

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.

Four Suits, One Deck

What strikes anyone who spends time with the history of playing cards is how persistent the intuition is that four categories can say something true about human variety. From the medieval estates of the realm to the behavioral science of Marston and Berens, different traditions in different centuries have arrived at the same structural insight: that people differ in recognizable ways, that these differences are complementary rather than hierarchical, and that a team or community that can draw on all four is stronger than one that cannot.

StrongSuits makes this insight accessible 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 you start a conversation that might not have happened otherwise. The four suits have always been a way of making sense of human beings. That is exactly what they still are.

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.