Over the next few days I'm going to talk about the MTR-i mandala and how it relates to Jung's stone mandala.  I've already explained how the MTR-i mandala is structured in a previous team building blog, though I'll provide a brief summary below.  What I want to go into during the next few days, however, is the deeper significance of the mandala beyond the representation of the team roles.

What has prompted this is a very meaningful coincidence (ie: a bit of synchronicity) that I discovered recently.  I'm still convalescing at home following a heart problem on New Year's Eve, and I ordered a copy of the DVD "Matter of Heart".  This is a documentary on Carl Jung, including his famous BBC interview from the 1950s.  There was another extra on the disc that I hadn't anticipated, an unfinished documentary, including some interviews with Jung, about the stone mandala that he carved to celebrate his 75th birthday.

I had never seen this mandala before, and the similarity with the team role mandala was striking, as can be seen in the picture (above right).  There are some very significant meanings that can be drawn from both the similarities and the differences between them.  Over the next few days I'll describe how I came to produce the team role mandala, how Jung came to produce his, and the significance I see in the relationship between the two.

Summary of the MTR-i Team Role Mandala

The team role mandala is divided into four quadrants to represent the four functions: Sensing at the top, iNtuition at the bottom, Thinking on the left and Feeling on the right.  There is also a division between an outer ring and inner ring, representing extraversion and introversion respectively.  This gives rise to 8 function-attitudes (eg: Fi, or introverted Feeling) each with their own team role name (eg: Campaigner).  Myers Briggs personality types (eg: INFP) can be placed at particular points on the mandala to illustrate where each type's preferences lie.

The mandala shown is using Jung's colours, rather than the ones I originally chose, though I will be changing the MTR-i colours to align with Jung's.

Tomorrow I'll give some more detail about how and why the MTR-i mandala was developed and some of the ways in which it can be used.