There are lots of clues in your Human Design blueprint to determine the energetics of your ideal workflow, work rhythm, and style that lead to optimum productivity, contribution, and success.

The most common approach is to look at your Energy Type and Strategy. Another way is to look at your Profile Lines. Another way still is to look at your Variable or Environment. Each way is a different window into the complexity of your unique circuit board and how it operates, and each is valid and viable for perspective, guidance, and nuance.

Personally, I find Human Design circuitry to be super insightful — especially since my energetic blueprint contains all three circuits (including both flavors of the Collective circuit) as well as two of the Integration channels — a very confusing and tangled web of energetic preferences that are difficult to navigate, leaving one feeling defeated when they don’t fully understand what’s going on.

Human Design allowed me to make sense of these different flavors of situational push-pull that I have felt as an employee within an both large and small organizations, as an independent contractor, and as a long-term partner at my own agency. I’ve had to figure out how to prioritize and harmonize these energetic preferences so that I could be the best version of me in the way I operate today — with my business partner, with my clients, and with my creative development and expression.

The circuits are super helpful to understand (at a high level anyway), your natural dynamic in the context of a team so that you can insert yourself — or create more space for yourself — depending on your needs and how you’re built.

The more you understand the individual components of your blueprint and how they are designed to operate with the other components of your blueprint and also with the outside world, the more effective you’ll be in creating the relationships and life you want at a soul level — where the ego distortions of the mind do not penetrate.

The party line on “teamwork” is that we’re all supposed to be “team players,” but what does that really mean?

Does that mean we all give up our identity and bow down to the loudest or most senior voice in the room (which is often the furthest away from the customer)? Does that mean that we lock arms inside and outside the company to demonstrate commitment (which is not the same as loyalty)? Does that mean individual contributors or the more introverted need to stop being individuals and introverts and don some false persona to “be part of the team” (while harboring feelings of resentment for not being fully seen or valued)?

A well-functioning team is one that brings out the uniqueness of everyone on the team, creating space for each contributor to show up in the way that honors how they’re built.

Some people are energized by having others in the room — others are depleted.

Some people do their best work when they actually look like they’re not working — the evidence shows up in bursts after long periods of “inactivity.”

Some people are more productive when they don’t have to work alone, while others do their best work in isolation.

When we force people into “production line” work styles, we infringe on their ability to express their fullest potential, because we can only express our fullest potential when we feel fully seen and supported — otherwise, we’re in defensive mode, on guard, wasting valuable energy on “appearing” busy and engaged because we’re afraid of being judged and penalized for how we do our work as opposed to the quality of the work itself. (Do you hear me, RTO mandates???)

If I worked at a regular company (I’m simply not built for that, which is why I’ve been at my own company with my beloved business partner for 10+ years), I would be using the power of Human Design to engage and amplify my team. I would use it to create the conditions that bring out the best of every member on my team. Tara and I use Human Design every single day in our relationship. We also use it when we engage with our narrative clients — precisely so we can be instrumental in bringing the best out in them while we co-create.

Human Design is a powerful tool to predict and improve collaboration among team members, if you know what you’re looking for — and to my mind (and my lived experience) it’s all about the circuits, of which there are three: the Tribal Circuit (Tradition), the Collective Circuit (Sharing), the Individual Circuit (Empowerment). In addition, there is a complex network of four channels that combine to create the Channel of Integration (Self-Empowerment), which is essential to discuss in the context of circuits.

(Download your free Human Design chart to see your circuitry.)

The Circuit of Tradition:

The Tribal circuit is about tradition. It’s also about hierarchy.

This energy is all about service and support, but it comes with conditions. It’s the classic quid pro quo arrangement: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. If the bargain doesn’t feel fair, someone is going to feel angry, frustrated, resentful, or deeply disappointed.

This is the essence of why return-to-office mandates are failing. Employees, having proven that they are equally (if not moreso) productive in their own space rather than at the office, are unwilling to accommodate the hierarchical, power-based commands from the top to return to the office “because I said so.”

GIFTS: loyalty, service, support, sense of duty and responsibility for or toward others

LIMITATIONS: “othering,” close-mindedness, willful ignorance, blind loyalty

The Circuit of Sharing:

The Collective circuit is all about sharing.

It’s an energy that runs counter to Tribal circuitry, which is based on power structures, material hegemony, and positional hierarchy. The Collective is an energy that includes what’s best for all of Humanity.

There are two ways of engaging the Collective energetic — one is through logic and the other is through lived experiences.

GIFTS: inclusive, fact based, feeling based, learns from the past, prepares for the future

LIMITATIONS: potential for imbalance if only logical or only experiential

The Circuit of Empowerment:

The circuit of Individuality is deeply creative. It’s magical, mystical, and brooding, ruled by a deep inner knowing that is other sporadic and worldly, where “correct” answers just come to them about which path to take or how to solve a problem.

This energetic is deeply at-odds with Tribal circuitry where power is positional. It also experiences a fair amount of friction with the logical and empirical channels of the Collective where “proof” — either fact-based, or experience-based — is of the highest value.

GIFTS: creative, innovative, independent problem-solvers, empowering of others

LIMITATIONS: likes to be left alone (to the point of being anti-social), tendency toward melancholy (a necessary chemistry of the creative process), can’t predict or plan for a-ha’s, has difficulty explaining the source of their a-ha’s

The Channels of Self-Empowerment:

Technically, the Channels of Integration are not a circuit. They’re an integrated network of channels that are all about individual survival awareness and response.

As a leader, it’s vital to understand and make room for this unique energetic in order to create team harmony and “borrow” from their instinctive survival awareness.

GIFTS: self-sufficient, self-empowered, intuitive, situationally-aware

LIMITATIONS: likes to work alone, tends toward not asking for help, situationally-loyal

Example | Steve Jobs

This is the Human Design blueprint for Steve Jobs — famously mercurial, famously visionary, famously contrarian.

Usually, when a blueprint has more than one channel, it also cuts across more than one circuit. It’s quite rare (at least in the years I’ve been studying charts) to find that all three of Steve’s channels are in the Collective circuit.

Two of his Collective channels are logical (The “Journalist,” The “Analyst”), meaning they naturally gravitate toward seeing the patterns of life and organizing ideas and strategies and societies in response to those patterns — in a way that benefits all, not just the Tribe.

One of his Collective channels is “abstract” (The “Catalyst”), meaning that it’s experiential, where “truth” is determined through lived experiences, physical, emotional, and spiritual (which helps explain his enthusiasm for psychedelics):

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

What I love about his chart dynamics is that they accurately reflect his authenticity as a brilliant innovator, game changer, and provocateur — for the good of all.

He was enormously difficult to work with (the mercurial nature of “The Catalyst”) and had his own way of doing things (Gate 10). He was uncompromising, whether it was dropping out of college to save his parents’ life savings, walking into early fundraising talks barefoot, or lauding the benefits of psychedelics.

He was a bit of a flame-thrower (Channel 41-30), stirring the emotions of those around him to help them find their truth through his temper, his boldness, his pursuit of perfection (Gate 58), and his fearless defense of “knowing” (Gates 61) what he knew to be correct for all of humanity, whether it was the artistic expression of product design or the name of the company (Gate 1), the breakthrough X-factor, from advertising (“think different”) to the iPhone (Gate 43), or the emotional recognition, spiritual resonance, and human connection people were craving (Gate 55, Personality Sun).

He was exceptional at pattern-recognition (Channel 17-62 and 9-52), which led to — and underscores — the soul of his legacy:

“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

He also had a completely open heart center — with no activations coming off or pointing toward it. The heart center in Human Design is where the Ego resides — it carries the energies of willfulness and self-worth.

People with open or undefined heart (where there is one or more gate activation) are prone through conditioning to feel low self-worth, which leads them to say “yes” to things they would rather say “no” to, or live their life in search of other people’s approval — which never leads to peace or joy or genuine fulfillment or satisfaction in life.

But our openness is where we also have the greatest opportunity for transcendence, and to my mind, Steve Jobs transcended what it meant to care about anyone else’s opinion of who he was or how he showed up or the bets he was making with the company.

He didn’t give a flying f*ck, and he had no problem letting you know. It didn’t mean he didn’t feel deeply hurt when he was ousted at the age 30 (note that he’s a 6-line exiting the first stage of trial and error and entering the second stage of bringing all that knowledge and experience forward into something that’s useful).

I could go on and on, but I don’t need to because the point I’m bringing to life is, where would the world be if someone snuffed out Steve’s “light” by trying to mold or shape him into their version of who he should be or how he should be.

Imagine if his parents had forced him to stay in college, for example.

I bring to life a sampling of these elements in Steve Jobs’ Human Design blueprint to illustrate that we are more than the sum of our parts. Even though this article is about the Circuits, it’s an opportunity to illustrate that everything informs and influences everything in a Human Design blueprint.

We are all meant to work in harmony — but we can’t do that if we don’t honor how we’re uniquely built.

The more you know about how your energy works, the more in command you can be of it.

Our job as individuals, peers, and leaders is to understand, practice, observe and harmonize our own energetics that guide us into the best version of us so we can live the life we want and become the fullest expression of our highest potential, one aligned decision at a time.

Whether you’re a freelancer or a team leader, a solopreneur or a CXO, a start-up or a Fortune X company, we all have a need for each other in one way, shape, or form — to advance our interests, pursue our passions, and achieve our objectives.

None of us is meant to walk this path alone. Your Human Design can support you in determining how best to “plug in.”

Note: Every Human Design chart is more than the sum of its parts, and every element of a chart affects — and is affected by — every other element. Human Design is a deeply layered, complex system that integrates eastern and western traditions and wisdom. When I share discrete elements of a chart, I am simply sharing glimpses into the mechanics of Human Design (and the Gene Keys) to show others how they, too, can discern practical insights from their own charts into their uniqueness and the patterns of thought, behavior, conditioning, emotions, and psychology that keep them from achieving their highest potential.