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Working collaboratively in teams is an essential element in systems engineering: Interdisciplinary teams are formed to tackle large‐scale, heterogeneous problems requiring skill and knowledge across a wide array of engineering and technical disciplines. While this is widely accepted as necessary, little attention is given to the problem of ensuring effective collaboration across the diverse team. Attention is given to the processes that will be followed, and tools are provided to aid communication; but the critical cognitive aspects that ensure that the team works effectively and efficiently towards a common objective are frequently absent. Instead, managers and team members assume that their disparate mental models have no impact on their collaborative efforts, or that any cognitive dissonance will evaporate naturally and organically. In reality, neither assumption is true, and if these issues are not directly addressed …