Different ways to do PERSONAL MAPS (Management 3.0)
Personal Maps is one of the exercises/techniques from Management 3.0 created by Jurgen Appelo. If you are interested you can find out more about Management 3.0 here.
Personal maps is a great way for people to connect and share a bit more about each other. By creating a personal map of a colleague or a friend, you make an effort to better understand that person. This can be done for teams or even for a group that you want to know better (conferences, friends, …) and is an exceptional great tool to use in new teams.
Warning: it might be a good idea to do a “Safety Check” exercise before you do it. As in a retrospective, the more people feel safe sharing the better outcomes the exercise will provide.
Here are 2 links explaining the basics of the exercise (as this is not the goal for this blog):
- https://www.mindsettlers.com/practice/3RStuJsDdmkK426ssaOoyU
- https://value-first.be/communication/personal-maps-management-3-0/
From my experience i usually like to use the following 6/7 categories:
- Goals
- Values
- Work
- Hobbies
- Family
- Home
- Education
You can do this with more categories than the ones presented above. Be creative and come up with new ones!
These categories may need to change according to the group/team you are working with, the categories I suggest above are the ones I believe fit the majority of groups.
I’m going to share with you the different ways I have seen it being done and/or i have done it:
- You do your own “Personal Map” and you present it to the group.
- 10 minutes to create
- 5 minutes to present and discuss
- Total time depends on the size of the group
2. You do your own “Personal Map” put it on the wall and let people ask you questions on what they are curious of.
- 10 minutes to create
- 5 minutes for Q&A
- Total time depends on the size of the group
3. Pair people to do each others “Personal Map”. I suggest people do it by asking questions about the other. You won’t present your own Personal Map, but your pair. Invite the rest of the group to ask questions if they’re curious to know more.
- Give enough time for people to engage on the pairing, therefore I would advise 20 min.
- 5 minutes to present
- 3 minutes for Q&A
- Total time depends on the size of the group
The next 2 options may be interesting in a team/group that has been working for quite some time and “believes” they know each other quite well:
4. You put an empty “Personal Map” on the wall and let the rest of the group fill it (Suggestion: timebox this part, 1 to 3 minutes). Afterwards the person will go through the “Personal Map” done by the rest of the group, cross the ones that aren’t correct and add the rest of the things about you. Explain why you crossed and present yourself with that and with what you added.
- 1 to 3 minutes for the group to create
- 5 minutes for the person to correct and tell its story
- Total time depends on the size of the group
5. This one is a variation of number “4” where you do first your “Personal Map” alone and then you can compare yours with the one done by the rest of the group. Don’t forget to present both. The rest of the group can try to present you with what they have done and then you present yours.
- 10 minutes for you to create yours
- 1 to 3 minutes for the group to create
- 5 minutes for the person to compare both and tell its story
- Total time depends on the size of the group
In terms of timing for this exercise depends on the size of the group, I would suggest for a group of 10, as an example, 2 hours time boxed. Still this depends on you as the facilitator, what do you want to do and the context.
One of the goals of Personal Maps is to create connections. Apart from the conversations after the sessions that this exercise will enable, one suggestion is to use a wool ball or a string to connect people with the same “hobbies”, “home town”, etc. (picture below for a workshop i facilitated, in this example we didn’t connect all the dots).
I tried all these 5 versions with different teams in different contexts. If you know more ways to do Personal Maps let me know so that I can update this post to share with more people.
Kudos to Ricardo Fernandes for being the one who gave me a lot of these tips! And thanks to Duarte Segurado for reviewing the article.