Personal Maps and the importance of individuals and Interactions in the Agile world

We as Millennials saw an era where talking to friends outside homes was normal followed by yahoo chat followed by ICQ followed by WhatsApp and nowadays people like to play games at home. The whole life has circled back for me when I think about Agile and how people are so important. The people and their interactions are very critical in any environment or setup and so it’s often important to break the ice and go beyond the conventional talks where all we hear is people cribbing about work or their work timings.

There is a practice in Management 3.0 called Personal maps which targets at making individuals talk about themselves. The idea is for each person in the team to take a A4 paper, write their names in the middle of the sheet and then draw bubbles around to depict themselves thinking outside the office about their interests and aspects which they generally don’t share in a normal conversation.

I usually Start it saying that I know we all know each other, we’ve been working with each other for so long, but do we really know each other, let’s find out.

The activity is a big noise creating event. You get out so many things which you would never have thought to know, and it’s so surprising that people sitting next to us had so many common interests which we never thought.

We basically draw ourselves on the paper, and then exchange that page with the person sitting on right who describes you using the paper, doing these multiple times, knowing people in the room. The more we make people introduce the more they come to know how they really didn’t know the real person.

 Not taking names, I had 2 girls working in same team doing same kind of dance, we got a movie producer in one of our session while in another I got a person who owned a resort! Just imagine these people never struck conversations bringing these aspects out. The best part is the common ground items coming out like someone having interest in books, other in cartoons, you get more grounds to talk to people.

We then create a tree out of the map near the desk, so that if a new person joins the team, they can get to know the team using the tree.

This is the method prescribed. I’ve tweaked it a lot of times asking people to dig into it to find 1 interesting thing of the person which they need to reveal it in end. Sometimes I make a tree only about interesting things people find.

In the end we live in a world where people interact and we need to recognize that people are important because an individual success might be good, but a team working well is the best as teams rally towards a cause and make it a great thing. Good teams always shine and are often asked for best practices.

I’ve also done this for remote teams having multiple video feeds interacting and it has been amazing experience. All this we can so much relate to the focus on individuals and interactions.

I recently used the same for a deep dive in Spark Business Agility Conference and people liked the idea. We had a great tree created in end with names and 1 interesting thing about the people in the conference.