Sharing our stories: What for?

When I took the Management 3.0 (M30) fundamentals online workshop, one of the first exercises we did was the Personal Maps one, which I already knew it in theory but I had never experienced it.

The idea is pretty simple: You need to create/draw a map of yourself, in other words, you need to represent your life in a mindmap, with different categories: Home, Studies, Friends, Family, etc.

You start by writing your name in the center, to then start opening different categories with their data.

As Management 30 explains on its web, this practice help teams to create empathy, to understand who is the person behind that professional and role.

By creating a personal map of a colleague, you make an effort to better understand that person 

Continuing with my first experience, prior to our first meeting, our M30 trainer asked us to create our personal map and digitize it, to share it with the rest of the class. Below is the capture of mine:

The result was very interesting: In that first class, and just after one hour of started the workshop, I felt a connection with people that I have never seen in my life, I was impressed.

Putting it into practice

After my first experience, I wanted other teams to experience the same. I decided to propose this to two different teams:

1. The first one was the team of all the Scrum Masters (six members), let's call it the Ninjas Team.
2. The second one was the Scrum team (5 members) in which I was the Scrum Master, let's call it the Scrum Team.

The context and challenges

I choose these teams because they were having different needs and challenges, for which the personal maps practice seemed a good strategy to try:

1. The Ninja Team was pretty new (before the Scrum Masters worked independently, and we were starting to form this team), so then we as members didn't know much about each other.
2. The Scrum Team's members were having trust issues. As Tuckman said, they were going through a conflicting phase (also known as the storming phase, more info here).

The dynamics

In essence, the dynamics were very similar, but I adjusted the second one after implementing the first one with the Ninja Teams:

1. Ninja Team:

• A new Scrum Master was joining our Company so I made use of this opportunity to propose the dynamic.
• I explained that the exercise was about, the purpose of it, so the proposal was to create the personal map at that moment using Miro.
• Every one of us took about 20 minutes to draw our own map on the board.
• After this, each one of us presented it and the rest of the team asked questions about any topic they felt curious about:

2. Scrum Team:

• What I learned from the previous experience (the Ninja Team one) is that having the personal maps in Miro was kind of impersonal.
• Based on that, some days before our meetings, I invited the team to draw each map on paper and scan them/took a photo.
• The result was much better. The maps had different styles, different colors, and even drawings and funny characters.

My conclusions

After experimenting with this practice with different teams, my conclusions are:

• This is a great tool to connect people and generate conversations.
• If possible, it is recommended to use it if the team is new (it's forming from scratch). It helps a lot to start building trust between team members, which is one of the biggest challenges in new teams.
• Having the personal maps drawn by hand it's much better than having them on a virtual tool like Miro or Mural. It helps to reflect the complete essence of a person's map,