Toolkit exercise: Team canvas

This is the second post in a series of ten blog posts about the exercises in the Toolkit for Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters. All exercises the blog posts in this series are about, are available in our free promo version of the book .

Team canvas is a somewhat more advanced exercise to run with new or existing teams. Its primary goal is to create alignment, however it also helps create transparency, set mutual expectations, resolve conflicts, and helps build a productive culture. This exercise does take a little bit to prepare and to run, so it’s not a last-minute go-to in case you have to facilitate a session ad-hoc. Preparation is key to successfully run this exercise, as you will need to explain this format to your group for them to get the most value out of it.

I’ve ran this exercise with lots of teams, usually as part of forming a new team, or during a “reboot” in which the team starts working on a new strategic effort. It all starts with ‘why are we a team?’, a question that isn’t asked often enough. A team without a purpose is like a laptop without a battery. It has limited value and it’s not exactly doing what you got it for in the first place. So, understanding why a group people is together is important. It might be that there’s a common objective, or a common expertise, that brings the team together. That’s usually the case and it helps to create transparency around that so everyone understands. Exploring common values and guiding principles is part of getting to the purpose of the team, so if you’re not sure about the purpose, consider talking about those first, as they will help you get to your purpose.

As a side note: I understand there could be an uncomfortable part to the question ‘why are we a team?’ in case the answer would be “we don’t know”. Some people might be scared they’re going to be no longer needed. However, that scare is typically unfounded and if your team is no longer going to be needed, this exercise would only expose what’s already there. In my experience, this exercise hardly ever lands on that.

A team typically has goals that help it achieve their purpose or objective and team members with certain skills and expertise to help them achieve those goals. Those have to be identified and made explicit. Transparency is key here: you want to know what you want to achieve as a team, and which skills and what expertise you have to do so. This helps you identify possible gaps or confirms that you have all you need to be successful. A knowledge matrix helps you identify possible gaps and/or opportunities for improvement. While this might take a bit to fill out, it does provide important and valuable information for this exercise. You could consider having the team fill this out beforehand as preparation for this exercise.

Strengths and improvement areas are similarly important to identify and make explicit. Some people would say ‘weaknesses’ instead of ‘improvement areas’, but there’s a huge psychological difference in calling it improvement areas. Knowing what to improve as a team is hugely valuable, whereas identifying weaknesses is typically more passive and ends up at “well, as least we know we suck at X”. Knowing people’s strengths and improvement areas will help create more mutual understanding and respect, plus it provides clear targets for improvements. At a very least it can help prevent or reduce frustration.

You also want to make sure everyone knows what personal goals people have. Do they align with the team goals or not? Can we help certain people achieve certain goals by giving them certain knowledge areas? Do people have an agenda that we should know about? This will not only create transparency (which is a common theme across this exercise) but it will clearly set expectations and will prevent conflict down the road.

Finally, for this exercise, agreements on how people interact are oh so important. I’ve seen too many teams have all kinds of useless confusion around communications, documentation, availability, decision-making, meeting attendance, device usage, you name it. All these trivial things can lead to pointless conflict if left unattended, which is a true waste. So spend some time on making simple, not extensive, agreements on these various topics. The team will thank you for doing so later.

Next week, I’ll write about the Agile Manifesto – The Values exercise. Back to the basics? Absolutely. But don’t be fooled to think this is something for inexperienced teams… Want more exercises to choose from? Buy the toolkit in paperback or on Kindle!