MANAGEMENT 3.0 MINDSET— A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING AND PRACTICE
Personal Maps
The Path to Certificate of Practice — Episode I

In this series of posts, I will tell my story of how it went about becoming a licensed facilitator of Management 3.0. One way to accomplish this is to get a Certificate of Practice so that you can prove that you have actually applied MGT 3.0 practices and shared your ideas and experiences with others.
Unlike the Certificate of Attendance, this more valuable certificate explains that you are a practitioner, not only attended a workshop.
In order to qualify for one, you need to pick seven practices and share, writing blog posts, producing videos or any other way of showing experimentation and adaptation because the premise is that people learn best when they run experiments and share their findings.
In this first post, we tackle a variation of the Mind mapping, which is a simple but powerful technique that allows anyone to visualize the relationships between concepts.
Personal Maps in Action

How well do you know your colleagues? Why? Perhaps your team is finding it hard to identify connections between members ? Or perhaps the Product Owner doesn’t have empathy with the devs?
You might be surprised at how little you know about them, so organize some face-time and ask a few interesting questions.
Let’s find out what makes each other tick by creating a personal map!
How does it work?

Start by taking an empty sheet of paper and writing the colleague’s name in the middle. Then write categories of interest around your peer’s name, such as home, education, work, hobbies, family, friends, goals and values. Then expand the mind map by adding the relevant things things you know about this person.
The purpose of personal maps it’s to help team members to show some more interesting in each other.
- It’s recommended that each team member presents someone else personal maps, so it will invite questions, discussions and moments where people make connections.
My personal experience
I applied this practice to a team that had just been formed two months earlier and their PO was leaving the company the same week that his replacement was coming. So at the time, the people on the team didn’t know much about each other and had no idea who “the new guy” was. So I asked each one to make their own personal map and present it. It was amazing! I gave them 10 minutes to fill out the map and they asked me for more time. I think something between 12 and 15 would be enough.
After that, they presented their maps and I think I should have limited each member’s maximum time to 5 minutes because it was a large team and took longer than I planned.
Although we have so many different people, they found many similarities that generated discussions and connections. Some of them shared remarkable things, and in the end, we had such a reliable and secure environment that people who were known to be more reserved also shared a lot about themselves.
Closing

In the end, I put all the personal maps on one wall and showed them that they were so different, but they also had a lot in common, then I linked that with our company value: diversity.
Because some people can better express themselves with colors, it’s useful to have some colourful pens and markers available.
After explaining this practice, we can explain that its main purpose is to have Mental closeness.
— “When team members understand each other, when they appreciate each other, when they trust each other, that’s when you get high performing teams.”, Jurgen Appelo
Because it all starts when we get to know each other a little better!
What do you think about this practice? Have you ever run it in your company? What are your lessons learned?
In the next episode I will cover the Kudo Cards Practice.
Or check out the other episodes here.
