Boost relationships with Personal Map!

Ihmisen - Le Blog

Personal Map 01 One of my daily jobs is to set-up collaborative workshops for my customers. These collaborative workshops are generally organized from 1 to 3 days and with a range of 5 to more than 100 participants.
One of my customers needed to reinforce the relationships within his trans-national community: his teams are based in France, UK, Germany and Spain. The Management 3.0 proposes a game named Personal Maps. This game is described by Jurgen Appelo in his book: "Managing for Happiness".

A lot of the time we work next to each other but don’t really know each other. Learning a bit about someone’s life history and even private life can go a long way in creating empathy. Personal Maps branches off from the tradition of mind maps to tell your own story. Personal Maps is composed of 8 branches:

  1. Education
  2. Work
  3. Hobbies
  4. Family
  5. Friends
  6. Values
  7. Goal
  8. Home
I’ve already worked for 1 year for this customer to develop a trans-national community and so, reached a first step of trans-national mindset/team spirit development. Personal Maps’ game was perfectly fitted to go one step ahead within this community.

This event (collaborative workshop) was designed on 2 days with around 70 participants. 1 year before, I’ve created an icebreaker for them where I’ve collected photography of (almost) each of the participant. I choose to introduce Personal Maps’ game as an energizer during the event. That’s why I decided to create a template (with the 8 branches of the Personal Maps’ game) customized with the photography of each of the participant. At the end, I’ve created a wall with 70 Personal Maps displayed!

Personal Map 02

This wall was kept during the entire event and all the participants received the following rules:
  1. Complete Personal Maps of your colleagues. If you see a blank part, go discuss with the person and find the answer!
  2. It is forbidden to complete own Personal Maps. But, you can help others to complete it for you!
Conclusion
  1. The participants played the game and the game generated a lot of discussion between them. It was very fruitful and the participants (i.e. colleagues of the same community but dispatched between 4 countries) have learnt to better know each other.
  2. The participants enjoyed this game.
  3. Personal Maps contribute to break barriers between people.
  4. Definitely, I will reuse Personal Maps!