NOTE: Credit goes to Kevin Klinemeier for coming up with the original exercise.

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With many teams I work with I don’t really know what everyone knows how to do or their ambitions. This provides a way for the team to communicate a lot of information in a poster.

There is an idea that you want to be a T shaped person. The idea is that a T shaped person has a lot of general skills and a few expert skills. I have found that everyone fits this, the real problem is communication. It is really hard to know what experiences, ambitions, and expertise a person has at a glance. We ran into this situation one time and needed a quick way to understand our team. Because of that we made up the following exercise. If you take the time to do with with your team, then they will all learn what each other knows and who to talk to if they run into problems. I recommend you do this with all teams. Before you begin

Gather some large poster post-its, your team, and markers. This takes about 30 minutes. 2

Step 1: Create the structure and explain the exercise.

  1. Give everyone a piece of poster paper
  2. Have them write their names at the top
  3. Have them draw a big hollow T shape and two squares on each side
  4. Explain what the different areas mean

Have your team draw these shapes on their paper.

Step 2: Take 10 min and fill it in.

Write your name at the top and write down what you consider to be your skills in large letters. Make sure it is legible from a distance.

An example of what it looks like filled out 3

Step 3: Have the team explain what they wrote

Go around the room and have each person explain what they wrote. This is important because other people realize they have similar skills and fill in more of the poster.

Step 4: Hang this on the wall of the office

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No one will remember what everyone said. It will take a while for this to sink in. We put these all over the walls. There were 30 people so we ended up with 30 posters. But, it was very helpful, at a glance I could see who knew what and what they wanted to know. What about a remote version? If you get a chance, this is worth doing in person. I’m sure you could do a version and maybe compile it into a photo album or some way to look at each others skills. However, you do loose the “ambient learning” of walking around and noticing that “Garry really wants to learn about machine learning” or that “Diane knows cobol programming”.

I do think there is some utility in moving all the poster information into a spreadsheet or a similar tool so you can search and get a sense of what the team knows as a whole. However, doing this will drift away from the personal aspects and move more toward the data driven side. This isn’t a bad thing but I would recommend using the posters and markers first just so everyone gets a chance to show some personality first.