Johari Window Exercise

Honest feedback, without the awkward start

What is the Johari Window exercise?

The Johari Window exercise is a useful starting point for building a feedback culture with your peers. Rather than jumping straight into difficult feedback conversations, it gives you and your colleagues a structured, lower-stakes way to begin exploring how you see yourselves and each other. It is a tool for you to reflect on which traits you think you exhibit amongst your colleagues, and which traits your colleagues see in you. The results are easy to understand, with each trait belonging to one of four categories, visualised as four panes of a window:

  • Open (or Arena): Traits that both you and your colleagues think you exhibit
  • Blind Spot: Traits your peers see in you that you do not see in yourself
  • Hidden (or Façade): Traits you think you have but that your peers do not see in your behaviour
  • Unknown: Traits that neither you nor your colleagues associate with you

From here, you can seek feedback to reduce your blind spot, or choose to be more open with your peers to reduce your façade.

Open (or Arena)

Known to self & others

Blind Spot

Unknown to self, known to others

Hidden (or Façade)

Known to self, unknown to others

Unknown

Unknown to self & others

Ready to run a session?

Start a new Johari Window exercise for your team and invite participants by email.

Create a session

Already have a session?

Check your email for the manage link sent when you confirmed your session.

How this tool works

As the facilitator

  1. 1 Create a session and add your participants by name and email.
  2. 2 Confirm the session via email - participants are invited automatically. You will be sent a link to manage the session.
  3. 3 Close the session when everyone has responded.
  4. 4 Send results so each person can view their window.

As a participant

  1. 1 Receive an email with two links - one to assess others, one to assess yourself.
  2. 2 Assess your colleagues by choosing words from a list of adjectives that describe them.
  3. 3 Assess yourself by choosing words from the same list that describe you.
  4. 4 Receive your results once the facilitator closes the session. No one else will see your results. It is up to you if you want to share them.

About the Johari Window

The Johari Window is a model and exercise developed in 1955 by two psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham. The name is a blend of their first names - Jo from Joseph, and Hari from Harrington.

The model helps individuals understand how they perceive themselves and how others perceive them. It emerged during a period of significant development in psychology, alongside the humanistic movement being shaped by thinkers such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

Unlike some personality tools that offer a relatively static picture, Luft and Ingham were explicit that the window is not fixed. As relationships change, grow, and develop, the window changes with them. Repeating the exercise over time can therefore reveal the shifting dynamics between an individual and the people they work with.

The results point to two clear ways to expand the Open area. To move into the Blind Spot, the individual needs to seek feedback from peers about specific traits - providing a structured and accessible first step into asking for open, candid feedback.

To move into the Hidden area, the individual needs to reflect on whether those traits are something they feel comfortable disclosing more openly, or whether the gap between self-perception and how they come across is something they want to work on. It is worth noting that not everyone will want to reduce their façade as social, cultural, and personal boundaries are legitimate, and the model respects that.

For this tool the original list of adjectives used by Luft and Ingham has been lightly updated. The original 56 words included terms such as "religious" which feel out of place in a modern workplace context. The updated list aims to stay true to the spirit of the original while being more relevant to how we work today.

Whilst most visualisations of the Johari Window show each area as the same size, in reality the proportions will differ depending on a number of factors. In a close-knit team that has been working together for a long time, individuals' open areas are more likely to be the largest, as psychological safety tends to be higher. In groups with significant differences in seniority or power dynamics, the shape of each person's window may look very different. The Johari Window is a useful exercise for explicitly and visually exploring these interpersonal and team dynamics.

Luft also outlined eleven principles that describe how awareness changes through interaction with others. A plain English summary accompanies each principle below.

  1. A change in any one quadrant will affect all other quadrants:

    All areas are interdependent. If one trait moves, the others readjust. This reflects the complexity of human relationships.

  2. It takes energy to hide, deny, or be blind to behaviour which is involved in interaction:

    People have more energy and are happier when they can be themselves. Trying to conceal who you are is draining.

  3. Threat tends to decrease awareness; mutual trust tends to increase it:

    Psychological safety within a group will more likely lead to larger open areas.

  4. Forced awareness (exposure) is undesirable and usually ineffective:

    Making people be overly transparent before they are ready is not what we are aiming for and can actually be harmful.

  5. Interpersonal learning means a change has taken place so that the Open area is larger and one or more of the other quadrants has grown smaller:

    Understanding your peers and teammates better will, by default, grow the open area for everyone.

  6. Working with others is facilitated by a large enough area of free activity - it means more of the resources and skills in the group can be applied to the task at hand:

    When people can engage openly, more of their actual skills and knowledge are available to the group - rather than being spent on managing impressions or navigating politics.

  7. The smaller the Open area, the poorer the communication:

    If teammates don't have a common understanding of each other, the quality of how they work and collaborate will suffer.

  8. There is universal curiosity about unknown areas, but this is held in check by custom, social training, and diverse fears:

    Not everyone wants to be fully open, and that is not a bad thing. It is a natural result of our different social and cultural backgrounds.

  9. Sensitivity means appreciating the covert aspects of behaviour in the Blind Spot, Hidden, and Unknown areas - and respecting the desire of others to keep them so:

    Not everyone wants to be an open book and that should be respected. The goal is not total transparency but willing, comfortable openness.

  10. Learning about group processes as they are being experienced helps to increase awareness for the group as a whole, as well as for individual members:

    Understanding how we work together as a team benefits everyone. It is not a fixed state but an ongoing, evolving process.

  11. The value system of a group and its membership may be noted in the way unknowns in the life of the group are confronted:

    How a group chooses to confront (or avoid) the things it does not yet know about itself reflects its values and ways of working more broadly.

Further reading

  • Luft, J. & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari Window: A Graphic Model of Interpersonal Awareness. Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development. University of California, Los Angeles.
  • Luft, J. (1969). Of Human Interaction. National Press Books, Palo Alto.
  • Luft, J. (1984). Group Processes: An Introduction to Group Dynamics (3rd ed.). Mayfield Publishing Company.