Johari Window
The Johari window is a model that sorts into four areas what a person knows about themselves and what the people around them know. The psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham published it in 1955. The open area holds what the person and the others both know, the blind area what the others see and they do not, the hidden area what they know and keep back, the unknown area what nobody knows yet. The total surface is fixed: asking for feedback shrinks the blind area, disclosing shrinks the hidden area, the open area grows by as much. The deliverable is a filled-in window for a person or a team, with the actions each area calls for.
Goal
The Johari window makes visible the gap between what a person knows about themselves and what the people around them observe. It was built for group dynamics training and is facilitated in a session, with the person concerned and a few colleagues who see them work.
The decision it supports is a development decision: who needs what, in what form. A well-filled blind area points to a need for regular feedback or for coaching. A hidden area points to a skill already there that the team does not use or to a difficulty nobody has heard. During a change deployment, these two findings decide what comes next.
The deliverable is a dated window carrying observations in the open area, the blind area and the hidden area, together with a short list of actions, each tied to one area and each with an owner and a deadline.
Usage
When to use it
- After a new tool goes live: spot who has already mastered it and who does not dare say they are lost.
- Forming a project team: make known the skills each member brings before the roles are handed out.
- Team retrospective: give structure to feedback that stays vague or turns into blame.
- Development review: frame the discussion on a gap in perception that is named and observable.
- A project team facing its users: name what the group keeps to itself, unspoken assumptions or constraints left unsaid.
When not to use it
- No psychological safety: the feedback round turns into a settling of scores, go through an anonymous survey.
- Performance appraisal or a promotion decision: the model measures nothing, take a competency framework.
- A team that has never seen itself work: nobody can feed the blind area, start with observation.
Description
Two axes, four areas
The model crosses two binary axes. The first separates what the person knows from what is unknown to them and reads in columns; the second separates what the others know from what is unknown to them and reads in rows. The others, in the session, are a defined group: the colleagues who see the person work. The crossing gives four areas, which Luft names in Of Human Interaction.
The open area holds what the person knows about themselves and the others know as well: their role, what they have mastered, their working habits. It is the surface a team collaborates on. The blind area holds what the others see and the person does not: a verbal tic, the effect produced on the person across the table, a skill they underrate. The hidden area holds what the person knows and has not said: a difficulty with a tool, a disagreement kept to themselves. The unknown area holds what neither the person nor the others know yet, an aptitude no situation has yet called on.
What is hidden is already available and it takes only the person's decision to say it. What is blind takes someone else naming it, so a setting where naming it is possible.
A constant surface, moving boundaries
Luft holds the total surface of the window to be fixed: any gain in one area is taken from the others. The window describes a state at a given moment.
Two movements shift the boundaries, one per axis. Feedback, what the others say back to the person, slides the vertical boundary to the right: what was blind moves into the open area. Self-disclosure, what the person chooses to say about themselves, brings the horizontal boundary down: what was hidden moves into the open area.
The unknown area shrinks without anyone being able to aim at it. It empties when a new situation reveals something to the person and to the people around them at once: standing in for someone at no notice, a crisis, a task never entrusted before. That is why an action plan coming out of a window often includes putting the person in a new situation.
The smaller the open area, the more expensive cooperation becomes: everyone works on suppositions, and the energy spent holding a hidden area does not go into the work. Luft also observes that threat reduces self-awareness while trust raises it, which makes forced disclosure counter-productive.
Running the session
The session brings together four to eight people who have seen the person concerned at work, around one working surface with the cross drawn in advance.
- Set the frame before opening the window
Who fills in whose window, where the line between work and private life runs, what leaves the room. The person concerned agrees to these three points. - Fill in the open area together
The exercise puts the vocabulary in place and frames the window on observable work. - Run the feedback round
Each participant names one observed behaviour, placed and dated, with the effect it produced. The person concerned listens and asks only for detail. Feedback phrased as a label ("she is rigid") gives nothing to work with; the same feedback as an observation ("at the workshop on 12 March, you decided before Marc had finished") does. - Open the disclosure round
The facilitator sets the pace and presses on nothing: this round is voluntary, item by item. - Redraw the window
Move the boundaries in the session, in plain view. What has just crossed from the blind or the hidden into the open is the result of the hour just spent. - Decide the actions
Each finding kept becomes an action with an owner and a deadline: a training course, a pairing, coaching, a task handed over differently. Three actions held to are worth more than ten listed. - Replay the window
Three to six months later, with the same group. Comparing the two windows says whether the actions had an effect.
A team's window
The model applies to a group as it does to a person. A project team has its open area, what its stakeholders know about it. Its blind area holds what users see of the way it works and it does not. Its hidden area holds the constraints or the doubts it has not shared. Filled in during a retrospective or with a group of users, this version answers a question of collaboration: what does the other side know about us that we do not know. It combines with force field analysis during a deployment, the window surfacing resistance that the force field then serves to score and sort.
What makes the exercise fail
Treating the window as a diagnosis
The four areas cannot be measured. The self-report questionnaire built on the model, examined in 1978, gives a score without giving the exchange that carries the technique. The filled-in window is the trace of a conversation.
Forcing disclosure
The hidden area belongs to the person. Professional discretion, a medical file, a private situation have their place there and do not have to leave it. A facilitator who pushes gets surface compliance, and the group learns that keeping quiet will be the better option next time. The target is an open area large enough to work in.
Forgetting the power relations
The model ignores hierarchy. What an employee puts in their hidden area depends on who is listening, their line manager or their colleagues, and the window keeps no record of the difference. Nor does it separate a difficulty left unsaid for want of an occasion from an interest deliberately held back. The blind area records what the room was willing to say.
Confusing feedback with judgement
A label names the person and closes the session; an observed behaviour opens a possible action. The facilitator reframes any label as an observation on the spot or sets it aside.
Trying to fill the unknown area
By construction, nobody in the room can fill it in. A team that tries speculates about people. The pane stays empty during the session.
A session with no follow-up
A window drawn and then filed away changes nothing. What has an effect is a list of actions held to and reviewed, then a window replayed a few months later to show what has moved.
AI considerations
Before the session, a conversational assistant prepares the facilitation: a grid of questions, a reminder of the rules of descriptive feedback, labels recast as observations that the facilitator can offer live. It also sorts a batch of written feedback and proposes a first classification by area, which the session will contest. Afterwards it turns the findings kept into a development plan with its deadlines and prepares the comparison between the first window and the one that will be replayed.
The blind area fills with observations only colleagues who have seen the person work can produce, and a model that has observed nothing would invent them. What is said in the session is personal data within the meaning of the Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP), in places sensitive personal data: putting a feedback record into an online service is a data protection decision, taken before the session. Finally, what moves the boundaries is an exchange between people taking a risk in front of their colleagues. No tool produces that risk for them.
Examples
The service des automobiles et de la navigation of the canton of Vaud, the cantonal vehicle and navigation office, opened its online counter six weeks ago. One case officer fills in her window with five colleagues from the same counter. The concept illustrated: the open area grows on both of its sides at once.
Two movements took place in one hour. Three colleagues named the same behaviour, explanations on the telephone that assume an administrative vocabulary the caller does not have, something she had not known. She then said she had never used the billing module and left it to a colleague. The two findings give two actions of different kinds, coaching at the counter for the first, half a day of hands-on training for the second.
Visualisations
A piece of information counts only by the side of each axis it falls on, and the session is judged by the movement of a boundary. A four-cell table would carry the lists. The figure carries the movement as well, by showing the same window at two moments.
Cost
| Phase | Level | Justification |
|---|---|---|
| Preparation | Medium | Get the agreement of the person concerned, choose colleagues who have seen them work, recall the rules of descriptive feedback. This framing decides the session and cannot be made good along the way. |
| Execution | Low | One to two hours for a person, half a day for a team's window. No material beyond a board and sticky notes. |
| Documentation | Low | The filled-in window and the list of actions fit on one page. The raw feedback exchanged in the session is not archived, it does not leave the room. |
Tooling
A whiteboard with the cross drawn on it and one sticky note per observation are enough. A note peeled off the blind area and stuck into the open area shows the result at the moment it happens. For a remote session, the collaborative whiteboards (Miro, Mural, FigJam) do the same job and keep an editable artefact for the replayed window.
Self-report questionnaires built on the model have circulated since the 1970s. One of them, the Johari Window Test, was the subject of a research note in 1978. They produce a score, useful for opening a discussion, too thin to replace it. For the follow-up, the tool that counts is the one where the person's development plan already lives, the annual review file or the training platform: the window pours its actions into it.
Sources
- Luft, J. and 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: the original paper, which gives the model its name. It appeared in the internal proceedings of a training laboratory and does not circulate in full text.
- Luft, J. (1969), Of Human Interaction, Palo Alto, National Press Books: the reference account of the model by its co-author. It carries the names of the four areas, the constant surface, the two movements and the effect of threat or trust on what a person will accept to see.
- Esposito, R. P., McAdoo, H. and Scher, L. (1978), The Johari Window Test: A Research Note, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18(1), 79-81: a research note on the self-report questionnaire built on the model, useful for placing the reach of a score obtained that way.