Complexity: Medium
Time required: 90-120 minutes, 2-8 participants
Material required: eam Canvas Basic recreated on a whiteboard or on a big piece of paper (e.g. flipchart paper), blocks of coloured post-its, pens, and timer
References: Team Canvas by Alex Ivanov and Mitya Voloshchuk
What is it for?
Team Canvas helps brining team members on the same page by following structured communication principles. Team Canvas is a strategic framework used to align teams and achieve cohesion among team values, goals and performances. It can be used is situations like forming a team, adding a new team member to the group, clarifying goals, addressing overall team achievements etc. It summarizes all the elements needed for a team to get the overview of group performance.
How to use it?
To fill in the Team Canvas gather a group for a 90-120 minute team session. Start with the introduction of defining the session’s goal and explaining the Team Canvas segments. Go through each segment making sure you asked questions from all segments. Spend 10-15 on each area and encourage participants to write their answers on post-it notes and discuss about them with the team. There are fields that all team should agree on: 1. People and Roles; 2. Goals; 4. Purpose; 5. Values; 9. Rules and culture. The rest of the fields can be filled in individually, with no particular need to be agreed upon. End a session with a Wrap up and ask the team members to tell about one insight they gained during the process.
