The Johari Window | Hacker News Reader

The Johari Window

en.wikipedia.org

126 points1970-01-0113 comments

This is best done with a group of friends who know you pretty well, and done as a mutual exercise, where you complete a Johari window for everyone.

It's pretty neat to see which qualities you see in yourself, and how much those show up in your peers' assessment of you, along with which ones they see that you don't, and vice versa.

There's this lovely interactive tool for performing this online, if you're with a group of friends and want to try it: https://kevan.org/johari

Related articles - no comments, but interesting enough to list:`

How to identify your blind spots? -The Johari Window - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16427343 - Feb 2018 (0 comments)

The Johari Window - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380139 - April 2015 (0 comments)

Reminds of this brilliance, which was also linked:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns

in a software project we named a sync primitive a "rummy": true, false, null, waiting.

Such a pool of pluswords, more or less. What if I am sarcastic, impatient, nitpicking, and arrogant? What if you are?

There's also the Nohari window. We did both in our team and man the Nohari led to some interesting situations. Would not recommend unless your team is very close and chill.

With the Johari, the "negative" basically shows by the qualities you attribute to yourself, but nobody else attributes to you.

TIL! This doesn't look half bad.

> “In the exercise, someone picks a number of adjectives from a list, choosing ones they feel describe their own personality. The subject's peers then get the same list, and each picks an equal number of adjectives that describe the subject. These adjectives are then inserted into a two-by-two grid of four cells.”

> “Room one is the part of ourselves that we and others see. Room two contains aspects that others see but we are unaware of. Room three is the private space we know but hide from others. Room four is the unconscious part of us that neither ourselves nor others see.”

I wonder how the fourth room, which neither the subject or their peers see, is populated…

I guess if we look into the list for the possible personalities[1] everything not fall in the first three windows are in the forth window.

[1.] provided by disillusioned user: https://kevan.org/johari

If I understand correctly, with the remaining words from the list. Guess it’s meant as a point of reflection, whether, and in what way, those adjectives might apply.

It's an interesting idea to me, and something I hadn't thought of before. Usually in these kinds of round-robin self-peer rating paradigms the peers are thought of collectively as a kind of oracle, especially as the number of peers increases.

Theoretically I guess there might be some pattern of behavior that goes unnoticed by everyone participating in the exercise. You could imagine, for example, some AI program that analyzes daily recordings of everyone in an organization (admittedly dystopian in its own way but relevant), and identifies some clear pattern in a person that goes unrecognized by everyone in the organization. Whether the AI would "count" in the Johari window exercise is where things get blurry but to the extent the exercise is about human cognition and its consequences I can see how it would apply.

This is already in a nice 2x2 matrix, so I'm sure it'll be coming to a consultant near you any time soon.

I feel like what is "unconscious" is oftentimes that which you don't recognize, but others do. The classic "Freudian" slip is the greatest example. People are always saying shit, completely by accident, that reveals their "unconscious" feelings but they don't even acknowledge or recognize it even if everyone else does. In fact, it is only possible to see what you don't know about yourself by speaking with others (thus: Plato!)

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