The Johari Window

Many people first encounter the Johari Window in leadership or personal development training. I was introduced to it in exactly that way – it was presented as a simple but powerful tool for self-awareness and managing feedback. It was used to demonstrate how feedback can help to reduce your “blind spots” about the way you are perceived by others. 

What is the Johari Window?

At it’s core, the Johari Window is a quadrant diagram, which plots what is “known to self” or “not known to self” against what is “known to others” or “not known to others”. The four quadrants (sometimes called the “four rooms”) are therefore:

1. Open – what you and others know about you. Also called the area of “free activity”.
2. Hidden – what you know about yourself, but choose not to share with others.
3. Blind spot – what others know about you, but you may not yet recognise.
4. Unknown – what neither you or others know about you yet, or, depending on how this tool is used, descriptors that do not apply to you.
   
   

Value of the Johari Window

As the saying goes, “all models are wrong and some are useful”. The Johari Window can certainly be one of the useful ones. For many of us, the idea of reducing blind spots through feedback is appealing. It gives us a simple framework for increasing our self-awareness and for reflecting on how our behaviour is perceived by others.

It also highlights how we might learn and grow in relationship with colleagues. In Johari terms, we often aim to expand the size of our open area – what’s shared and visible – while reducing what’s hidden or in our blind spot. Doing so can help us improve the way we work and communicate with others.

As Joseph Luft, co-creator of the model, brilliantly put it: 

“A centipede may be perfectly happy without awareness; but after all, he restricts himself to crawling under rocks.”

In other words, awareness can feel uncomfortable, but it opens up new possibilities.

That said, we do need to use the Johari Window with some care and caution. Here’s why…

A Brief History of the Johari Window

The Johari Window was developed in 1955 by two psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, and first presented at a HR conference in California* (the name Johari comes from combining their shortened first names, and is pronounced as they are: Joe-Harry).

It seems it made an impact that neither of them were expecting,** and Luft wrote later that they were “surprised to find so many people, academicians and non-professionals alike, using, and tinkering with, the model.”

Interestingly, the Johari Window wasn’t originally designed as a diagram or model. It was first created as an exercise. Participants were given a list of adjectives, and asked to choose which best describe themselves. The same list was then given to their colleagues or peers, who would choose the adjectives that they felt best described that person.

Once both sets of choices were compared, the descriptors were sorted into the four quadrants:

• Hidden – chosen only by the subject, not others
• Open – chosen by both the subject and others
• Blind spot – chosen only by others
• Unknown – chosen by neither

The results can then be plotted into the Johari Window grid and might end up looking something like this: 

In this form, the Johari Window exercise is clearly about exploring how we perceive ourselves, what we choose to share and how others perceive us. Where there are differences, it opens the door to self-reflection and learning.

This might be especially useful if we’re doing some work on our “work persona” or our “leadership persona” and want to better understand how we come across to colleagues. By comparing what’s in our hidden area or blind spot with what others see, we can gain insight into how our behaviour and communication are experienced by the people around us.

For example, I might believe I’m very approachable, but be surprised to find when I do the Johari Window exercise that my team didn’t choose that word – or others I was expecting, like “supportive.” That alone might be a valuable starting point for change.

On the other hand, the exercise might show that certain aspects of my personality simply aren’t visible at work – perhaps I’m not sharing my more fun or light-hearted side. Seeing that difference can prompt me to reflect: is this something I want to keep hidden, or might showing a little more of it help me build stronger connections?

Different Applications of the Johari Window

Like any model, the Johari Window can be adapted to different contexts. There are multiple ways that the Johari Window can spark useful insights. 

One key use is as a visual reminder that everyone has a “Hidden” area. As we build relationships, we can intentionally choose what to disclose, over time perhaps shrinking our Hidden area and expanding our Open area. Equally important, the Johari Window reminds us we can be intentional about what we keep in our Hidden area. For instance, teachers might think very carefully about which aspects of their personal lives they want to share with students, and which remain in their Hidden area.

In this way, the Johari Window can connect well with practices such as developing Personal User Manuals or READMEs. Framing these tools through the Johari Window encourages us to be deliberate about what we bring into the Open area – what do we want colleagues to know about our working style, preferences and values?

Common Misunderstandings about the Johari Window

Where it’s perhaps problematic, is where we see the Johari Window presented not as a tool or exercise, but as a model of the self. A quick search online turns up multiple leadership and coaching articles claiming that the Johari Window helps to “reduce conscious and unconscious biases”, or urges people to eliminate blind spots and change their behaviour so that they can be judged more favourably by others. 

This is probably a stretch, for a number of reasons… 

Firstly, the Johari Window is about exploring perceptions – both our own and those of others. We don’t have to accept or internalise the descriptors others might choose for us. After all, people see us through the lens of their own prejudices, biases and stereotypes.

Secondly, what is “known” by others is still just their perception. It might be “their truth” but it is not an absolute or objective truth. The same behaviour can be perceived in radically different ways dependent on context. A woman expressing anger might be perceived as overly emotional, while a man doing the same might be considered passionate or full of conviction. This intersects with race too – a black woman might be labelled aggressive for behaviour that would be deemed “assertive” in a white man. The Johari Window doesn’t protect us from those biases.

And even if we do the exercise exactly as Luft and Ingham, the adjectives themselves may not provide anything we can recognise as clear, actionable “feedback”. For feedback to be truly useful, it needs to be specific, not just a list of vague descriptors.

From a psychological safety perspective, that’s especially important. If we give someone a list of adjectives without further explanation, it’s easy to see how it could increase anxiety: Why do they see me like that? Am I always that? Does everyone see me this way? Without context, the exercise risks undermining trust rather than building it.

The risks of misusing the Johari Window

When we give kind, clear and actionable feedback, we try to separate a discussion about someone’s behaviour from wider (and often unfair) assertions about their character. Misused, the Johari Window risks doing the opposite – blurring the line between feedback and identity, and reducing someone to a label rather than supporting their growth.

Learn more about the Johari Window, feedback models, and practical ways to build psychological safety in our online workshops.

References/ Further Reading:

Personal User Manuals

Psychological Safety and Giving Feedback

An interesting essay from William Bergquist on the Johari Window

Article from Joseph Luft on the Johari Window

*Despite our best detective work, we’ve not been able to track down and read the original paper for this, though plenty of articles online use the following citation: Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari Window, a Graphic Model of Interpersonal Awareness. Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development, 246, 2014-03. The closest we’ve found (thanks to Charlie Gregson!) is this archived copy of a piece by Joseph Luft in the Human Relations Training News 1961) It seems that Joseph Luft later wrote about the Johari Window in his 1969 book ‘On Human Interaction’ which is also out of print and difficult to track down. If anyone has a copy of the original paper or book, let us know – we’d love to read it and update this piece accordingly!

**As a testament to this unexpected popularity, there is even an excellent Belgian Metalcore band called The Johari Window. Listen to them on Bandcamp here.

Psychological safety full online course

Our online psychological safety workshops cover everything from what psychological safety is to how to measure and build it in organisations. We offer a range of options to suit your needs, from foundational to advanced learning, for everyone from team members, senior leaders, consultants and trainers. All are highly engaging, inclusive and interactive learning experiences.

The workshops will help you to:

• Understand the theory and evidence for psychological safety in relation to team performance.
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• Find out how to measure psychological safety across your organisation or within teams.
• Learn how to foster psychological safety in your teams, organisations, or your own clients.
• Ignite your leadership and management teams with the benefits of psychological safety.
• Use and apply the Psychological Safety Action Pack with teams to measure, build and maintain psychological safety
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All our training options and workshops provide certificated CPD hours and Credly badges to evidence your professional development.

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This is an excellent piece by Joe Fay in The New Stack about psychological safety in Tech, and why it’s more important now than ever.

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This is a fantastic listen – during her 24 years as a NASA astronaut, including a six-month stint on the ISS, Cady Coleman learned lessons about everything from managing stress and assessing risk to cross-cultural communication and navigating bias. Cady describes creating a psychologically safe environment where people “feel free to report safety issues or things that just don’t feel right or could be done better.“

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Here’s a great open access study by Alf Steinar Sætre, Amy C. Edmondson, Oda Dregelid and Sofie Rud Zimmer, that examines how psychological ownership—a sense of personal ownership over a project—can facilitate successful innovation handoffs across departmental boundaries in organisations. The research highlights that psychological ownership motivates individuals to engage more deeply with projects, ensuring improved coordination and continuity during handoffs. However, it also highlights potential downsides, such as the “Not Invented Here” syndrome, where high ownership can lead departments to reject ideas from outside their own group.

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This article by John Allspaw on resilience engineering and adaptive capacity echoes many of the points and practices we espouse in our management training:

• Resilience means improving how people can respond and learn from unexpected events and incidents. Fostering environments where people can openly share their perspectives is key to organisational learning. 
• In organisations, we notice when things go wrong, but less so all the times that things go right. We tend to investigate the hell out of a failure, but rarely put the same effort into analysing success. We should.
• Organisations are made up of many teams working together. It’s all well and good if a team is psychologically safe, but if two teams can’t work together as a group, the organisation will suffer. Being explicit about teams’ goals, constraints, needs and capabilities (i.e. through Team charters) fosters the capabilities for success.

Everything about Resilience Engineering in practice requires fostering psychological safety.