Over the years I have worked with many different teams, in different organisations and with very different challenges. Despite those differences, I keep coming back to one simple observation: teams work better when they have a shared understanding of why they exist, what they want to achieve and how they want to work together.
That sounds obvious, but in practice it is often not as clear as we think.
Especially when a team is new, when people have joined or left the team, or when the organisation around the team changes, many assumptions remain implicit. People can have very different expectations about their responsibilities, the way decisions are made, the level of collaboration that is expected and even about the purpose of the team itself.
A Team Canvas can help to make these assumptions visible and create a shared understanding.
What is it?
For me, a Team Canvas is much more than a poster that you create during a workshop and put on the wall afterwards. It is a way of making the things that are often implicit within a team explicit, so that people can actually have a conversation about them.
A Team Canvas can contain different topics, depending on what the team needs. There is no single version that works for every team, and I actually think that is one of the strengths of the approach.
What can be on it?
Purpose
The first question I like to ask is why the team exists. This is different from asking what the team does, because activities and responsibilities can change while the underlying purpose remains much more stable.
A clear purpose helps a team make decisions and determine where it should spend its energy. It also makes it easier to explain to stakeholders what the team is actually there to achieve.
Customers
It is useful to understand who benefits from the work of the team and who depends on the team to be successful. This can be particularly important in larger organisations where teams are part of a much bigger chain of products, processes and services.
By making these relationships visible, a team can start to understand not only what it does, but also where it fits within the larger system.
Outcomes
I prefer to talk about outcomes rather than only looking at the output of a team. Delivering a lot of stories, features or other work does not automatically mean that a team has created value.
The more interesting question is what difference the team wants to make and how it will know whether it is actually making that difference.
Roles
Teams often have a formal description of roles, but that does not necessarily mean that everyone has the same understanding of their responsibilities.
A Team Canvas provides a good opportunity to discuss who is responsible for what, where responsibilities overlap and where there may still be gaps. These conversations can prevent misunderstandings later, particularly when teams are becoming more self-organising.
Strengths
Every team has knowledge, experience and talents that go beyond the formal job descriptions of its members. Making these strengths visible can help a team understand what it can do itself and where it is dependent on other people.
It can also reveal where knowledge is concentrated in one person, which can become a risk for the team.
Behaviour
Many teams have values written down somewhere, but the real question is what those values mean in daily behaviour.
If a team says that openness is important, what does that mean when someone disagrees with the Product Owner? If respect is one of the team’s values, how do people behave when a discussion becomes difficult?
These conversations are important because they turn abstract values into something that people can actually use in their daily work.
Ways of working
A team also benefits from discussing how it wants to work together. This can include topics such as meetings, collaboration, refinement, planning, quality, documentation and communication.
The purpose is not to create a huge list of rules that nobody remembers. Instead, the team should identify the agreements that really help them work effectively together.
Decisions
Teams often discover that they have very different assumptions about how decisions should be made and how information should be shared.
Making these assumptions explicit can prevent frustration and unnecessary escalation. It also helps a team become more autonomous, because people know where they can make decisions themselves and when they need to involve others.
Feedback
I also like to discuss whether people feel comfortable challenging each other, asking questions and admitting that they do not know something.
A healthy team is not necessarily a team where everyone agrees. In my experience, it is much more important that people feel safe enough to disagree and that they know they can have difficult conversations without damaging the relationship within the team.
Development
A team is not a static group of people, and the things it needs can change over time. A newly formed team will have different needs from a team that has been working together for several years.
I therefore like to connect the Team Canvas with the development stage of the team, for example by using Tuckman’s model of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. It gives the team a useful language to talk about where it currently is and what it needs to move forward.
How do you create it?
One important thing I have learned is that creating a Team Canvas is not one workshop.
Depending on the team, its size, its history and the topics that need attention, it can take several workshops to create a canvas that the team really recognises as its own. Before starting, it is therefore difficult to say exactly how many sessions will be needed.
And I think that is a good thing.
The goal is not to get through a predefined list of boxes within two hours. The goal is to have the conversations that the team needs to have.
Some topics might be relatively easy to agree on, while others can lead to much deeper conversations. You may discover that the team first needs to talk about its purpose before it can meaningfully discuss responsibilities. A conversation about behaviour might reveal tensions that need more attention before the team can make agreements.
That is all part of the process.
I therefore prefer to see creating a Team Canvas as a series of conversations and workshops, rather than as one fixed workshop with a fixed agenda.
Some topics can first be explored individually before bringing the answers together, while other topics are much more valuable when the team immediately discusses them together.
The most important part is not filling in the canvas, but creating the shared understanding behind it.
And then?
One of the biggest mistakes I see is that teams create a beautiful Team Canvas in Miro or on a poster and then never look at it again.
I think the canvas should evolve with the team.
When people join or leave the team, when the team’s purpose changes, when there are tensions within the team or when the way of working changes, it can be useful to revisit the canvas and see whether the agreements still make sense.
That is also why I see a Team Canvas as something that can support the team over a longer period rather than as a one-off workshop exercise.
The canvas gives the team something tangible to look at, but the real value is in the conversations that created it and the agreements that come out of those conversations.
No perfect canvas
I do not believe there is one perfect Team Canvas that every team should use.
The topics should depend on the team, the organisation and the situation that the team is currently facing. Sometimes purpose and responsibilities are the most important topics, while another team may need to focus much more on collaboration, decision-making or trust.
I also prefer to use the language of the team itself rather than filling the canvas with corporate terminology. If the team does not use the words you put on the canvas, the canvas will quickly become something that belongs to the facilitator rather than something that belongs to the team.
The best Team Canvas is therefore not necessarily the most beautiful one. It is the one where the team looks at it and recognises itself in what is written down.
Need help?
Creating a Team Canvas is something I really enjoy facilitating, and I can help teams with the complete process, from preparing the sessions and determining which topics are relevant, to facilitating the conversations and turning the results into a canvas that the team can actually use.
Because every team is different, I do not believe in simply running the same standard workshop for every team. I prefer to first understand what is happening within the team and then design the process around what the team actually needs.
The number of workshops is therefore something we determine along the way, based on the conversations that need to happen and the progress the team is making.
If you feel that your team could benefit from creating more clarity around its purpose, responsibilities, expectations, ways of working and ambitions, feel free to get in touch.
I am happy to help, including as an external facilitator that you can hire for the process.
