Author: Hugo Messer

The Culture Canvas

Another useful tool is the culture canvas. This canvas can be filled by the distributed team (ideally in one space).

Hugo gives the example that as a Dutch team member, I would fill this in regarding the collaboration with my colleagues, for example, in India. I’ll take the “perspective” and use sticky notes to indicate what I hear about my Indian team mates. I’ll indicate what pains and gains I derive from the collaboration, etc. I might write that I have a lot of gain from the creativity my Indian team brings to my project, as this enables me to deliver a better product to my customers.

My Indian teammates will do the same thing in turn for me. They might say that they consider me to be very open. In a way they gain from this because they know what’s going on. But they may sometimes feel hurt because I come across as blunt.

Now after we’ve both filled the canvas (and yes it requires openness from both sides—so you may want to do some warm up exercises before doing this), we can compare the results. We can make a list of the top five issues we identified and then discuss ways to deal with them. What could we change in our communication or in our process to avoid the issues going forward? Or, could we introduce some specific tools to help us improve?

This Culture Canvas is inspired by the empathy map of Alexander Osterwalder.