Johari Window
What is the Johari Window?
The Johari Window is a visual framework used to improve interpersonal communication and relationships while promoting personal development. It is divided into four quadrants—open area, blind area, hidden area, and unknown area—where participants categorize personal attributes. This tool offers opportunities for feedback and discussion, aiming to enhance group dynamics.1
The Basic Idea
Unless you are Professor X and can read people’s minds, it is likely that you rely on guesswork when it comes to understanding what other people think about you.
Unfortunately, that guesswork isn’t usually very accurate, largely not because we don’t understand other people, but because we do not really understand ourselves. As a result, a gap exists between our self-perception and other people’s perception of us, and it is a gap that we find difficult to identify.
The Johari Window can help diminish that gap. It is a self-awareness tool that helps us understand the differences between how people see us and how we see ourselves.1
There are known knows; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
– American politician and former United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in a 2002 news briefing.2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
