Two windows that explain inclusion

Inclusion happens on two levels at once. There’s the personal level — what I can see about my own behaviour, my blind spots, the parts of myself I choose to reveal or keep hidden. And there’s the societal level — what the people around me currently treat as normal, sayable and acceptable. Two well-known models give us a language for each. The Johari Window looks inward. The Overton Window looks outward. Hold both, and you start to understand why inclusion work is never just about policy or just about awareness — it’s about both moving together.

The Johari Window: looking inward

The Johari Window is a simple model of self-awareness with four quadrants, drawn along two lines: what you know about yourself, and what others know about you.

• Open (the Arena). Things known to you and to others — your visible behaviours, the parts of yourself you share freely.
• Blind spot. Things others can see but you can’t — the habit, the tone, the impact you’re unaware of.
• Hidden (the Façade). Things you know about yourself but keep from others — needs, experiences, parts of your identity you don’t feel safe to share.
• Unknown. Things neither you nor others have yet seen — untapped potential, buried responses, things only the right situation reveals.

The goal is to grow the Open area, because that’s where trust lives. It grows two ways. Feedback from others shrinks your blind spot — you learn something about your impact you couldn’t see alone. Disclosure shrinks your hidden area — you choose to share something, and the façade comes down a little.

Why the Johari Window matters in EDI

This is where it gets practical. Unconscious bias and microaggressions live almost entirely in the blind spot. By definition, you can’t see your own unconscious bias — that’s what makes it unconscious. The only way it moves into the Open area is through feedback: someone trusted enough, and kind enough, to tell you how something landed. That’s a huge part of what allyship actually is — the gift of trustworthy feedback, offered as a courageous conversation rather than a public callout. Calling people in — kindly, specifically, privately — is how we help each other see our blind spots without raising the defences.

The hidden area matters just as much. People only disclose — their identity, their needs, their lived experience, the adjustment that would help — when they feel safe enough to. That safety isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the precondition for disclosure. Where there is no psychological safety, the façade stays up, the Open area stays small, and you never get the information you need to include people well. The bigger the shared Open area between us, the more trust, the more belonging, and the better the work.

You can’t see your own blind spot. That’s the whole point of the word. Inclusion is partly about building the kind of relationships where someone will hand you the mirror — and you’ll thank them for it.

Want to explore your own Open area? Two of the self-checks on this site go straight at it: the Emotional Intelligence self-check looks at self-awareness and how you take feedback, and the Psychological Safety & Belonging self-check looks at whether the people around you feel safe enough to disclose.

The Overton Window: looking outward

The Overton Window describes something different — not the individual, but the group. It’s the range of ideas currently considered acceptable in public conversation at any given moment. Picture a spectrum running from unthinkable, through radical, acceptable, sensible, popular, all the way to policy. At any point in time, a “window” sits over part of that spectrum — and ideas inside the window are the ones people feel they can say out loud without raising eyebrows.

The crucial thing about the window is that it shifts. What sits comfortably inside it today may have been unthinkable a generation ago — and the reverse is true too: things once treated as perfectly normal can drift to the edge of acceptability and out. The model is neutral about which ideas are right. It simply describes how acceptability moves.

Why the Overton Window matters in EDI

Inclusion norms are always on the move, and the Overton Window gives us a way to see it happening. Plenty of language and behaviour once considered normal is now widely seen as unacceptable; some things once unsayable are now ordinary. When someone says “it’s just banter” or “you can’t say anything any more”, they’re often standing right at the edge of a shifting window, feeling it move under their feet. Both phrases are the window being contested — and backlash, when it comes, is the window being pulled back the other way.

For anyone leading change, this is liberating. The window of what’s “normal” in an organisation isn’t fixed — it’s shifted, deliberately, by leaders who model new behaviour, by advocates who keep raising an issue, and above all by lived-experience stories that make the abstract human. You can move the window. But there’s a craft to it: you move people most effectively when you meet them at the edge of the current window rather than leaping past it. Push an idea that sits in the “unthinkable” zone for your audience and you’ll lose the room; offer the next reasonable step and you bring people with you. That’s the same instinct behind agreeing to understand — start where people are, not where you wish they were.

You don’t shift a culture by shouting from the far end of the spectrum. You shift it by standing just inside the window and gently opening it a little wider, conversation by conversation.

How the two windows connect

Here’s why it helps to hold them together. The Johari Window is about personal awareness — me widening my Open area through feedback and disclosure. The Overton Window is about societal acceptability — the group shifting what it treats as normal. They’re not the same thing, and real change needs both.

You can have a roomful of self-aware individuals and still have an organisation whose collective window hasn’t moved. And you can have a fashionable, window-shifted culture full of the right words, where no individual has actually examined their own blind spot. Genuine inclusion is where the two meet: people widening what they can see about themselves, and the shared window shifting toward inclusion — each one making the other easier. As more people do their personal work, the collective window moves; as the window moves, it becomes safer for the next person to disclose and to hear feedback. That’s conscious inclusion working at both levels at once.

Practical takeaways for leaders

• Build feedback that shrinks blind spots. Make it normal, specific and kind to tell each other how something landed — and model receiving it well yourself.
• Make disclosure safe. People share their needs and experiences only when the façade can come down without cost. Protect that safety relentlessly.
• Call in, not out. The blind spot moves into the open through a trusted, private nudge — not a public takedown that raises the drawbridge.
• Meet people at the edge of the window. Offer the next reasonable step rather than the destination. You move a culture by widening the window, not by leaping past it.
• Use stories to shift what’s normal. Lived experience does more to move the window than any policy memo — it makes the abstract human.
• Work both levels. Invest in individual self-awareness and in the collective norms. Neither alone is enough.

Inclusion isn’t one conversation or one campaign. It’s a slow, deliberate widening — of what each of us can see about ourselves, and of what all of us are willing to accept. Two windows, opening together. Explore related thinking in allyship: hold the rope and the Inclusive Culture & Belonging topic, or hear these ideas explored on the Inclusion Bites podcast.