Alignment Chart Template
The alignment chart originated in the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game to allow players to categorize their characters according to their ethical and moral perspectives.
About the Alignment Chart Template
To understand what an alignment chart does, it’s helpful to understand the concept of alignment. An alignment categorizes a person, thing, or idea along two dimensions: “lawful” versus “chaotic” and “good” versus “evil.” Combine these dimensions in a total of nine different alignments. For example, someone can embody “lawful good” or “chaotic evil.” An alignment chart situates these traits along a 3x3 or 5x5 grid.
Where is the Alignment Chart from
Alignment charts originated in the game Dungeons & Dragons. D&D creator Gary Gygax drew on fantasy stories by authors Michael Moorcock and Poul Anderson to create a fun, memorable system for categorizing players’ characters before playing a game. Characters could be lawful, meaning they respect and follow societal rules; chaotic, meaning they are rebellious and individualistic, or neutral, meaning they aren’t quite lawful or chaotic. Gygax later introduced the cross-cutting traits of “good” and “evil” to add nuance to these descriptors.
Over the past few years, alignment charts have moved beyond the realm of D&D and into classrooms, online quizzes, listicles, and conference rooms. They’re a popular feature on social media accounts for brands and individuals alike.
If you’re a social media manager, you can use an alignment chart as a fun exercise on your Instagram or other accounts, sorting your products, features, favorite movies, or more based on the alignment system.
You can also use an alignment chart template as a lighthearted way to kick off a brainstorm, or as an icebreaker before a meeting. Simply give everyone a topic, or invite your team to pick a topic and let your imagination run wild.
Create your own Alignment Chart
Making your own Alignment Chart is easy. Miro’s virtual collaboration platform is the perfect canvas to create and share them. Get started by selecting the Alignment Chart Template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
Pick a topic. If there’s a book you like, you could align the characters or align several books in the same genre. If you have a line of products, you could align those too. The possibilities are endless! The only constraint is that you have to choose nine things to categorize. If you’re using the alignment chart to kick off a brainstorming session or as an icebreaker, get the whole team involved. Invite anyone to pick a topic.
Choose photos or images to represent each thing you’re categorizing. You can use emojis (as seen in our template), stickers, or actual images of the item you’re sorting into the chart. Get creative with it. If you plan on sharing the alignment chart on social media, don’t be afraid to dress it up with colorful fonts and graphics. You want your chart to stand out to inspire your followers to share widely.
Use the template to sort each thing. Add your images to the template to signify where something falls in the alignment chart. There are nine total possibilities: lawful good, chaotic good, neutral good, true neutral, lawful neutral, chaotic neutral, lawful evil, chaotic evil, and neutral evil.
Share your chart with your team. Once you’re finished sorting, you can share your alignment chart with your team! This is especially useful if you need to gather feedback from your teammates before posting it on social media.
How do I read an Alignment chart?
An Alignment chart is a useful tool for developing a character’s identity. An alignment chart categorizes a person, thing, or idea along two dimensions: “lawful” versus “chaotic” and “good” versus “evil.” It’s possible to combine these dimensions in a total of nine different alignments in the Alignment Chart’s 3x3 grid. For example, someone can embody “chaotic evil” or “lawful good.”
What are the 9 moral alignments?
The Alignment chart has 9 moral alignments in its 3x3 grid, which allow you to categorize characters according to their ethical and moral perspectives. These 9 moral alignments include Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, and Chaotic Evil. Using Miro’s Alignment Chart Template, you can categorize characters and share them with your team.
Get started with this template right now.
Sailboat Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Meetings, Retrospectives
The Sailboat Retrospective is a low-pressure way for teams to reflect on how they handled a project. By defining your risks (the rocks), delaying issues (anchors), helping teams (wind), and the goal (land), you’ll be able to work out what you’re doing well and what you need to improve on for the next sprint. Approaching team dynamics with a sailboat metaphor helps everyone describe where they want to go together by figuring out what slows them down and what helps them reach their future goals.
Roadmap Planning Template
Works best for:
Roadmap, Agile
The Roadmap Planning Template in Miro is a dynamic tool designed to streamline the process of planning and tracking project milestones. This template is part of Miro's Intelligent Templates offering, which integrates AI, interactive widgets, and automation to enhance productivity. One key feature of this template is its real-time collaboration capability, allowing team members to work together seamlessly, regardless of their location. This feature ensures that everyone is on the same page, making it easier to assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress effectively.
Johari Window Model
Works best for:
Leadership, Meetings, Retrospectives
Understanding — it’s the key to trusting others better and yourself better as well. Built on that idea, a Johari Window is a framework designed to enhance team understanding by getting participants to fill in four quadrants, each of which reveals something they might not know about themselves or about others. Use this template to conduct a Johari Window exercise when you’re experiencing organizational growth, to deepen cross-functional or intra-team connections, help employees communicate better, and cultivate empathy.
Daily Stand-up Meeting Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Meetings, Software Development
The entire team meets to review the day before and discuss the day ahead. These daily meetings, also known as “scrums,” are brief but powerful — they identify roadblocks, give each team member a voice, foster collaboration, keep progress on track, and ultimately keep teams working together effectively. This template makes it so easy for you to plan daily standups for your sprint team. It all starts with picking a date and time, creating an agenda, and sticking with the same format throughout the sprint.
Quick Retrospective Template
Works best for:
Education, Retrospectives, Meetings
A retrospective template empowers you to run insightful meetings, take stock of your work, and iterate effectively. The term “retrospective” has gained popularity over the more common “debriefing” and “post-mortem,” since it’s more value-neutral than the other terms. Some teams refer to these meetings as “sprint retrospectives” or “iteration retrospectives,” “agile retrospectives” or “iteration retrospectives.” Whether you are a scrum team, using the agile methodology, or doing a specific type of retrospective (e.g. a mad, sad, glad retrospective), the goals are generally the same: discovering what went well, identifying the root cause of problems you had, and finding ways to do better in the next iteration.
Meeting Notes Template
Works best for:
Business Management, Meetings
When your meeting is a success (and Miro will help make sure it is), participation will run high, brilliant ideas will be had, and decisions will be made. Make sure you don’t miss a single one — use our meeting notes template to track notes and feedback in a centralized place that the whole team can access. Just assign a notetaker before the meeting, identify the discussion topics, and let the notetaker take down the participants, important points covered, and any decisions made.