So you’ve planned and organised your engagement event. If you haven’t, come back after you’ve read the section on planning and organising an event!

Now you just need to make the planning all worthwhile for you and your participants. It’s time to learn the art of facilitation.

Facilitation is how you conduct the workshop. It’s about managing, motivating and inspiring your group.

Good facilitators:

  • tell a story about that helps people understand why they’re there and what’s expected of them
  • prime participants with the information they need to contribute
  • listen carefully
  • are unbiased
  • make sure the group stays on track, but guide the conversation, rather than taking control or showing off their knowledge
  • know when to move on or change tack

Practicalities on the day

  • Make sure you’ve got all the stuff you need to run the activities you’ve planned. You don’t want to interrupt the flow by going off hunting for missing pens and sticky notes
  • Share an agenda and timetable. Let everyone know what to expect
  • Use a warm-up exercise to set the tone and alleviate any tension people might be feeling. Choose an exercise that involves the kind of thinking you want to encourage for the rest of the event
  • Some people may be more familiar with the topic than others. Bring everyone up to speed, so everyone can contribute
  • Some activities could be a big jump for some participants, so build the group up to maximise their potential. For example, do a problem-framing exercise before a problem-solving exercise
  • Sometimes it is useful to give participants space to work on their own before coming back together as a group to share, reflect and discuss
  • Give the group a break if your event is longer than an hour. If it is a whole day, give them multiple breaks including lunch
  • Give people a way to give you feedback after the event, so you can do even better next time

Thinking about your audience

Think carefully about who is in the room:

  • Children might be more open with people closer to their age. Depending on their age, children might be more open with or without parents or carers there
  • If you’re talking with an excluded or underrepresented group, the demographics of the facilitators might alter their engagement
  • People might be less willing to honestly share opinions if their bosses or other senior managers are present

Being agile and reactive

Good planning will help the workshop go smoothly. But don’t expect everything to go to plan. Common challenges include:

  • conversations going off-topic, going on too long, or going round in circles
  • conflicting opinions or conflicts over language
  • negativity and internal politics
  • some people dominating the discussion – make sure every person in the room gets heard
  • technical issues

Stay sharp, and if any of these happen to you, you might need to react and intervene!

Content design is a design discipline that concentrates on the words, pictures, videos and other stuff that fill up websites, apps and other products. It can help make your writing more effective in things like engagement and educational materials or funding bids.

Content design puts the user’s needs first when creating content for them. To do content design, before you start writing or creating content, take plenty of time to find out what the users of a potential product really need.

Content design uses tools like:

  • desk research
  • keyword and vocabulary research
  • user needs
  • user journey mapping

When you’ve finished your discovery research and are ready to write something, pay close attention to your structure, headings, vocabulary and style, to make your content as easy as possible for everybody to read, understand and act on. That way you’ve got the best chance of your readers doing what you want them to do.

Plain English

Using plain English means always using the simplest words possible.

Plain English is better for people who:

  • don’t speak English fluently
  • have low literacy skills
  • have information processing impairments like dyslexia
  • are neurodivergent, like autistic people
  • are in a hurry, on a bus, anxious or tired (most people at some point)

At some point in their lives many people learn a waffly, formal way of writing that is harder to read than it needs to be.

Writing in Plain English instead isn’t difficult, everyone can do it. You just need to unlearn some of the bad habits you might’ve picked up.

Even if you are writing for an expert audience, research shows that experts appreciate clear plain writing as much or more than everybody else. So, let’s put an end to formal language and corporate waffle!

Write like you’d speak. Read your writing aloud. Do you sound dull and formal? If you do, try again!

Use everyday vocabulary, like:

  • Ensure → Make sure
  • However → But
  • Such as → Like
  • Collaborate → Work with
  • Queries → Questions
  • Utilize → Use

Get rid of waffle, like:

  • With regards to
  • Please note
  • Please be aware
  • Please find below
  • Please do not hesitate to

Waffle often comes with a ‘please’ – watch out for it and get rid of it!

Keep it short

Write short sentences. They’re easier to read than long ones. And that’s good. Long sentences, especially ones with subclauses like this, can be harder for people to read, which is bad.

For example:

This email is to acknowledge that we’ve received your query

would be better as:

We’ve got your email

Keeping paragraphs short is good too. Multiple short paragraphs are better than one long paragraph. So change paragraphs whenever you finish a thought.

Frontloading

Put the important stuff first:

  • At the start of a message
  • At the start of each sentence
  • In headings and links

Don’t wait to tell people what they have to do until the end. Tell them at the start.

Formatting

Fancy formatting makes things harder to read. Keep formatting simple. Avoid:

  • Bold
  • CAPITAL LETTERS
  • Underlining
  • 𝒲𝑒𝒾𝓇𝒹 𝒻𝑜𝓃𝓉𝓈
  • 𝒜𝐿𝐿 𝒪𝐹 𝒯𝐻𝐸 𝒜𝐵𝒪𝒱𝐸 𝒜𝒯 𝒪𝒩𝒞𝐸!

Headings

Headings help people quickly scan and get to the things that are important to them. Use lots of headings if you’re writing about lots of different things.

Don’t ask lots of questions in your headings (they will mostly start with ‘W’ words like who, what, why and when, which makes it difficult to scan).

The second of these sets of headings is the easiest to scan and extract meaning from for most people

  • How to write a CV → CV writing
  • What to say in a cover letter → Cover letters
  • What to do if you get rejected → Rejection
  • Have you been discriminated against? → Discrimination

Links

Link text on web pages must always fully describe the target.

Apply for free school meals online or ask for a form at the office

instead of:

Click here to apply for free school meals online or ask for a form at the office.

It’s vital for people who use screen readers, and better for everyone

MoSCoW stands for ‘must-have, should-have, could-have, won’t-have’. It is a method for prioritising things like tasks, features and functions, when you don’t have enough time or money to do everything you’d like.

You can do it on your own, or in a group, to get more than one person’s perspective on what their priorities are.

To do a MoSCoW prioritisation exercise:

  • Write out everything you might possibly want to do. This can be in a list in a spreadsheet, on a digital whiteboard like Mural or Miro, using card-sorting software like Optimal Sort, or in person with good old-fashioned paper sticky notes.
  • Put each item into one of four buckets: must, should, could, won’t.
  • Set aside everything in ‘won’t’. They’re off the list (for now).
  • Check you have the resources to deliver everything in ‘must’. If there are too many things in ‘must’ for you to deliver them all with the time, money and skills you have available, then you’ll have to deprioritise some of them.
  • The things in ‘should’ and ‘could’ stay on the list, but only get done if you’ve finished all the ‘must’ and have time and money left over.

It is important to define what ‘must, should, could and won’t’ mean before you start. This will help you make consistent and coherent choices, and make sure everyone taking part is making decisions on the same basis.

You should keep your end users (like staff, students, customers) in mind and consider what is important to them. But MoSCoW is about deciding what you can and are going to do with the time, knowledge and skills you have. Something could be very important to your users, but if you simply cannot give it to them for whatever reason, then it has to go in the ‘won’t’ bucket. But don’t worry, ‘can’t’ really means ‘can’t right now’. It doesn’t mean you can never do it.

Things to consider when you are defining what the buckets mean for your exercise:

  • Will your product or service simply not work or do its core job if you don’t do this? Then it’s a ‘must’.
  • Is this out of scope, or impossible to do with the time, money and skills you have? Then it’s a ‘won’t’.
  • ‘Should’ means ‘it would be great and help a lot of people if we did this, but our product or service will still work if we don’t’.
  • ‘Could’ means ‘it will be fine if we don’t do this, but it would be nice to have for at least some of people some of the time’.
  • You don’t have to cater for everybody’s every need. But you mustn’t put things to do with accessibility and inclusion in low-priority buckets. Whatever you create, it has to be accessible to everyone who needs to use it. Accessibility is not optional.

Whenever you are creating or planning something, it can help to run an engagement event like a workshop with stakeholders and potential users. This could be an event for anyone from senior leaders in stakeholder organisations to primary school children.

Why you should do it 

Engagement events bring lots of benefits: 

  • Working with people helps you create things for them. This is more effective than making assumptions about what they need 
  • Taking part in events gives people the chance to share their nuanced perspectives and experiences 
  • If you invite a diverse group of people to your event you will understand your problem from a richer and more inclusive point of view 
  • Watching people as well as listening to them can give you an insight into unspoken attitudes and behaviours as well as the things people tell you directly 
  • You get a chance to see people disagree with each other and work through their differences, helping you reach consensus and agreement 

Number of attendees

There is no set limit for how many people can attend an event. If you have more than about 8 people, we recommend breaking out into groups of 4 to 8 people for activities. 

Resources you need

You will need at least one facilitator (and maybe more for a big event). 

For an in-person event you might need: 

  • tables for group work 
  • paper, pens or pencils, sticky notes
  • anything else you need for your activities, like glue, scissors, Sellotape, Blu-Tak, magazines, Lego 
  • drinks and snacks, if your event is going to last a while

This might look like a list for primary school students. But in fact, activities that use things like glue, scissors and Lego are great for adults too. They can help open up different ways of thinking that don’t just rely on discussion and writing.

This is not a complete list. Use your imagination, and do some research to find activities that get people doing things they don’t usually do. But always make sure all your activities are accessible to all your attendees, and come up with alternative ways for people to take part.

For an online event, you will need to choose and set up:

  • video conferencing software, like Zoom, Teams or Google Meet 
  • an online whiteboard if you want one, like Mural or Miro

See our guidelines on running accessible sessions in the introduction for tips on making sure nobody is excluded.

Organising your event

You can run events online as well as in person. Some activities are easier to run or more effective when done in person. But if you run an in-person event, don’t exclude people who cannot attend in person. 

Start planning as soon as possible – ideally 6 to 8 weeks in advance

Choose a date: 

  • Make sure there isn’t a competing event at the same time 
  • Or maybe there is an existing event you can tag yours onto? 
  • Consider school holidays, travel logistics, and anything else that could impact people’s availability 

Find a place (for in-person events): 

  • Make it as easy as possible for people to get to your event 
  • Think about locations your attendees already use, like a local community centre 
  • Consider physical accessibility like wheelchair access 
  • But don’t forget about other types of accessibility needs, like light, noise and temperature 
  • Find out who you need to speak to, to check availability and book your space 

Invite the people: 

  • Pull on your own networks and anyone else’s networks you can (for example your client’s networks if you are working for a client) 
  • People are busy, so the sooner you establish relationships with people the better 
  • Make a list of important organisations in the industry you’re working in, find their talent or HR managers and heads of departments 
  • Don’t be afraid to approach people on LinkedIn, by email, and especially by phone 
  • Work out what’s in it for them and pitch the benefits of attending. This could be networking, learning, corporate social responsibility or just a chance to be listened to

You may need to go back and tweak the dates, location and other arrangements until you find the sweet spot that works for the most people.

User needs are a template for writing down who your users are, what situation they are in, what they need, and why.

Writing user needs before you start creating anything (from writing a paper to planning a new lesson or building some new software) helps focus your mind on what your users really need, instead of what you think they should need, or what your organisation says it needs.

The user needs formula

Ideally after you’ve done some research to find out about your users and their needs, complete the following sentences:

As a [who is your user?]
When I [what situation are they in?]
I need [what do they need?]
So that [why do they need it, what are they going to do?]

Writing good user needs

Try not to think about solutions to your users’ problems at this stage. You are only trying to capture what they need to do and why, not how. The how will come later in the design process, and it is useful to separate what and why from how.

Make sure you capture what the user is really trying to do. You can use the 5 whys tool to dig deeper into user needs. Nobody actually needs a dropdown menu on a website. They need a way to choose something. A dropdown menu is a solution, not a need.

Make as many user needs as you like. A small bit of writing for a web page might only have one user need. A whole new service or app might have a hundred or more.

A problem statement is a short and pithy summary of the core problem you are trying to solve on a project. Crucially, it doesn’t say anything about possible solutions.

Writing a problem statement at the start of a project:

  • makes sure everyone on the project is focussed on solving the same problem
  • stops you wandering off in a different direction – throughout the project you should keep coming back to your problem statement to check you are still solving it and not some other problem instead

You can use your problem statement to help you decide what to do about the problem by using the ‘How might we…?’ technique.

A problem statement for this guide

Connected Places Catapult hired a design agency to carry out user research and create this guide. Here is the problem statement the agency wrote for the project:

There are not enough people who:

  • have the right skills
  • want to join the industry

to satisfy the aviation industry’s demands over the next 5 years.

Just like all good problem statements should, it completely ignores any possible solutions. A problem statement is just that – a statement about the problem you are trying to solve.

An impact/effort matrix is a prioritisation tool that helps you to evaluate projects or ideas based on the impact they could have and the amount of effort they would take.

This is a group exercise that can take between about 20 minutes and a couple of hours. 

Making an impact/effort matrix

Draw a 2-by-2 matrix, like this:

Label the horizontal axis ‘Effort’ and the vertical axis ‘Impact’

Label the boxes:

  • Top right ‘Big projects’ 
  • Top Left ‘Quick wins’ 
  • Bottom left ‘Filler tasks’ 
  • Bottom right ‘Thankless tasks’ 

Discuss each idea and decide where it should sit on the matrix. The higher up the more important it is. The further right the harder it will be. 

  • Big projects are high effort but high impact. They are important and ambitious but may need more planning and people
  • Quick wins are low effort but high impact. You should start them soon
  • Filler tasks are low effort and low impact. They aren’t a priority, but you can do them if you have time
  • Thankless tasks are high effort but low impact. They aren’t worth doing

Strategic foresight is a method to help you make informed best guesses about the future and better decisions about what to do about it.

Strategic foresight has 3 main stages, each of which can involve multiple steps. Sometimes you may go back and forth between stages or steps – this is not necessarily a linear process. The stages are:

  1. Understand the landscape and decide on your vision for the future
  2. Decide what to do and how to do it (interventions and strategies)
  3. Make a roadmap, and contingency plans for when things go wrong

Because it is an involved, multi-step process, you will need to commit time to strategic foresight. You won’t be able to do it in a single session of just a couple of hours.

Strategic foresight is different to near-term planning and even from forecasting. It looks further into the future. Strategic foresight typically looks about 5 years into the future.

But that depends on what you’re looking at and how fast it moves. For nuclear power, the future might be well-known over the next 10 years, so strategic foresight would look further ahead than that. For artificial intelligence (AI) the future might be very uncertain only a year ahead.

Setting up

You will do a strategic forecasting exercise in one or more sessions. Before you hold your first session you’ve got some setting up to do, to make sure it’s as productive as possible.

Set clear objectives

What do you want the future to look like? Be imaginative and ambitious. But also be specific, for example using key performance indicators (KPIs).

Invite your stakeholders

Strategic foresight works best when you involve lots of different people, not just experts in your field or industry. So go ahead and invite people from adjacent fields, or communities who will be affected.

You should invite people whose job it is to care about the future not just the day-to-day present.

Choose a facilitator

Your facilitator could be someone in your organisation, or someone neutral you bring in from outside. 

They will plan, arrange and run sessions, and interpret and report on the outcomes.

Vision and landscape

Mission and vision

Your organisation might already have mission and vision statements. If you don’t, strategic foresight starts by coming up with some. These statements should say in very clear and simple language:

  • What you want to do (your mission)
  • How you hope to do it (your vision)

Even if you already have mission and vision statements, consider revisiting them if they aren’t written in the clearest, plainest language possible. Clarity is going to be very important for your strategic foresight sessions

You could use the 5 Whys technique to get under the skin of:

  • why you do what you currently do
  • why you do it the way you do

Analysis of external events

Next, look at things outside your organisation that could affect your success. You can use a scheme like STEEPLE to do this from a number of different angles. STEEPLE stands for:

  • socio-cultural
  • technological
  • economic
  • environmental
  • political
  • legal
  • ethica

For each category, think of what could go wrong, and what could go well, in big and small ways.

Start off wildly pessimistic. Write down everything from minor hiccups to complete catastrophe.

Then be radically optimistic. Imagine small wins as well as the most outlandishly successful scenarios.

If you don’t need to go into as much detail as STEEPLE, you can skip categories you don’t want to consider. For example, PESTLE misses out the legal and ethical categories.

The futures cone

Now take everything you’ve just captured and populate a ‘futures cone’, based on how:

  • likely it is to happen
  • far in the future it might happe

Useful categories for how likely something is to happen are:

  • projected (your best guess at what will actually happen)
  • probable (highly likely)
  • plausible (might happen, but not highly likely)
  • possible (can happen, at least theoretically not impossible)
  • preposterous (could theoretically happen, but is infeasible or absurd)

[Futures cone diagram, p20 and p21 of Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime PDF]

Timeline of anticipated events

Plot everything in the ‘projected’ and ‘probable’ categories on a separate single line to create a timeline of anticipated events. Write a short description of what the future as a whole looks like, based on those events.

You can include some ‘plausible’ events if you want to capture a bit more uncertainty.

What to do and how to do it

Now you have a picture of what the future might look like, you can start to plan interventions and strategies. Or in other words, what to do and how. The aim of your interventions and strategies is to make your preferred future more likely. 

How might we…?

Choose an area of the future to focus on. Then start this next part of the process with a ‘How might we…?’ exercise, to come up with ideas for interventions that:

  • are feasible, viable and desirable
  • support your vision
  • take account of the likely future or futures

Don’t hold back. Seemingly ridiculous ideas are welcome! Encourage everyone to build on each other’s ideas by saying ‘yes and…’ not ‘no but…’.

Develop a strategy for each idea

For now, choose a single intervention idea (yes, only one!) You could use a tool like affinity mapping to group ideas and help you pick which areas to focus on.

Write a statement that ties together:

  • the future you have chosen to focus on
  • your vision
  • your chosen intervention idea

You can use a template like:

  • In the future [the area you are focusing on] is expected to become [the extrapolated future in that area].
  • In response, our strategy is to implement [your intervention] through a [the core principle you are following according to your vision] approach.
  • In doing this, we will become a [the type of organisation you will become by following this strategy].

Define the strategic future

Add to your statement by putting measures of success on it. This might include things like key performance indicators (KPIs).

The template might continue with:

  • With successful implementation of [your intervention] the future will match our [vision statement] by [some qualitative measures].
  • We can also measure this achievement by [some other qualitative measures].

You can go through this process for as many areas of the future as you have time for and think are important, to come up with multiple interventions and strategies for implementing them.

Roadmap and contingency plans

Finally, it is time to put some more detail on your plans.

The locus of control

Take each strategy you have developed and put it at the centre of a ‘locus of control’. This is a map of how your strategy could be affected by probable, plausible, possible and preposterous futures, and how much control or influence you have over the knock-on effects.

[Locus of control (strategic ripple) diagram, p36 and 37 of Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime PDF]

You might have:

  • total control over what you do
  • some influence over how stakeholders react
  • no control at all over external events

Strategic roadmapping

Create a strategic roadmap (also known as a routemap) of everything you will need to do to implement each strategy and bring you to your strategic future.

To do this, you can plan:

  • forwards from the present to the future (forecasting or futurecasting)
  • backwards from the future you are aiming for (backcasting or future backcasting)

[Routemap diagram, p38 and 39 of Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime PDF]

You can add detail to and iterate on your roadmap by:

  • doing a gap analysis to check what you’ve missed
  • updating your existing strategic future to create a new and more ambitious ‘blue-sky’ strategic future
  • revisiting your roadmap in the light of this new strategic future

[Revised routemap diagram, p40 and 40 of Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime PDF]

Turbulent futures and wild cards

If you want to plan for more unlikely futures, you can go back to your futures cone and pull out things that were in the ‘possible’ and ‘preposterous’ categories. These are your wild cards.

Go back to your timeline of anticipated events from earlier, and put any wild cards you want to consider on the timeline. Think about how the wild card would affect the future. Then adjust your strategic roadmap to take it into account.

Write a pre-mortem

At this stage you could do a pre-mortem. Ask everyone to imagine a future where something has gone wrong and they are doing a post-mortem to find out what happened.

You can immerse people in the fantasy by asking them to write an email explaining exactly what happened at each stage from start to failure.

Contingency plans

You could use your pre-mortem to develop mitigation strategies for the possible points of failure you have identified.

You can catalogue possible risks by how likely they are to happen and how bad it would be if they did. You can’t plan for every eventuality, but things that are either highly likely or have catastrophic consequences (or both!) are good targets for contingency planning.

More information

For more detail on all the stages and steps of strategic foresight exercise, see Connected Places Catapult’s Strategic Foresight Methods for Maritime: A Practical Guide to Charting and Realising Desired Futures (PDF, XXX kb)

Card sorting is an exercise that can help you arrange things into useful categories that match the way most people would group or label them.

Categorising things like skills can be useful if you are designing the modules for an educational course, or designing how courses are presented on your website. 

You might think you can just do this based on your own knowledge. But you’d be surprised how often your personal idea of categories and labels is not the same as other people’s.

Card sorting lets you find a set of categories that makes sense to most people. Maybe your instinctive categories are correct? But if you’ve run a card sort, you can be sure of it. 

You can run a card sort in person using real cards, or online using a virtual whiteboard like Mural or Miro, or dedicated card sorting software like Optimal Sort.

How to run a card sort

Write down each thing you’d like to categorise on a separate card. Then ask your users to take each card and put it into a group. 

If you’re doing this in person with real cards, remember to take a high-resolution picture of the groups before you pick up the cards for the next person. Otherwise, you’ll be throwing away your results! 

If you’re using a virtual whiteboard, you should give each participant their own copy of the whiteboard. 

If you’re using dedicated card sorting software, it should take care of the recording and some of the analysis for you. 

Ways to run a card sort 

There are 3 ways you can run a card sort: 

Open:
In an open card sort you do not give people any pre-defined categories to sort things into. They choose and label their own categories. This can be a useful type of card sort to do first, when you don’t have any information about how people categorise things. 

Closed:
In a closed card sort you tell people all the categories at the start, and ask them to sort the items into only those categories. This can be a useful type of card sort to do later, when you want to test the categories that you think might work. 

Hybrid:
In a hybrid card sort you give people some categories, but also let them make up their own. Use this like you would a closed card sort, but when you based your categories on a limited amount of information, and you reckon you might have missed a category or two. 

Interpreting the results 

For an in-person card sort with real cards, or using a virtual whiteboard, you’ll have some work to do work to analyse the results. A dedicated digital card-sorting tool like Optimal Sort will do some of the analysis for you. 

To analyse the results of a card sort, look for: 

  • categories that lots of users create, 
  • things they consistently sort into the same category, 
  • things that often get paired together in the same category

Affinity mapping is a technique you can use to organise user research findings into groups based on their natural relationships.

When used in design, affinity mapping is usually a group activity.

Affinity mapping has 6 stages:

  1. Agree ground rules
  2. Capture data on individual notes
  3. Group notes
  4. Name the groups
  5. Establish relationships between groups
  6. Develop explanations for the groups and their relationships

Agree ground rules​

There are lots of variants of affinity mapping. So even if everyone in your group has done affinity mapping before, there’s a good chance they may have done it slightly differently. So it’s a good idea to discuss exactly how you are going to do it before you start.

Some common differences are whether:​

  • the whole team discuss each note together, or you divide the notes up and discuss at the end
  • you can chat about the decisions you’re making, even if you are working on separate notes
  • people are allowed to move notes that other people have already moved​

You need to be mindful about how you work together so as not to diverge too much.​ Regularly check back in with each other and share your current understanding.

Capture data on individual notes​

Transfer your research findings onto a set of sticky notes. When writing notes:​

  • only put one thing on each note – you need to be able to work with each idea independently​
  • only use direct observations or quotes​
  • use different coloured or shaped notes to mean specific things
  • don’t forget about any accessibility needs of your team members

Group notes

Group notes based on specific concepts.​ It is important to be specific. These are not categories or broad themes. You want to capture as much nuance as possible at this stage.
If you group every note that talks about a pain point together, all you’ve learned is that there are pain points. You probably knew that before you started.

To help you be specific, set an arbitrary limit on the number of notes in a group.
Don’t always go for the most obvious grouping. It’s easy to jump to the most obvious and superficial. But those aren’t always the best possible groups when you think carefully about our project aims.​

Sometimes notes don’t lend themselves to a group. Don’t try to force them into one. Similarly, you can remove notes that you thought were interesting when you started but look less relevant as your affinity map takes shape.

Name the groups

This is about more than just categorising and naming things​. When you give a group a name you are creating new knowledge about your participants. Getting this right early makes your synthesis more robust. 

  • Write a descriptive, narrative summary of the notes in the group
  • ​Phrase the name the way you imagine a participant would
  • It should make sense to somebody outside the team​
  • ​Make sure the name describes all the data in the group.

If you’re struggling to do this then it might mean the group isn’t really organised around a specific central concept.

Establish relationships between the groups​ 

If different groups relate to some broader concept, then you can group them together.​ Doing this adds depth to your affinity map. This might happen where you’ve previously split a bigger group down into multiple, more specific groups.​

Develop explanations for the groups and their relationships​

The final step is to write up your findings by describing and explaining your groups. This is where you take your first steps towards generating insights.​