Ensuring opportunities for all ideas

Synthesizing the documented notes was sometimes very challenging as we lacked the context behind the ideas generated. This was particularly difficult when organizing information from the embedded co-design sessions that were conducted by our partner organizations and without our team’s presence. In either case, we were not fully aware of the participants attitude towards the topics and their group discussions. In addition, many groups did not properly document their discussions, which led to sporadic notes that were difficult to interpret and connect to more concrete ideas.

To organize information and ensure outlier data is included in our final reports, our team developed a consistent process of digitizing and interpreting participant information. The information was organized into tables based on similar themes that emerged when reading through the content. In addition, new categories were created to capture outliers and any other information that didn’t conform to any of the emerging themes. Each member of the team reviewed the information, discussed how the information was synthesized, achieved consensus regarding the outcomes, and made sure all ideas were captured in the final reports. The final reports were published on our website and shared with participants directly to solicit their feedback about the results.

TRY

• Develop a consistent process of organizing information in collaboration with the team.
• Use a documenting system that provides open access to all members of the team for their review and iterations, such as shared Google documents and Google sheets.
• As a team, discuss the collected information and come to a consensus on how information is interpreted.
• Incorporate all ideas generated by the participants and avoid “averaging” the ideas when organizing into categories.
• Develop separate categories for “outlier” ideas to ensure they get included.