PHASE 2: Understand & Define

This tool helps the group move from individual impressions toward a shared understanding, recognizing patterns across different experiences and turning them into a clearer focus. By clustering and naming challenges, personal stories become connected, tensions become visible, and key “nodes” in the community emerge as areas worth deeper exploration.

The tool also helps the group identify where they want to invest their attention and care. By choosing the challenges that genuinely motivate them, participants take ownership of the process, and the project teams that form carry clear intention and strong internal motivation for the work ahead.

This tool makes visible the people, groups, and structures surrounding the person or group most affected by the challenge. Instead of looking at the challenge only through personal experience, the map helps reveal who is involved, who provides support, who creates obstacles, who remains invisible, and who could play an important role in the next steps of the process.

The map reflects the ethic of care for people: every challenge exists within a web of relationships. The first step toward fairer and healthier solutions is to recognize who is present, how roles are distributed, and where there is potential for connection, support, or the restoration of trust.

After creating the Circular Relationship Map, the team begins to see that the challenge exists within a network of people, groups, and structures. Instead of rushing toward a solution, the team chooses one perspective through which it continues exploring the challenge. By selecting one person or group, regardless of the zone they occupy on the map, the team “zooms in” on their perspective.

This helps deepen the understanding of relationships, tensions, and influences that shape the system. This choice does not mean that others are less important, nor that future solutions will be designed “only for them.” It simply serves as a temporary point of focus — helping the team move beyond general impressions and stay grounded in a concrete experience.

This tool helps the team practice listening and understanding experience before taking action. Through a guided mock interview and role-playing, participants explore how the challenge is actually lived: where pressures arise, what emotions appear, and which constraints shape everyday experience.

The focus is not on analysis or solutions, but on the flow of experience itself — what is said, felt, and left unspoken. The tool helps the team slow down, notice their own assumptions, and prepare for conversations with real people. When such conversations are not possible, the insights can serve as a temporary basis for further work.

An Empathy Map is a tool used to organise and connect insights about the experience of a person or group. While interviews reveal experience through dialogue, the empathy map structures it into fields such as thoughts, feelings, needs, pressures, and strengths.

This tool helps the team distinguish insights from assumptions and see people more holistically — not only through problems, but also through existing resources and potential. In this way, it creates a foundation for designing solutions grounded in real experience and capable of supporting sustainable change.

This tool helps the team view a challenge as a dynamic part of a wider, interconnected system. Instead of reducing the problem to a single cause or actor, attention is directed toward the relationships, patterns, rules, and flows that shape the situation together.

The team explores how the problem functions: what triggers it, what sustains it, what consequences it creates, and where tensions, feedback loops, or turning points appear within the system. The goal is to understand the whole picture so that later interventions can strengthen relationships, trust, resources, and the space for change.

The map does not aim for perfect logic, but for shared learning and insight into the living system in which the challenge unfolds.