The Nugget Frame
The nugget frame is probably the simplest framework we ever came up with. Nevertheless, it turned out to be effective on several occassions. The frame allows team members to capture what is most important to them - and why.
A former colleague of mine, Johannes Meyer, and I came up with the nugget frame in 2013. Since then, the frame has been applied demonstrably in over 250 projects and workshops across industries. It turned out to be a useful framework for teams who are working with whiteboards and sticky notes.
The Creation of the Nugget Frame
In 2013 I was hired to facilitate an innovation project within a large pharmaceutical company in Germany. The goal was to design digital tools for employees that would create true benefit and foster loyal relationships with the company.
The teams explored the context of what loyalty means to the company and what kinds of needs employees have that they might address using digital tools. Based on a few hypotheses, the team started to conduct interviews with employees, thereby validated assumptions, and uncovered hidden needs.
After around 30 in-depth interviews the teams have gathered a lot of data, documented on hundreds of sticky notes on mutliple white boards. Over a period of three months, our teams crunched those data to reframe the initial project question and designed and tested several designs. Needless to say, more data accumulated over the weeks and it became more and more difficult to recognize the most relevant insights along the way.
It became especially difficult to work with all data after a long break in which different team members were either on holiday or had to fulfill other duties. Everyone then stared in disbelief at their whiteboards, overwhelmed by the amount of sticky notes. We realized we would need a better way to hold on to priorities and interpretations that were made weeks ago.
First, we started creating digital reports and paraphrased important insights of each teamwork sessions. Unfortunately, The digital reporting felt detached from the teams’ analog work. It also turned out to be difficult to paraphrase data that was coming from different team members. We would often knew that an information was important to us but we could not immediately externalize the reasons for it.
So we changed our approach in the simplest way we could think of and started highlighting what was most important to the team at every moment in time.
To emphasize this prioritization visually, we started to handout cut out paper frames around sticky notes that seemed most relevant to different team members (see illustration below). While doing so, we realized that seemingly objective data can of course mean different things from different perspectives. Simple blank frames did not reflect this aspect of sense-making, yet. Therefore we triggered our team members to comment their choices by stating the relevance of an insight in a formalized sentence above the sticky note: “Wow, that is really…”
The Design Rationale behind the Nugget Frame
Any frame includes distinctive aspect while excluding everything else. Therefore frameworks are basically tools that help teams to change perspectives, as I have argued in a previous post.
In our private homes, we use frames in order to value pictures that have a special meaning to us. And while those pictures may change over time, there will always be some that are worth being put in a frame.
While a whiteboard may also be regarded as a frame for a context in which a team operates, the nugget frame highlights a smaller but more important aspect within the context of all data. A gold nugget in a lot of sand, if you will.
The nugget frame is magnetic and can be easily arranged on a whiteboard full of sticky notes. It has a cleanable surface for you to write and rewrite information on it. The prompt “WOW! THIS IS REALLY…” invites team members adding a simple adjective or a sentence that justifies their choices. A quote that is highlighted with “WOW! THIS IS REALLY contradictive behavior” will easily make it into a team’s conversation even weeks later.
Over the course of these projects, we have experimented with adding more features, using different prompts and frames. In the end, we always fell back to our initial simple design that would offer enough flexibility to support a wide range of team interactions. These are at least three contexts in which the nugget frame can help a team:
Context 1: Highlight the most important data
Situation:
A team has gathered a large amout of data, e.g. observations from user or market research, new ideas, relevant trends or feedback from larger product testing phases. They are working through data in a physical room that is covered with sticky notes.
What the nugget frame does:
After gathering data, the team can quickly and intuitively highlight what’s most relevant via attaching nugget frames. When their choices change, team members can easily rearrange the nugget frames in their workspace or rewrite their statement that describes why the find this particular sticky note more important than others.
Benefits:
The nugget frame is a great entry point into a next phase and helps work with complexity. It can help the team nail down a challenge or idea to one sentence and agree on what’s relevant. Meanwhile, it is not denied that there may be a bigger picture outside the nugget frame.
How to do it in a team:
After long days of gathering information at whiteboards and walls, save five minutes to let everyone highlight their most important aspect of the day and state its relevance in front of the whole team without any further remarks by everyone else.
This method will help give everyone a voice without being judged. It also works as a cognitive relief for team members who feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data. The nugget frame sets a small, yet significant mark to end the day.
Context 2: Remembering yesterday’s teamwork
Situation:
We all want to work on exciting projects in dedicated teams until we finally reach a great solution. In reality, most teamwork and projects is torn apart into short time spans in which teams work together, then retreat to work individually and then, after long breaks, again in teams. Sometimes weeks and months pass before a team continues their projects and then needs to reconnect to their previous thoughts and ideas.
What the nugget frame does:
The nugget frame reminds team members of the data that was perceived as important in a previous session. Furthermore, it highlights the reasons why the team decided this data was relevant. It thereby works as a visual anchor in an ocean of sticky notes.
How to do it in a team:
After long breaks in projects, go back to your insights, pick out the sticky notes that are positioned within the nugget frames and recapitulate on why this struck you as important. Usually team members start connecting the dots and go back to their content starting with the most relevant. The recapitulation becomes a narrative, a storyline that is easy to follow and connects information intuitively instead of trying to restate all data in the room.
Context 3: Triggering discussions that are to the point
Situation:
Many teams struggle to have meaningful conversations when they are lost in large amount of data and insights. Finding the one insight out of a hundred insights can quickly lead into aimless arguments.
What the nugget frame does:
The nugget frame is a natural way to trigger an individual vote for a single option by each team member. Team members comment on their vote by writing their statement on top of the frame. Then, everyone else gets a chance to feedback the comments. Teams consequently stay on topic and do not discuss several insights at the same time.
