In January 2020, we were sitting with a big group of obstacles and opportunities to the Relationships First vision that the co-design team had gathered through research with council staff in the months previous. We needed to make sense of what we had so we could narrow in on a small set design challenges. In order to cluster them quickly and collectively, we chose to use the octopus clustering method.
After sorting together, we asked everyone to name or theme the clusters and finally dot vote on which theme they thought best captured what the cluster was saying.
Then we asked everyone to gather around the theme that resonated with them the most. From that we formed teams to take Relationships First forward. Incredibly, the group naturally split into evenly numbered teams including Humanising the System.