# The Iceberg Model

Teams map the visible features of a product, policy, or project above an imaginary waterline, then surface hidden individual, societal, and STEEP implications beneath it to plan mitigations.

**Time:** 90 minutes. Source recommends 90 to 120 minutes. Planned here for a crisp 90-minute workshop.
**People:** 4 to 24. Subgroups of 3 to 6 working in parallel on identical canvases, followed by whole-room debrief. If total headcount leaves an isolated pair, form groups of 3 or up to 7 so nobody works alone.

## Choose this exercise

**Purpose:** Map visible features and hidden individual, social, or systemic impacts of an initiative to inform design choices.
**Use it when:** Use when reviewing a proposed product, service, or policy design before implementation to check for unintended consequences.
**Skip it when:** Skip when the focus is purely operational troubleshooting of an existing broken workflow or when no clear proposal exists yet.

## Materials and tools

- One large Iceberg Canvas poster or flipchart sheet per group
- One pad of yellow sticky notes per group (for visible features)
- One pad of green sticky notes per group (for individual impacts)
- One pad of blue sticky notes per group (for societal impacts)
- One pad of pink sticky notes per group (for STEEP impacts)
- Medium-tip dark markers (one per participant)
- Painter's tape for wall display
- One printed STEEP Reference Sheet per table
- Index cards (at least two per subgroup)

## Before participants arrive

1. Draw a horizontal waterline across each poster sheet, sketching a small iceberg peak above and a large mass below.
2. Divide the lower area into three rows or sections: Individual, Societal, and STEEP (Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political).
3. Place colored sticky notes, markers, index cards, and reference sheets at each small-group workspace.

## Say this to open

Today we evaluate our initiative using the Iceberg Model. What users see is only the tip above the water. Most consequences happen beneath the surface. We will first map the visible features, then intentionally flip them to examine hidden personal, social, and systemic impacts so we can adjust our plan.

## How to run it

### 1. Introduce the canvas and subject (10 minutes)

State the specific product, service, or policy under review. Explain the iceberg layout: the visible tip above water, and the three underwater impact categories (individual, societal, and STEEP). Clarify the color code for sticky notes. Give one neutral example: an app offering on-demand delivery has visible benefits like 15-minute grocery drop-off (yellow), but underwater impacts include courier physical strain (green), local street congestion (blue), and changing labor policy regulations (pink).

### 2. Map visible elements above the waterline (15 minutes)

Working in subgroups of 3 to 6, participants write obvious, visible features, stated benefits, and user touchpoints on yellow sticky notes. Instruct participants to write one idea per note, read it aloud to their table, and place it above the waterline on their canvas. Stop when tables have populated 6 to 10 clear surface points.

### 3. Flip to hidden impacts beneath the surface (30 minutes)

Subgroups review their yellow notes and examine the hidden implications beneath the water. Direct them to generate at least one underwater note per yellow note, using the assigned colors: green for individual impacts, blue for community or societal impacts, and pink for macro STEEP impacts. Participants post these notes in the corresponding underwater sectors.

### 4. Cross-group gallery review (15 minutes)

All subgroups post their canvases on the wall. Give the room 10 minutes to walk silently around the other canvases, reading the underwater notes. Each in-person participant uses a marker to place a small dot on the two most critical unintended risks and two most promising opportunities. Remote participants use digital dot-voting tools on the shared digital canvases.

### 5. Action planning and debrief (20 minutes)

Reconvene as a whole group. Review the clusters of dots. Facilitate discussion using the debrief questions. Conclude by having each table write down two concrete design mitigations or policy safeguards on index cards to incorporate into the project plan.


## Debrief questions

- Which hidden impact surprised you the most once we looked beneath the surface?
- Where did we find potential tensions between individual user convenience and broader societal or environmental outcomes?
- What is one concrete change we must make to the current design to mitigate a serious unintended consequence?

**Finished output:** Populated iceberg canvases showing visible features and categorized hidden impacts, plus written action cards detailing design mitigations.

## Remote

Set up an online whiteboard with pre-drawn iceberg templates for each breakout group. Pre-configure color-coded digital sticky notes (yellow for visible, green for individual, blue for societal, pink for STEEP). Run step 1 in the main room, send participants to breakout rooms of 3 to 6 for steps 2 and 3, bring everyone back to a single shared board for silent cursor review and digital dot-voting in step 4, and conduct the debrief and action documentation in the main room.

## Hybrid

Keep in-person participants in localized table groups with physical posters and remote participants in their own online group on the shared online whiteboard. Appoint one in-person scribe to take a high-resolution photo of the physical posters before the gallery walk and upload them directly to that same shared online whiteboard so both remote and local participants can review and dot-vote across all canvases together.

## Access and participation choices

- Participants may contribute spoken observations directly to a designated table scribe if writing or typing is difficult.
- Color coding is reinforced with spatial sections (labeled rows) on the canvas to support color-blind participants.
- Participants may choose to observe silently during the synthesis without being required to speak to the whole room.

## If the session gets stuck

**Groups only generate positive outcomes and struggle to identify hidden negative consequences.**

Prompt them with targeted questions: 'If this succeeds ten times faster than expected, who loses time, money, or resources? What physical waste is created?'

**Participants get stuck trying to decide whether an impact belongs under societal or STEEP.**

Instruct them not to stall over categorization; post the note in either section and keep generating insights. Placement precision matters less than naming the impact.


## Terms used here

- STEEP: An acronym for macro-environmental factors: Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, and Political.

## Participant material: STEEP Prompt Reference

STEEP ANALYSIS PROMPTS FOR UNDERWATER IMPACTS

- Social: How does this affect family routines, community cohesion, social equity, or cultural norms?
- Technological: What data dependencies, infrastructure requirements, cybersecurity risks, or obsolescence issues are created?
- Environmental: What materials, energy consumption, supply chain travel, or physical waste streams are involved across the full life cycle?
- Economic: Who pays hidden costs? How does this shift local markets, employment security, or financial dependencies?
- Political: What legal compliance, policy regulations, governance questions, or public accountability risks arise?

## Sources and adaptation

Observed in Participatory Methods, which credits inspiration to the Iceberg Canvas by Karwai Ng & Will Anderson from the Google Design Sprint method collection.

Retained the core mechanic from the Google Design Sprint Iceberg Canvas / Participatory Methods source: dividing an iceberg into visible above-water features and below-water impacts classified into individual, societal, and STEEP categories with color-coded sticky notes. UWT added flexible group sizing (3 to 6 per subgroup with clear handling for odd group counts), step durations calibrated to a 90-minute session, index cards in materials for Step 5 action recording, remote dot-voting in Step 4, and unified online whiteboard instructions for hybrid gallery walks.

[Participatory Methods](https://participatorymethods.com/activities/the-iceberg-model/)

Current run sheet: https://unitedwetransform.com/exercises/the-iceberg-model/