Understanding Chain
Understanding Chain is a prompted conversation exercise for relationship mapping: it helps participants build useful connections and understand how people, roles, or ideas relate.
How to run it
- To set up the game, the group needs to develop two things: an audience breakdown and a set of questions.
- “What’s cool about this? Why should I care?”
- “When does your technology road map converge with ours?”
- “How will it impact our product portfolio?”
- The questions will become the links in the understanding chain. To generate them, the group puts itself in the mindset of the audience and captures the questions on individual sticky notes (see the Post-Up game in Chapter 4 for more information).
- All methods All authors IAF Library Library Understanding Chain 37 40 In the Understanding Chain game, a group shifts from a content focus to an audience focus, and draws out a meaningful, linear structure for communication.
Run this exercise live
The facilitator console stays in this browser. Its QR handoff is a short-lived participant snapshot containing only public exercise instructions, phase, prompt, and timer state.
What participants need now
Materials:
This is a participant-safe snapshot, not a response form. It sends nothing back to the facilitator.
Prompts to use +
To set up the game, the group needs to develop two things: an audience breakdown and a set of questions.
“When does your technology road map converge with ours?”
Run this with your AI assistant +
Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own local model: paste this prompt and your AI will co-facilitate this exercise with you.
Adapt this exercise for my exact room. Exercise: Understanding Chain. Readiness: Publishable Draft. Core moves: To set up the game, the group needs to develop two things: an audience breakdown and a set of questions.; “When does your technology road map converge with ours?”. Return a concise facilitator script with timing, wording, safety notes, and remote/in-person adjustments.
Origin unverified
- Where we observed it: The strongest current observations come from Gamestorming; aggregators are listed as additional observations, not origin proof. (2 sources observed, including Gamestorming, SessionLab.)
- What that means: we track where an exercise has been observed in public sources. We do not claim to know who created it, or how popular it is.
- No efficacy claims: appearing in this library is not a claim that the exercise is proven effective. Facilitator judgment and context decide whether it works for a given room.
- Corrections: if you have evidence of an earlier or more accurate source, read our methodology and trust boundary and tell us.