Guide for participants

• There is no right answer and nothing to hand in.
• Everyone’s perspective is useful, complexity arises from your different views.
• Enjoy it. Bring only your curiosity and a willingness to say, “wait, why?” out loud.

The exercise step-by-step

For the next 35 minutes you are going to build a map of a health problem with people who might not think exactly like you. That is the whole point.

1. Introductions max 8 min

   Do a round of presentation based on the following:

   • Your name and affiliation
   • Your role in public health: research, policy, practice, teaching, industry, student, other
   • One health problem (what, who, where and when) you would like to understand better
   Who facilitates?

   Whoever in the group has the first name earliest in the alphabet becomes the facilitator and timekeeper. We are in the land of good clocks and watches, so we trust you. Please find some help in the guide for facilitators.

2. Pick one problem max 2 min

   As a group, choose one of the problems shared in your team and write it in the middle of the page. If you cannot think of one, here are some suggestions:

   • Colorectal cancer is rising among individuals younger than 50
   • Access to cardiovascular disease prevention is socially unequal
   • Vaping and consumption of nicotine products among adolescents is on the rise

3. Brainstorm factors max 5 min

   Working individually, write at least three factors that could be involved in that problem, one factor per post-it.

   Try to write variables that can in some sense go up or down (e.g. “physical exercise”, “funding”, “trust in services”) rather than fixed labels (e.g. “the health system”).

4. Merge and connect max 15 min

   1. Put your post-its around the central problem. If two factors are the same or nearly the same, the people who wrote them decide together whether to keep just one.
   2. Discuss which factors influence each other and draw arrows in one direction between them:
      • +If factors reinforce each other (both move in the same direction), you can mark it with (+)
      • −If factors suppress (one goes up, the other goes down), you can mark it with (−)
      • ?If an arrow feels genuinely unclear or “it depends”, mark it with a “?”
      • ⇄If the interaction is reciprocal, you can write another arrow back.

Timing at a glance

Emergent voices 15 min

By the end, we will reconvene as one group and discuss what came out of the maps. A few prompts to have in mind:

• What did you like about this exercise?
• What was the most challenging part?
• Did you learn something new, about the problem, or about how another discipline frames it?
• Where did you disagree at your table, and did you resolve it? (Please share the unresolved ones. Those are the good ones to discuss.)