DISCOVER-Y as an aide to debrief
Using DISCOVER-Y in meetings with colleagues to review client encounters is straightforward, once its use for encounter preparation and in real time are understood. The difference in a debrief situation, however, is that there is now a lot more information with which to fill the diagram (the information that was discovered during the encounter), and so it can be drawn in advance. It may even be prepared in the form of slides, or by using a Mind Map presentation program.
My experience is that once the Y diagram becomes densely populated with information and links, then the advantage of clarity that a sketch once offered starts to diminish. When this begins to happen, the basic Y can be complemented with tables, charts and other representations. Also, remembering that DISCOVER-Y is a Mind Map at heart, I may take advantage of the many Mind Map programmes on the market (some of which are free). The above diagram shows the type of presentation that can be made with such a program. The example is given here, with downloads.
Alternatively, when a page-by-page or slide-by-slide presentation of information is desired, the table shown on the left may provide inspiration on how to structure this. It represents the same information as was captured in the Mind Mappicture above. It is divided into eight sections, one for each zone of the DISCOVER-Y diagram. I could choose to keep all this information together in a single page, as in this example, or split the table into two, four, eight or more separate parts, as necessary.
This format is well-suited to PowerPoint®, for example. It benefits from the link that is maintained with DISCOVER-Y’s spatial organisation of information through the pictograms that accompany each set of bullet points. Many people are helped by visual representations, and this tabular format is therefore a good compromise between traditional, textual lists and a complete two-dimensional picture. A template file corresponding to this example is given here, with downloads.