Structuring group discussions with K-cards
K-cards are often used at peer conferences to facilitate the discussion after someone has presented their experience report. Some people really hate them. In my experience they’re a great tool to enable rich conversations. Since the facilitator uses the K-cards to structure the discussion in threads, K-cards allow the group to drill down to the details of the experience report. This instead of the conversation jumping around as person 1 broaches topic A, person 2 introduces topic B, and person 3 wants to return to topic A.
The explanation of these K-cards often takes the form of “This is what each card means.” instead of “This is when to use this card for what purpose.” And despite the elegance of the K-cards system, when you learn about them during the opening of a peer conference, it’s a lot of information to digest. So I hope this blog post will be useful as a written explanation of how to use K-cards.