Tagging — for facilitators

Samvinas

• Pipe in the items and define your categories in settings.
• Choose single-user (personal sorting) or multi-user (group consensus) to fit the activity.

Tagging consumes any piped items — ideas, actions, clusters — and the categories you define are yours to name, so it bends to whatever sort the moment needs.

Paper and pen

You need: the items on sticky notes or index cards, masking tape, a fat marker, and wall space.

• Divide the wall into labelled columns with masking tape — one heading per category, written big.
• Move each item into a column. For a group sort, do it as a gallery: anyone may move any note, and a note that keeps bouncing between columns gets a red dot — that's your consensus view, marking what the group reads differently.
• For a personal sort, deal each person their own set of cards and let them make columns on the table before comparing.
• The failure mode is the catch-all column — "other" or "later" quietly swallows the sort. If a column is filling faster than the rest, its category is too broad; split it or sharpen the definitions.
• Harvest: photograph each column with its heading legible, and list the red-dotted items — they're the discussion agenda.

When & why

Reach for Tagging when the group needs items sorted, not shortlisted — everything keeps its place, it just gains a category (time horizon, theme, owner-to-be).

• Keep categories few and clearly distinct.
• The consensus view highlights items the group sees differently — a good place to focus discussion.
• What usually follows: Voting or Ranking within a category, or Sign Up once a sort by time horizon has made the near-term work visible.