Discovery Events: Exploring a Topic Without Pre-Defined Dimensions

Most Signal Event interviews measure. You decide in advance what you want to know, the event carries dimensions with definitions and scoring criteria, and the report tells you how a cohort scored on each one.

A discovery event starts from a topic instead of a set of measures, and explores it openly. In place of dimensions, it carries a short list of topics worth paying attention to, with no fixed idea of what will be found in them. The report is built from what participants raised.

When to run a discovery event

Run a discovery event if you are venturing into a new domain and need to uncover the right questions before determining answers, or when you lack sufficient knowledge to define specific metrics. It is also ideal when previous research yielded surprising outcomes that require foundational understanding before re-scoring, or when pre-specifying dimensions might bias participant feedback. 

Run a construct-based event when you know what you want to measure, need scores that compare across participants, or intend to track the same measures over time.

What a discovery report contains

A discovery report separates two things.

1. Topics explored are the areas the event set out to cover, and what participants said about each. A topic nobody reached is named as unreached rather than dropped, because an area no one raised is itself a finding.

2. What emerged are themes that came out of the conversations without being asked about, ordered by the strength of the evidence behind them.

A discovery report opens directly into the evidence, with the same feed, filters, search and quote cards a measurement report uses. It has no Analysis tab, because there are no dimension scores to analyze.