Knowledge base
Some statements sit firmly within one theme, others float between them. That floating is not noise but a finding.
2026-07-13
If you ask a group to group sixty statements, everyone does it slightly differently. More can be inferred from those differences than from an average score.
Some statements end up in almost everyone's hands in the same company. What that statement is about is clear to the group, and the theme around it is sharply bounded.
Other statements shift from pile to pile depending on the participant. One half puts it under organisation, the other under skills. Such a statement gets a high bridging value: it bridges themes instead of falling within one.
A low bridging value means: everyone understands the same thing here. A high value means: the interpretations diverge.
Suppose a theme scores highly on importance on average. That looks like a clear signal to act on it. But if the statements within it all have high bridging values, that average means something other than you think: people scored highly on something they interpret differently.
A decision on such a theme runs aground predictably. Everyone says yes, and then everyone does something different.
Low bridging, high importance. You can act directly here. The picture is shared and so is the urgency.
High bridging, high importance. Build shared understanding first. Not because the group disagrees, but because there is no shared definition yet. A session in which you ask what people mean by it yields more here than an action plan.
High bridging on the edge of two themes. These are often bridges in the literal sense: topics that connect two areas. Anyone looking for an intervention with effect on several themes at once looks here.
The measure is not new. In the concept mapping literature the bridging index has long been used to support the interpretation of a map. The calculation is straightforward: for each statement it looks at how far away the other statements lie that it was sorted with. If that company is widely spread across the map, the value is high.
Every report contains the bridging values per statement and per theme, precisely because a map without those figures easily looks more convincing than it is.
More on the calculation is on the method page.
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