hexagon-complexity-mapper
Hexagon Complexity Mapper
What This Skill Does
Guides students through a hexagon mapping exercise in which they identify factors shaping a complex topic, write each on a hexagonal tile, and arrange the tiles so that adjacency — physical touching — signals a claimed relationship between two factors. The arrangement is not sorting into categories. It is a collective act of relationship-claiming. When two hexagons touch, students are asserting "these two things affect each other in some way" and must be able to explain how.
This distinction is critical. Hexagon mapping is not a brainstorming exercise with a prettier shape. It is a tool for surfacing the hidden connective tissue of complex situations: which factors cluster together because they are mutually reinforcing, which sit at the boundary of the system as external forces, and which hold the map together by appearing in multiple clusters.
The skill produces a shared visual map that becomes the input for subsequent tools such as Three Horizons mapping, systems awareness iceberg work, or agency circles.
Evidence Space and Strength of Evidence
This skill encodes the H3Uni Hexagon Mapping method, a practitioner framework developed by Anthony Hodgson. It is not a validated classroom intervention.