Why the labels look like this
The model
A directory can’t control how tools are used. What it can do is give every tool honest labels — where it comes from, what it opens, and what it takes to hold it — so judgment has something to work with.
The safe-use envelope
Four numbers, deliberately separate. Depth and quality are different things — a well-run depth-1 systems session can move a team further than a clumsy depth-4 ritual. The most common facilitation failure is a depth-3 exercise run with holding-1 competence; the labels make that mismatch visible before the workshop.
Depth — what it can open
| ●○○○ | Informational | Conceptual and cognitive engagement; participants talk ABOUT topics. Little or no self-disclosure beyond opinions. Examples: discussing a framework, mapping a system, sorting cards without personal stakes. |
| ●●○○ | Reflective | Personal reflection and meaning-making; participants share their own experience at a self-chosen comfort level. Examples: journaling prompts, structured dialogue rounds, values clarification. |
| ●●●○ | Emotional | Invites live feeling and self-disclosure with interpersonal risk: empathy practices, sustained eye contact, naming grief/anxiety/joy in the room, giving and receiving personal impressions. The exercise works because emotion becomes present. |
| ●●●● | Transformational edge | Deliberately works at participants' growing edge: identity, despair, shadow, deep somatic or transpersonal process. Can destabilize before it reintegrates; aftercare and voluntary, informed participation are part of the design, not optional extras. |
Holding — what it takes to hold
| 0 | Self-guided | Designed for solo use without a facilitator (guided audio, journaling prompt, self-assessment). |
| 1 | Host | Someone keeps time and reads instructions; no group-process skill required (energizers, simple structured rounds). |
| 2 | Facilitator | Group-facilitation craft required — framing, psychological safety, balancing participation, debriefing. |
| 3 | Space-holder | Experienced facilitator able to hold emotional process: welcoming and normalizing strong affect, working with triggering, closing well, arranging aftercare. |
| 4 | Specialist | Professional/clinical or lineage-specific training assumed (therapeutic methods, trauma work, deep somatic release, certified programs). |
Trust — what the group must already have
| ★ | any | Works in freshly formed or low-trust groups |
| ★★ | some | Requires some psychological safety — people speak without fear of ridicule |
| ★★★ | established | Requires established trust — people can risk disclosure and disagreement with each other |
Disclosure — what the design asks people to share
| none | No personal material in the design — task-focused |
| optional | Personal sharing is invited and meaningful |
| required | Personal sharing IS the mechanism — the tool does not run without it |
The pairing rule underneath: whoever holds a process should be able to work one level deeper than the exercise aims, because exercises open more than they intend. Where a design shares nothing — journaling, solo quests, silent practice — privacy is the container, and the labels say so.
Honesty fields
Mechanisms say how a tool works (attention-training, open-awareness, somatic-awareness, emotional-processing, cognitive-reframing, perspective-taking, …), which enables substitution and sequencing. Change scope keeps claims honest: most single exercises produce a state; practices build skills; only sustained, scaffolded engagement supports capacity — per the 2021 IDG report, qualities like Connectedness are not produced by training, only supported. Form names the genre: exercise, practice, method, or instrument.
Origin travels with every tool — creator, tradition, lineage notes, license. Exercises get renamed and re-attributed as they travel; this directory keeps receipts, and links instructions home instead of republishing them.
The full model with its rationale lives alongside the dataset — YAML records, controlled vocabularies and a validator — in the project repository.