Chains

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.harmonica.chat/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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What is a chain?

A chain is a sequence of sessions that run in order. Each step has its own facilitation focus and its own group of participants, but the output from one step flows automatically into the next as context. The final step sees the accumulated insight from every step before it. Chains are useful when you need structured progressions — a diverge-then-converge process, a panel of named roles deliberating in sequence, or a methodology that requires distinct phases. When you launch a chain, Harmonica automatically creates a project to contain all the steps. You can navigate between steps from any step’s results page.

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Start a chain

Chains start from the Templates page, not the main dashboard. Chain templates appear in their own section on that page.

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Role-based steps

Some chain templates assign participants to specific roles. Each role gets a dedicated join link for their assigned step — they only participate in the steps they’re assigned to. For host-assigned chains, you assign participants to roles after the session launches. The step shows a waiting state until you make assignments; once you do, the step activates and participants can join. For round-robin and all-participants chains, role assignments happen automatically at launch based on your roster.

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How context flows between steps

When a step completes, its session summary automatically becomes part of the next step’s context. The facilitator in each new step knows what the previous group said. Depending on the chain template’s design, the next step may receive:

• The previous step’s summary — the immediately preceding step only
• All prior summaries — everything the chain has produced so far

This context flows through the facilitator, so participants in later steps can build on, interrogate, or prioritise the output of earlier ones without being handed a raw document.

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Navigate between steps

Once a chain is running, you can navigate its steps from any step’s results page. A step-progress widget shows the chain’s title, each step’s status (completed, current, or upcoming), and links to viewable steps. Public results pages include the same navigation, so stakeholders following the chain can move between visible steps without an account.

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Worked example: Wardley mapping

The Wardley Mapping chain template is a three-step process that ends with a rendered Wardley map:

1. Landscape scan — participants identify the components that make up the space: users, activities, and enabling capabilities.
2. Evolution assessment — participants position each component on the evolution axis (genesis → custom → product → commodity).
3. Strategic synthesis — the facilitator assembles findings into a rendered Wardley map, surfaced as a visual output artifact on the chain’s project page.

To launch it, find Wardley Mapping in the Methodology chains section of the Templates page. The resulting map appears on a dedicated Wardley Map tab in the project (labeled Maps if the project contains more than one Wardley chain), and you can export it as PNG, SVG, or the raw map definition.

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