Close

End the session with a saved board, a complete legend, and agreed next steps.

Purpose

Make sure the understanding built in the room survives the session. A board nobody saved, read back, or owns starts fading the moment people leave.

When it starts and ends

Close starts after Decompose, or after Prioritize when the session skips Decompose. It ends when participants leave the board.

Steps

Read the tree back. Walk through the top-voted nodes, their connections to the outcomes, and what the deep dives found. Then ask:

Does this map feel right? What is it missing?

Last contributions go to the parking lot.
Review the parking lot. For each parked node, decide with its author: it joins the tree, it stays parked for next time, or it is dropped.
Name 2 or 3 key insights: what the group knows now that it did not know when the session started.
Complete the legend: the colors and arrow styles in use, the flow direction, the date, and the context.
Save the board. Take a photo of a wall, or save the digital board, labeled with the date.
Agree on next steps: who owns the tree, and when the group will bring it back. See evolving the tree.

Timing

Allow 5 to 10 minutes. Protect them: when a session runs late, cut the end of Decompose, not Close.

Tips

Name the owner of the tree. A tree with an owner comes back at the next time it's needed. A tree without one rarely does.
Write the insights on the board, next to the legend, so they stay with the tree.
Share the saved tree soon, while the session is still fresh, with the people who were in the room and with the people who need it next.

Traps

Skipping Close because time ran out. The board gets saved, but nobody agreed on what it means or what happens next.
Leaving the legend half done. A tree without a complete legend is hard to read for anyone who was not in the room, including the participants a few months from now.
Forgetting the parking lot. Parked nodes are a promise made during Group. Review them, even briefly.

Example

The renewals session closed with a read-back of the 3 top-voted problems and the support subgroup's finding about how tier 1 is measured. The group named 2 insights: sales promises reach all the way to outages, and customers forgive an outage they hear about from the company first.

In the parking lot, the helpdesk tool stayed parked: the problem it was meant to solve, tier 1's missing view of a customer's setup, was already on the tree with a better action. The pricing node stayed parked as out of scope, and the facilitator took it to the leadership team.

The facilitator completed the legend and saved the board. She owns the tree, and it comes back at quarterly planning in 3 months. The deep-dive session on outages was set for the following week.