Frequently asked questions

How does a dialogue run?
In five steps: strategy workshop, setup and invitation, the dialogue, the result, the follow-up communication. You provide the context, BrainE4 provides the concept. Within 48 hours the dialogue room is ready to launch. From there BrainE4 takes over moderation, analysis and reporting.

How long does a dialogue take?
21 days. In that time your stakeholders contribute ideas and arguments anonymously and assess each other's. Afterwards you hold robust priorities in your hands, along with new ideas and arguments, prioritised by the participants themselves.

How much effort does it take on your side?
Three hours in the workshop. One sign-off on the communication. Everything else is ours, from moderation through to the report. Your participants need ten minutes, spread across the 21 days.

How quickly can a dialogue start?
Within 48 hours of the workshop. BrainE4 sets everything up: technology, invitation texts, design, with your logo. You share a link, your stakeholders click, the dialogue begins. There is no IT project.

What happens in the strategy workshop?
Beforehand BrainE4 analyses your situation and develops a first proposal for the questions, the hypotheses, the stakeholder group and the way people take part. In the workshop we sharpen the concept with you and record the six assumptions per question that the dialogue is to test. Afterwards you decide whether a pilot dialogue or a dialogue mandate follows. The concept is yours, even if no dialogue follows.

Who develops the questions?
BrainE4 does. Large-scale dialogues require the right questions: open questions and the hypotheses to be tested. You supply the situation, the goals, the stakeholders and the assumptions; BrainE4 turns them into the concept, the key questions and the communication.

Who moderates the dialogue?
BrainE4, daily, for three weeks, with no work for you. Every new contribution is checked so the dialogue stays factual and safe.

Can you see what is happening during the dialogue?
Yes. You follow along live and see each day which topics dominate. It creates no work for you.

How much time do participants need?
Ten minutes over the full run, anonymously and at any time of day. There are no appointments and no obligation to attend.

What happens after the dialogue?
You receive a finished communication for your stakeholders, transparent and traceable. The message it sends: "You listened." A sample report from a citizen dialogue is publicly available.

What is the Insight Guarantee?
You set the standard yourself, before we start. In the strategy workshop you record six assumptions for each question. BrainE4 feeds them in anonymously, indistinguishable from the contributions of your stakeholders. At the end there is a complete ranking, often several hundred ideas and arguments. It is measured against the top ten. There BrainE4 guarantees you at least five topics that were not on your radar — as an average across all questions. If that is not achieved, BrainE4 does not send an invoice. You keep the complete analysis in every case.

How can BrainE4 guarantee that?
No consultant commits in advance to how much new ground they will cover. BrainE4 does, and puts its fee behind it.

Why are the assumptions fed in anonymously?
So that they travel the same path through the dialogue as every other argument: assessed by everyone, with no recognisable origin. That way it is verifiable at the end what was genuinely new and what you had expected anyway — rather than what merely felt new.

What does a dialogue cost?
Scope and cost ceiling are agreed before we start. For a dialogue mandate you receive a proposal with a binding cost ceiling in advance. The scope depends on the number of questions, the size of the stakeholder group and the languages.

What forms of collaboration are there?
Four: strategy workshop, pilot dialogue, dialogue mandate and framework mandate.
The pilot dialogue is a clearly limited run on one question from the workshop — you experience the idea duel on a real decision. The dialogue mandate is running the dialogue in full. The framework mandate repeats dialogues at fixed intervals and shows you developments over time.

What does a framework mandate give you?
A basis for comparison, for everyone who needs to decide regularly. Because the concept, the activation and the question structure are already in place, every follow-up dialogue costs less. Instead of a snapshot you see changes as they emerge.

Are there licence or user fees?
No. You acquire no licence and set nothing up. No IT project, no user licences.

What is included in the mandate?
Development of the questions, the invitation and communication concept, setting up the dialogue room in your design, daily moderation over three weeks, four-eyes review of every contribution, analysis and segmentation by the criteria you define, one results report per question, a one pager and the finished follow-up communication.

Can we see this beforehand?
Yes. BrainE4 shows you a completed dialogue with real results, including a sample report from a citizen dialogue. In the twenty-minute intro call we go through your specific question. If a dialogue does not serve your decision-making, BrainE4 will tell you.

What does the intro call cost?
Nothing. Twenty minutes is enough to establish what you need to decide and whether a dialogue will get you there.

How does the ranking of arguments come about?
The substantive analysis of the idea duels is carried out with a Bayesian method from the Bradley-Terry family (Bradley & Terry, 1952). Every statement is given a credibility interval that discloses the statistical uncertainty under the documented assumptions.

Is the method scientifically grounded?
Yes. The methodological foundations for dialogue-based participation and for the aggregation of pairwise comparisons were developed in Innosuisse project no. 57442.1 together with the ZHAW and the OST. IPF raking and weight trimming are established standard procedures in survey research, which BrainE4 has further developed for real-time use in a dialogue format.

Is the statistical uncertainty disclosed?
Yes, for every single finding. Every statement is given a credibility interval.

What sets the idea duel apart from a survey?
In a survey your people tick predefined answers. In the idea duel they write their own, and everyone else weighs them in direct comparison. That is how you also learn what nobody would have asked about. Surveys count votes, but they never see the real ideas and arguments.

Doesn't this just produce a wish list?
No, because nobody can only wish. Every participant has to choose between two contributions, a hundred times over. What ends up at the top has prevailed against everything else.

Can a single person strongly influence the result?
No. The number of idea duels counted per person is capped, so that individual participants cannot influence the result disproportionately. On top of that, every argument is assessed in many independent duels.

Can you analyse by area?
Yes. BrainE4 compares departments, regions or criteria you define yourself. That way you see where a position holds and where it falls apart.

What question types are there?
Alongside the idea duel there are also the classic formats: multiple choice, Likert scales and the Net Promoter Score. The closed formats deliver comparable figures — where a time series needs to be continued — while the idea duel delivers the why behind them, and topics nobody would have asked about.

Is this an AI method?
No. Every judgment comes from a human. AI only helps to structure, it never decides. The human being is at the centre here, with their full powers of judgment.

What happens if too few take part?
Communication is half the battle, and it is BrainE4's job. We do not invite people to a survey; we put into words what is at stake in your specific question. Your company. Your impact. Your future. Your voice. For participants it takes ten minutes over the full run, anonymously and at any time of day.

Is participation anonymous?
Yes. Taking part in the dialogue is open, voluntary and anonymous. Each person submits their own ideas and arguments in their own words. There are no predefined answers and no attribution of contributions to individuals.

Can the client see who wrote what?
No. You see arguments, rankings and segment analyses, never individual people. You follow along live to see which topics dominate — without any attribution to individuals.

Can organised groups distort the result?
No. Organised camps cannot tip the ranking, because every argument is assessed in many independent duels and each participant receives an individual sequence. The number of duels counted per person is capped. And any over- or under-representation of particular groups in the raw data is corrected continuously, so that a demographic or political imbalance cannot take hold in the result.

How are inappropriate contributions handled?
BrainE4 reviews every new contribution under the four-eyes principle, so the dialogue stays factual and safe. The basis is our published community guidelines: insults, calls to violence, spam, advertising and political propaganda are removed and, in the interest of good corporate governance, disclosed in the report. Controversial content is not removed — disagreement is the purpose of the method, not a malfunction.

Are the dialogues GDPR-compliant?
Yes. Dialogues are conducted in compliance with the GDPR.

What information do participants give about themselves?
For the weighting, BrainE4 assigns each person to a weighting cell based on their own details, along socio-demographic dimensions such as gender, age, education and region. Which dimensions are collected is configurable depending on the question, and the configuration is disclosed in the results report.

Where is it developed?
100 % Swiss Made, in collaboration with the OST and the ZHAW.

What kinds of decisions is BrainE4 suited to?
Decisions where you want to know beforehand where consensus holds and where resistance sits: strategy, mission statement, post-merger integration, reorganisation, CEO onboarding. In the public sector, for site and area development, budget priorities and proposals ahead of a vote.

What are the four dialogue worlds?
Leadership Dialogue for strategy and direction, Cultural Dialogue for culture and change, Customer Dialogue for market and customers, Citizen Dialogue for citizens and politics. The same method, four fields of application.

What does the Leadership Dialogue give you?
Between you and the truth sit layers of hierarchy. Each one filters and smooths, until only the tame version reaches the top. In the Leadership Dialogue your whole organisation thinks with you, anonymously and as equals. In 21 days: blind spots surfaced, priorities ranked, consensus proven — before the budget is committed.

What does the Cultural Dialogue give you?
Engagement scores tell you something is off. They almost never tell you why. The Cultural Dialogue makes the why visible, anonymous and unfiltered — no one can steer which arguments carry weight. You learn the reason while you can still act on it, instead of in the exit interview.

What does the Customer Dialogue give you?
You see which arguments convince and which cost you trust, before the market delivers its verdict. Your customers, or members, weigh the arguments blind against each other: no leading questions, no vocal minority. In 21 days you know why they buy, why they hesitate and why they walk away.

What does the Citizen Dialogue give you?
You see what truly moves your population — before you decide, not after. The Citizen Dialogue secures legitimacy beyond the few dozen who show up at the information evening, makes conflicts visible while they can still be resolved, and lowers the referendum risk. Three hours of work for your administration, GDPR-compliant.

What sets BrainE4 apart from an employee survey?
A survey delivers yes-no answers and scattered single voices: no weight, no consensus. BrainE4 delivers validated top arguments and the why behind them, in the words of your employees, and shows which explanation the workforce actually shares.

What sets BrainE4 apart from a participation platform?
BrainE4 is not another participation platform but a complementary method: reasoning instead of commenting, no likes and no noise, but dynamic consensus validation. Protected identities, so organised groups cannot distort the result. And a decision-ready output: validated majority and minority positions, in the words of those affected.

What sets BrainE4 apart from a workshop?
Workshops bring depth, but only for the few in the room. The larger the group, the more the loudest voices dominate. In the anonymous idea duel the argument counts, not the position of the person who wrote it.

What sets BrainE4 apart from likes and comments?
Comments remain single voices without weight. Likes measure popularity and say nothing about what matters. In the idea duel every argument is assessed by many people in direct comparison and then weighted.

When is BrainE4 not the right fit?
If a dialogue will not move your decision forward, BrainE4 says so in the intro call — before any proposal is on the table.

How does BrainE4 derive representative statements?
Taking part in a BrainE4 dialogue is open, voluntary and anonymous. The dialogue is not tied to a pre-quota'd random sample. So that the dialogue represents the target population, participants' votes are weighted using what is known as raking: votes from participants in under-represented groups are given greater weight, votes in over-represented groups are slightly reduced. The weighting is recalculated during the running dialogue with every increase in data, in order to reproduce the specified marginal distributions of the target population. On the assumption that participants and non-participants with the same socio-demographic profile do not differ substantially in their assessments, this yields representative statements for the target population.

Which dimensions is the weighting based on?
The target population is the permanent resident population of Switzerland. We describe it along socio-demographic dimensions, up to seven in the standard model, among them gender, age, education, party sympathy, region and income. Calibration is against the marginal distribution of each individual dimension, not against their full combination. The target values come from official sources.
Which dimensions are used is configurable depending on the question, the target group and the client. The configuration used is disclosed in the results report of every dialogue.

How is the weighting applied during the running dialogue?
It is participants who are weighted, not individual contributions. Each person is assigned to a weighting cell based on their own details; the weights of all cells are redetermined with every increase in data. The number of idea duels counted per person is capped, so that individual participants cannot influence the result disproportionately. Any over- or under-representation of particular groups in the raw data is thereby corrected continuously, so that a demographic or political imbalance cannot take hold in the result.

Which weighting procedure is used?
The adjustment is carried out using Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF, also known as raking), a procedure established since the 1940s for calibrating sample data simultaneously against several known marginal distributions. We then cap extreme individual weights through trimming. Because trimming alters the exact match with the marginal distributions, calibration and trimming are repeated in alternation until both conditions are met together.

What statistical foundation does the analysis rest on?
The substantive analysis of the idea duels is carried out with a Bayesian method from the Bradley-Terry family (Bradley & Terry, 1952). Every statement is given a credibility interval that discloses the statistical uncertainty under the documented assumptions.

Where do the scientific foundations come from?
The methodological foundations for dialogue-based participation and for the aggregation of pairwise comparisons were developed in Innosuisse project no. 57442.1 together with the ZHAW and the OST. IPF raking and weight trimming are established standard procedures in survey research, which BrainE4 has further developed for real-time use in a dialogue format.

What does this mean for your decision?
Through continuous weighting against known population shares we derive representative statements, with transparently disclosed statistical uncertainty for every single finding.