The difference between a regular meeting and this phase is that the participants discuss viewpoints that they have already explicitly expressed and were captured. The ontology of the domain that is explored is cognitively manipulated by reading and writing. GEM is grounded in social interactions mediated by an incrementally-constructed shared memory. During the generation phase, participants are collaboratively involved in a creative activity using the sheets that are progressively filled in. During the reformulation phase, they cluster the viewpoints into concepts that are compared during the relation generation phase.
Generated concepts are good enough solutions that are accepted by the participants.
Consensus ratings are computed and used as mediating relative trends to guide designers and evaluators in their final decision making process. For reasons of comprehensibility, if the expression of a concept is too complex, it must be split into several simpler concepts. The simplicity of a concept is usually a function of the number of viewpoints that generated it. The interest of the participants for a concept is provided by the number of positive reinforcements of its various viewpoints. It may be considered also to be inversely proportional to the number of its strongly contradicted viewpoints.