Wetskills-Spain 2026 – Blog 5 –
Today was a very different day at Wetskills Barcelona. After the activities and visits of the previous days, we spent the entire day focusing on our respective cases. No visits, no external activities, and no distractions — just our teams, our case studies, and a lot of discussion, research and brainstorming.
The day gave us the opportunity to slow down and really immerse ourselves in the challenges we had been assigned. Although we had already been introduced to our cases and had started thinking about the problems they presented, today was the first time we could dedicate several hours exclusively to understanding them in depth. We started by going back to the case itself and making sure that we had a clear understanding of the problem we were actually trying to solve. This was more challenging than it might sound. One of the main things we have been learning during Wetskills is that identifying the real problem behind a case is just as important as coming up with a solution. It is very easy to jump straight into brainstorming ideas, but without properly understanding the context, the stakeholders involved and the different impacts of the problem, we might end up solving the wrong thing.
As a team, we discussed the different aspects of our case, shared our perspectives and started organising the information we had collected. We looked at the processes involved, the different factors contributing to the problem and the potential consequences before, during and after the event or situation described in our case. Each team member brought a different perspective, which made the discussions particularly interesting. Sometimes we agreed immediately, while other ideas led to much longer conversations — but those discussions helped us question our initial assumptions and look at the problem from different angles.
Another important part of the day was deciding how to structure all the information we had. When you are researching a complex water-related problem, it is surprisingly easy to end up with a huge amount of information without knowing exactly what to do with it. Today was therefore also about filtering: deciding what was relevant, what was missing, and which questions we still needed to answer. By the end of the day, we had a much clearer picture of where we stand. We may not have all the answers yet – and we certainly still have a lot of work ahead of us – but we have moved from simply having a case to actually understanding the challenge behind it and beginning to shape a possible solution.
Tomorrow the challenge continues – more questions to answer, more ideas to develop and hopefully a solution that brings together all we have been working on.
Bog by Laura Pérez Vázquez
