Through these three translational mechanisms , participants described how they made soft data meaningful , and thus endowed them with function in relation to quality and safety , either diagnostically ( Aggregation and Triangulation ) or illustratively and persuasively ( Instrumentalization ) . The three approaches to generating soft intelligence were not mutually exclusive , and two or more were often present in participants ' accounts , with overlap evident between our categories of Aggregation and Triangulation . However , there were also important distinctions between the two : whereas Aggregation implied that soft data could become useful independently , through the accumulation of multiple soft data , Triangulation saw generating soft intelligence only as a complement to or means of validating data derived from conventional sources .