Basics of Affinity Diagrams

Basics of Affinity Diagrams

When you have a scattering of ideas or suggestions, you can use affinity diagrams to organize and group them.

Affinity diagraming is a simple way for an individual or (better) a group to quickly gather and organize a large number of disparate concepts, ideas, suggestions, etc. It is a natural activity after a brainstorming session.

Affinity Diagram Procedure

With one two steps, this procedure is easy to remember.

First, without talking (more on this in a moment), sort the ideas into groups.

Second, for each group of ideas create a summary title the represents that group.

That’s it.

Let’s say you have 200 stickies each with one idea from the brainstorming session. Some are word-for-word the same idea. Some are the same idea only worded slightly differently. Some are really different than others.

The first step includes the no talking rule. When just finishing a brainstorming session where the team is quickly generating ideas and withholding comments, this next step becomes very difficult for most teams.

The idea with no talking is to further reduce the urge to comment, lobby, cajole, or critique ideas toward…