When You Have Too Many Ideas… Affinity Analysis
Do you remember the last time you tidied that bottom drawer or that overflowing cupboard that has accumulated years of random purchases? Most of us have some area of our lives that is simply too messy for words, a looming mound of stuff with no reason, rhyme, nor arrangement. For some people, it’s their bookshelves, while for me it’s my DIY workbench, with tools, screws, glues, and who-knows what surprises from long-abandoned projects.
Arranging stuff has become such a problem it has prompted its own industry, with Marie Kondo leading the charge among any number of guides for organising our messy drawers, cupboards, and benchtops. But what do you do when that stuff is sitting inside your head. The most confusing mess we ever encounter is the product of our own minds. How do you organise all those brilliant, boring, bizarre, or brand-new thoughts, the stuff cluttering your brain?
And that’s just when you’re trying to handle whatever mess is in your own mind. What if instead you needed to bring order to the wondrous confusion arising from a room full of people, their often weird and random yet occasionally incredibly-clever ideas?
How can you bring order to something so insistently disordered?
There is a way, a surprisingly simple tool.
That tool is called Affinity Analysis.
About Affinity Analysis
Affinity Analysis helps organise ideas by helping people find natural categories for their thoughts. That’s important because the main reason people struggle to organise things is they lack clear categories.
That is one of the guiding insights underpinning Marie Kondo’s approach to tidying. The first thing she does is give people useful categories, which are simple and broad. At the top level, she categorises things by whether that bring joy or don’t, before moving to lower-level categories like clothes, books, papers, etc.
Pre-decided categories work brilliantly with household clutter, helping people to create order out of mess. Unfortunately, pre-decided categories aren’t so helpful when you want to organise ideas. If you don’t believe me, try using Marie Kondo’s categories for organising menu options, work tasks, career opportunities, holiday options, etc.
The truth is almost no categories or ‘rules’ work all the time. For example, and despite what your teachers may have told you, there are no rules in English that always work, and every bit of grammar has an exception. Likewise, categories that work from one perspective fail dreadfully from others. Imagine trying to use engineering rules to categorise books in a library, arranging volumes by size or strength. It would make it almost impossible to find your favourite author. Likewise, any house built using library categories, with construction materials arranged by their producers the way books are arranged by authors, is unlikely to work as your next home.
Using someone else’s pre-decided categories only works when other people are much the same as you and dealing with the same issues. When people are different, with varying ideas and experience, demanding they use the same categories becomes an exercise in power, not understanding. It’s the same as expecting women to let men categorise their interests, or letting someone from a different country tell you how your country should be organised. And that becomes worse when someone tries to impose their own categories on other people’s ideas. Every time someone claims they know the ‘rules’, they are basically saying other people need to adapt to them. That’s an exercise in power, not knowledge nor understanding.
So, imagine if you have a diverse group of people and they don’t know how to make sense of all their ideas. How can they bring their ideas together without somebody imposing their own rules on everyone else?
It can be done, using a surprisingly simple tool called Affinity Analysis.
Instead of starting with the rules and categories, Affinity Analysis gets people to categorise things and then find the reasons for those categories. At heart, Affinity Analysis asks people to collectively find their own categories then use those to discover their own rules.
Feeling Your Way
Even so, Affinity Analysis is not a complete free-for-all, however most of these rules are about what you can do, not what you can’t.
Before starting the process, it is important to ensure each item is movable. That’s easy if it’s an idea — you simply write each idea on a piece of paper, a sticky note or a card, but that’s not always necessary. Affinity Analysis will also work with small items like cooking utensils or clothing, samples or souvenirs.
After collecting all the items, people take a vow of silence. Well, sort-of, because one of the crucial parts of Affinity Analysis is there is no talking during the process and the more people involved, the more important that there is no talking.
Many people think that stopping people from talking would slow down the process, but the opposite is true — the process of sorting things works very much faster when people don’t talk. I’m not entirely sure why that works but it seems it’s because talking takes attention away from the items themselves. Instead of sorting, they think about rules for sorting, which leads to thoughts about what are the right rules, then who’s rules are right, and so on and so on. People can talk about rules for sorting forever and some people do (think of Wikipedia or the Oxford English Dictionary).
If instead they stop talking, people start focusing on connections between items, then connections between categories, then whether one item fits better with another category, and so on, and so on, and it all happens remarkably quickly. I have seen people use Affinity Analysis to sort hundreds of items into categories within a few minutes. By contrast, I have seen people take hours to agree on rules for categorising even a few items, often without reaching agreement.
When it comes to sorting, words get in the way.
Even if you’re doing it on your own, it is best to shut down your mental chatter about finding the right categories, focusing instead on finding which items fit best together.
The only other rules for Affinity Analysis are that people should try to place similar items together, and they should keep rearranging items until everyone is satisfied with the position of all the items.
That’s pretty much it, although a few additional things can help. For starters, it helps if people place similar items close enough together that they are touching each other. That’s not essential but it does help others to see which items belong together.
It also helps to tell people they can move an item from one place to another, and back again. No category is final until everyone is finished. Until then, an item may be moved from one category to another. When an item is repeatedly moved between two or more categories, it means the item genuinely belongs in each of those places. In that case, you can put a copy of that item (a piece of paper with the same words or the name of the item) in each of the categories.
When described like this, Affinity Analysis may sound like chaos but it is structured chaos or to be more precise, it’s self-organising chaos. That’s because Affinity Analysis allows people to find a shared way of organising items, as the items reveal their own categories.
Finding The Words
Once people stop rearranging items, they can start talking again. In fact, they must talk at this point because each group needs a name or description.
With some categories of items, the names are obvious. For example, a group of items comprised of vegetable knives, slicing knives, and peeling knives might be called ‘cooking knives’, while jars, containers, and boxes are all ‘storage.’ Sometimes the name comes from one of the items, which has often happened when I ask people to group words and phrases for describing personality. For example, in one group of people ‘open’, ‘adaptable’, ‘willing to change’, ‘adaptive’, and ‘flexible’ were brought together with the name ‘adaptable.’
These names provide a handle, a way of guiding attention to the whole collection of items. The process of naming gives people a shared set of handles, a common language for referring to the items included in the Affinity Analysis. That means they are no longer talking from their own, isolated perspectives and instead have created a shared appreciation of what was a confusing mess just a few short minutes previously.
I have never seen a diverse group of people quickly reach that level of agreement from talking things through. The reason for that is people use the same words to refer to different things, because every word carries multiple meanings, connotations and implications. You can only reach agreement with someone once you know what their words mean for them. Affinity Analysis creates agreement quickly because it reveals the meanings (the connections between items) before people choose words (the names or descriptions) for those meanings. People need to agree on meanings so they can agree on words.
Choosing The Path
Shared words are valuable. Every team needs a shared language, a common way of understanding each other and what they are working towards, which is why every leadership book sooner or later discusses the creation of shared vision. Unfortunately, many leaders make the mistake of assuming they can create shared vision by imposing their ideas upon their team. That only works sometimes, and always results in ignoring the team’s wisdom. By contrast, Affinity Analysis reveals the group’s wisdom, quickly and easily, without anyone imposing their ideas on others.
This provides a special bonus. While rearranging items into fresh categories helps people to understand each other, it also prompts new, shared understandings as items get connected in novel ways. The process of identifying new groups and categories is inherently creative, often providing ideas that no-one in the group had previously recognised. Unlike many tools for creativity (like Brainstorming), this happens so smoothly that people often don’t recognise how clever they’ve been together. And because they’ve done it together, people are far less likely to criticise the results: after all, that would mean criticising themselves.
What Next?
The results of an Affinity Analysis enable people to make decisions and take actions based on their fresh, shared understanding. Less obviously, the outcomes of Affinity Analysis often form the basis for planning projects and time management. I’ve often found the new groupings are helpful for making decisions because the novel names provide simple, shared ways of evaluating options. That is why I used Affinity Analysis to plan my forthcoming book on group processes, Choose Your Tools!
Whichever way you use it, Affinity Analysis is a tool worth knowing, something to pull out of your back pocket whenever things get too complicated. I’m sure I’ll be using it this weekend when I finally take to my workbench.
