Affinity Diagram Why Is It Used?

Sometimes when running a major project in your organization, the amount of information you have to work with can start to quickly pile up, overloading you with details from all directions. It can be useful to have some sort of analytical grouping tool to make sense of it all, and thankfully, there are various utilities you can use in the world of Lean and Six Sigma.

The affinity diagram is a particularly useful tool that can allow you to easily organize large volumes of ideas, grouping them by different criteria related to their themes or how they are linked to each other. This can help you quickly navigate a larger volume of data and ensure that you actually see the big picture, that is, that you’re not missing any important relationships between those entities.

Affinity Diagram: Basic Concepts

The affinity diagram is a relatively simple and straightforward tool, and it’s quite flexible in how you can apply it to your specific organization and environment. As a general rule, you’ll group all your ideas according to certain themes, writing them down under each category in a list.

Determining the themes themselves can take some creativity, and it’s usually not a rigid process. This of course depends heavily on the exact nature of the problem you’re trying to resolve. Sometimes the categories may not be so obvious, requiring you to dig a bit deeper in the concepts you’re dealing with, or call upon the assistance of people more experienced in this specific field.

In addition, some problems might benefit more from splitting their concepts even further into subgroups and other similar classes. This is particularly true when dealing with more complex ideas, such as when trying to organize the assets and production pipeline of your entire organization. Of course, in those cases, you might also benefit from looking into alternative forms of representation and organization for your ideas, but an affinity diagram should prove useful in many cases.

A Structured Approach to Affinity Diagrams

Feeling lost? If you’re not sure where to start with your affinity diagram, you should look at the most fundamental point a list of all relevant ideas and concepts. Write down everything you can think of that relates to your current situation, and write all those points down as separate items that can be rearranged easily.

Some recommend using a tool like post-it notes or something similar that allows for simple physical organization, but if you’re taking your notes on a computer this can significantly simplify things as well. Just draw them up in a tool like OneNote and you’ll be able to easily rearrange them in the next step.

Once you’ve come up with everything related to your project, you should start grouping those objects into different sets. What those sets are going to look like depends entirely on what sort of project you’re dealing with and the specifics of your organization. As we said above, sometimes it might even be appropriate to have subgroups within each major group.

Just try not to make things too complex for what you actually need. It’s possible that there might be a simple approach to organizing your thoughts in your affinity diagram. The important point of this tool, after all, is to ensure that you have a clear overview of all relevant ideas in your current project. If you see an opportunity for additional complexity, this could mean that affinity diagrams are not the ideal tool for your current needs.

Or, alternatively, it could also mean that you need to look at the way you’re using affinity diagrams and reevaluate it. Perhaps you could split things up a bit more into several additional diagrams? It’s a flexible tool that can easily be twisted to your own preferences.

Conclusion

The affinity diagram is a simple, yet powerful tool that can have some serious implications for an organization looking to organize large numbers of details in a project. At a glance, it can even look a bit too simplistic to be worth anything, but the truth is that it can be one of the best organizational tools for any serious leader, as long as you know what you’re doing when using it, and you recognize the correct use cases for it.