Organizing Ideas Into Common Themes

Is it ever a bad thing to have too many ideas? Probably not, but if you’ve ever experienced information overload or struggled to know where to begin with a wealth of data you’ve been given, you may have wondered how you can use all of these ideas effectively.

When there’s lots of “stuff” coming at you, it is hard to sort through everything and organize the information in a way that makes sense and helps you make decisions. Whether you’re brainstorming ideas, trying to solve a problem or analyzing a situation, when you are dealing with lots of information from a variety of sources, you can end up spending a huge amount of time trying to assimilate all the little bits and pieces. Rather than letting the disjointed information get the better of you, you can use an affinity diagram to help you organize it.

An affinity diagram helps to synthesize large amounts of data by finding relationships between ideas. The information is then gradually structured from the bottom up into meaningful groups. From there you can clearly “see” what you have, and then begin your analysis or come to a decision.

Affinity diagrams can be used to:

• Draw out common themes from a large amount of information
• Discover previously unseen connections between various ideas or information
• Brainstorm root causes and solutions to a problem

Because many decision-making exercises begin with brainstorming, this is one of the most common applications of affinity diagrams. After a brainstorming session there are usually pages of ideas. These won’t have been censored or edited in any way, many of them will be very similar, and many will also be closely related to others in a variety of ways. What an affinity diagram does is start to group the ideas into themes.

From the chaos of the randomly generated ideas comes an insight into the common threads that link groups of them together. From there the solution or best idea often emerges quite naturally.

Affinity diagrams are not purely in the domain of brainstorming. They can be used in any situation where:

• A single, best solution is not readily apparent from a series of choices
• You want to reach a consensus or decision and have a lot of variables to consider, concepts to discuss, ideas to connect, or opinions to incorporate
• There is a large volume of information to sort through

Step-by-step guide to the affinity diagram

Here is a series of steps that you can practice with to show how the process works.

1. Describe the problem or issue
2. Generate ideas by brainstorming. Write each idea on a separate sticky note and put these on a wall or flip chart. Remember to:
   • Emphasize the quantity of ideas, rather than simply quality
   • Suspend judgment on creative or unusual approaches
   • Encourage “Piggybacking” on other ideas
3. Sort Ideas into natural themes by asking:
   • What ideas are similar?
   • Is this idea connected to any of the others?
4. If you’re working in a team:
   • Separate into smaller groups of 3 to 4 people
   • Sort the ideas IN SILENCE so that no one is influenced by anyone else’s comments
   • Keep moving the cards around until consensus is reached
5. Create total group consensus
   • Discuss the shared meaning of each of the sorted groups
   • Continue until consensus is reached
   • If some ideas do not fit into any theme, separate them as “stand-alone” ideas
   • If some ideas fit into more than one theme, create a duplicate card and put it in the proper group
   • Try to limit the total number of themes to between five and nine
6. Create theme cards
   • Create a short 3-5 word description for the relationship
   • If you’re working in a group, do this together, out loud
   • Write this theme/header on a blank card and place at the top of the group it describes
   • Create a “super-headers” where necessary to group themes
   • Use a “sub-header” card where necessary as well
7. Continue to group the themes/headers until you have reached the broadest, but still meaningful, categories possible
8. Draw lines connecting the super-headers, themes/headers, and sub-headers

The Final Structure of Your Ideas

You will end up with a hierarchical structure that shows, at a glance, where the relationships are. Grouping ideas under headings, and then grouping headings under super-headers in an affinity diagram is a practical way of “chunking” information generated in brainstorming sessions, during mind mapping, or even a planning exercise.

Affinity diagrams are great tools for assimilating and understanding large amounts of information. When you work through the process of creating relationships and working backward from detailed information to broad themes, you get an insight you would not otherwise find.

The next time you are confronting a large amount of information or number of ideas and you feel overwhelmed at first glance, use the affinity diagram approach to discover all the hidden relationships. When you cannot see the forest for the trees, an affinity diagram may be exactly what you need to regain your focus.

Today I would like to share a list of questions that you can ask your team (or yourself) in order to prompt your thinking and brainstorming sessions.

The following list is available as a PDF for download here (right click and “Save as”).

Resources

• Whose input do we need?
• Whose input could we use?
• Has anything like this been done before?
• What mistakes can we learn from?
• What successes can we learn from?
• What resources do we have?
• What resources might we need?

Executive issues

• How does this relate to the strategic plan?
• How does it relate to other priorities, directions, goals?
• How will this affect our competitive position?

Administration

• Who’s accountable for this project’s success?
• Lines of communication
• Methods of reporting
• What structures do we need?
• What planning is still likely to be required?
• What re-grouping will we need? How often?
• What people do we need?
• Current staffing?
• Hiring?
• Subcontractors?
• Consultants?
• How do we get involvement?
• What skills are required?
• Who needs to know how to do what?
• What training do we need?
• How do we get it?
• What other communication do we need?
• Who needs to be informed as we go along?
• What policies/procedures affected? What needed?
• What about morale? Fun?
• Staffing?

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A difficult part of starting any project is the anxiety that often occurs about how the project may end. The outcome is, of course, the most important part of the endeavor, and it is vital that you have a clear understanding of the desired outcome before you begin.

How you envision the outcome of implementing your plan is essential to its final success. If you have a clear vision of exactly what you are working to achieve you can communicate it to the rest of the team.

Your vision of the outcome is the final mark on the yardstick that you will be using to measure your progress through the plan’s stages. When you have properly defined the outcome of the project you can then create and define specific activities and sub-goals to reach your objective.

What happens when it’s over?

If the project has been determined to be worth doing and you have outlined the “Why”, your next step is to set the conditions that define its successful completion. Here is a short list of questions that can help create the vision of a successful outcome:

• What are the potential rewards?
• What are the potential obstacles?
• Are there potential opportunities for changing the plan to meet changing conditions? How might this affect the outcome?
• What will the success of this project mean in a year? In three years?
• What is the best possible result of the project?
• What might prevent you from reaching the best result?

As with Defining the Purpose, clear Outcome Visioning can greatly increase the enthusiasm of the participants. Knowing where you are going is always preferable to blundering blindly about.

Tools for answering the questions

There are plenty of tools and methods that individuals and teams can use to capture the potential solutions. Brainstorming and Free Association can be helpful in exploring unexpected problems as well as opportunities. These also happen to be very good Team-building exercises which can be very helpful to the overall success of your project. Getting everyone to participate and contribute to the solutions to a problem raises the level of buy-in and enthusiasm for a project.

Flip-charts come in handy for brainstorming sessions, lots of room for writing down the ideas and suggestions. They are also very handy for mind-mapping, a method of capturing ideas and determining the connections between them. Often these connections prompt more ideas!

Mind-Mapping Software

Here are a few links to some of the mind-mapping resources that are available online:

• Mind-Mapping.org - a list of over 200 resources!
• Exploratree - web based “thinking guide”
• Flying Logic - web based mind-mapping
• Freemind - a free download that you can take with you

Other Brainstorming Tools

Depending on the type of project that you are working on, other resources might be helpful as well:

• Storyboards
• Weddings
• or even Travel Planning

Whatever tool that you use, the basic principles are the same:

1. Understand “Why”, what is the purpose of the project?
2. Visualize the outcome, what is the final result?
3. Brainstorm ideas, and capture every one for evaluation.

In future posts in this series we will discuss organizing these ideas into a coherent structure and identifying Next Actions.

An Underutilized Productivity Idea

This post details what I call the In-Context method of Project Planning. It is built upon the ideas of many other authors and trainers that I have encountered, then distilled into an easily digestible and manageable tool. I believe that this can be one of the most useful productivity ideas that you have in your arsenal. I wish that many of the facilitators of countless planning sessions that I have had to endure had heard of it!

What I like most about using this process is that no special equipment or expensive training is required. Merely following a sequence of steps can make project planning a joy rather than a modern form of torture. The irony of this emphasis on planning is that I never really thought that I had any projects that were “serious” enough to warrant this kind of analysis and structure.

What I did not realize is that this planning process is not at all cumbersome. On the contrary - it is straightforward and simple to follow and to implement. It can be used for large-scale, team-driven projects as well as something as mundane as a blog post.

In learning how to use the In-Context process for projects large and small I have learned to simplify my own project tracking and improve the completion rate. One of the most exciting consequences has been to move some of my Long-term Goals into shorter-termed Contexts.

Vertical thinking, really contemplating the issue at hand and how it will get from point A to point B is essential to the success of a project, and the In-Context method is a vertical thinking tool.

The Essential Phases of In-Context Planning

There are five basic steps in this planning model, each of which will be examined in turn:

1. Define the Purpose of the project and the Principles to be followed
2. Outcome Visioning
3. Brainstorming
4. Organizing
5. Identify the Next Actions

Following these steps, in this order, may seem like common sense. Yet how many of you have been trapped in “planning sessions” where common sense had apparently been tossed out a window? Where no actual planning got done? Where you left the meeting feeling defeated and demoralized, with less of an idea of what you were supposed to accomplish than when you went in?

Define the Purpose of the Project

One of the most common mistakes that people in charge of Projects make is to start putting together a plan, agenda, or punch-list without having a clear idea of exactly what they want to accomplish. Project planning can be greatly enhanced by the use of high-level thinking, that is, not thinking about nuts-and-bolts stuff, but really thinking about the results that you are looking for. Getting the “big picture” view of the current project or situation will aid you in determining the need-behind-the-need, or the “Why” of working on the project in the first place. If you do not know why you are working toward a particular goal you may never get there, and you will certainly never persuade anyone else to follow you into that darkness.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing well“

Asking yourself, your leader, or your team about the “Why” of a project or obstacle is a good way of finding out if it is worth doing. [editor’s note: if it is not worth doing, do not spend any more time on it!!] What is the cost of this effort going to be measured in - time, energy, expense? Who is going to pay the price?

When your leader, you, and those you are leading all understand the value of the project it leads to increased motivation. Getting motivated about the execution of the project creates a stimulus for doing the hard work of proper planning.

Principled Planning

Once you have determined that a project is worth doing, what are the values and principles that will guide you through to its completion? Depending on the type of project it is, you may have certain values regarding safety, cost, usability, complexity, etc. Are there principles that you are willing to compromise in order to meet a deadline? Which of your principles cannot be violated, regardless of cost or time constraints?

Including resource allocation into your project plan will be essential to its success. People, money, and time are the most common resources, ask yourself which others you may need. Is there a dedicated team, or workspace, or a new piece of machinery/equipment that must be obtained? How will these choices affect the eventual success of the project?

Finally, your principles will determine how changes are made to the plan once it is underway. Who will review and approve these changes? Are there naturally occurring points in the plan where choices about changes can/have to be made?

The Purpose = A Compass

The plan that you are about to create will be your road-map to success. Your Purpose and Principles become the compass that keeps you pointed in the right direction. Clearly defining your purpose and the principles that you will follow make it possible to communicate your goals to your team, or those who will ultimately be implementing this plan. This open communication will make it simple to monitor your program and detect when it may be getting off-track or bogged-down.

In the next posts in this series we will look at Outcome Visioning, Brainstorming, Organizing, and Identifying your Next Actions. At the end we will go over some real-life examples and present a planning tool that can guide you through this Natural Planning Process.