Affinity Diagram

Good decision making is an essential skill for success in business and effective leadership. It applies to any business in any line of work. Making good timely decisions will not only lead your team or business to success, but it will also foster the respect and trust of your team members. Poor decisions, or not making decisions, will lead to failure and, quite possibly, the loss of faith from your team to lead them effectively. There are many different tools and techniques that can help you make well thought timely decisions that will help enable your success. These tools are designed to help you plan out the effects of your decisions and take the best course of action. These tools fall into one of the following categories, or groups. The first decision is selecting what to change in your environment. Then, the importance of working out the different options that are available. Also, a part is making a choice, taking into account different factors, and choosing by valuing different factors. It is necessary to research the pros and cons of every decision. There is pressure toward and against change. This is why checking decisions from every different perspective are beneficial toward the analysis of a profitable outcome. One of the tools available when deciding what to change is an Affinity Diagram. This tool is used to help retain large amounts of data from brain storming and organize it into groups. This, data that is gathered, is all connected by one single concept and grouped into categories by related items.

The Affinity Diagram tool is a good way to get people to work together to solve difficult issues on a creative level. This tool can be used in situations that the unknown or unexplored is being addressed by a team or group of people with many seemingly different or unrelated ideas. This is very important when the team is newly formed or not everyone has a complete and comfortable understanding of the situation. The criteria for using an Affinity Diagram is best achieved when you need to sift through large amounts of data such as the reasons why an auto dealer is not making a profit. Also, it is an excellent way to get a lot of people to work to their full potential and think on a gut level. Because an Affinity Diagram is a brain storming activity, and the team members accept ideas without criticism from others in order to stimulate and develop creative ideas, the Affinity Diagram should not be used if there are less than fifteen ideas to be categorized. This is not the specifically intended purpose of the affinity process and there are other decision making tools that are more effective to identify the highest priority items.

Creating or developing an Affinity Diagram seems to work the best with five or six participants. There are a few guide lines to follow during the procedure that will get the most productive feedback out of the process. The most effective way to get the most from the Affinity Diagram is to have the participants experience the work in silence and display their ideas at will. This encourages ideas that may not conform to conventional thoughts and discourages people from setting aside ideas that may steer them to a thorough decision. Also, the participants need to go for gut reactions, no matter how absurd they sound. This can be facilitated by going for speed rather than deliberation.

The step-by-step process:

Step 1 Generate ideas. Brainstorming is the best method for this step. When you put the ideas on post-ittm notes it works the best for the rest of the steps in the process. Have the members of the group write down their ideas on the post-it notes without discussion with others so there is no intimidation by individuals in the group to only have their ideas be presented.

Step 2 Display the ideas. Post the ideas on a board, wall, or the table in a random manor so that everyone can see. Here is an example of an Affinity Diagram for a small automotive dealership's service department that is not making an efficient profit margin. See the example