Jiro Kawakita and affinity diagrams

At some point in our lives, sometimes recurrently a couple of times a year, we have sat down on the floor to put in order those memories that we still keep on paper or in analogue format (books, photos, music...). Whether it's a move or simply a “change of wardrobe”, we organise and classify objects, giving them new meanings. Our junk can create affinity diagrams.

An affinity diagram is a method or visual tool for organising and synthesising large amounts of information. These diagrams are constructed by classifying and grouping related ideas, concepts or data that have been collected during research, interviews or analysis.

The essence of this simple method lies in its ability to reveal emerging patterns, connections and trends from the information collected, providing a clear and structured view.

Affinity diagrams not only represent an effective technique for data synthesis, but also reflect the philosophy of the Eastern-born methodology.

From the Himalayas, with love

Jiro Kawakita was the fourth of six children, born in 1920 in Mie Prefecture, Japan. After living in Tokyo, he was educated in Kyoto where he cultivated a lifelong love of the mountains. During the war, he studied geography at Kyoto University and later obtained a professorship at Osaka University. He spent the 1950s and 1960s conducting social scientific explorations in Japan, India and Nepal, where he initiated anthropological studies on the challenges of water supply in remote Himalayan valleys.

During an ethnogeographic study on environmental balance in the Sikha Valley in Nepal, the following situation was encountered:

With large amounts of data scattered on my desk, I had been racking my brains to find some way to integrate them when I suddenly realised that depending on the spatial arrangement of the cards, I could see new meanings in them and find ways to systematise the data. That was the first discovery that led to the creation of the KJ Method.

Jiro Kawakita

From this modest form came the KJ Method, also known as the affinity diagram: “a method for synthesising ideas by arranging objects in space”. The technique evolved from Professor Kawakita's expeditions in Asia from the 1960s onwards, later refined together with students and colleagues.

The affinity diagram technique excels in three key areas:

• It is versatile, as it can be applied to any type of printable information: quotations, statistics, images...
• It encourages a democratic approach to understanding information, rather than imposing a hierarchical structure from above. Associations emerge from below through the continuous comparison of cards.
• Beyond the simple categorisation of concepts, it can generate explanations, as the relationships between different pieces of information can help us to discover hidden links between ideas.

A method for a new way of thinking

Deduction, which involves reasoning from premises to a proven conclusion, and induction, which derives general rules from common observations, are common styles of logical thinking. However, philosopher Shunpei Ueyama suggested that the methodology of affinity diagrams aligns with neither deduction nor induction, but rather with abduction, a lesser-known but powerful form of reasoning formalised by Charles Sanders Pierce, which we have previously discussed here.

In an abductive argument, one reasons from observations to a hypothesis that, if true, would explain those observations. Thus, affinity diagrams become a perfect tool for abductive thinking, generating meaning from numerous pieces of information.

In 1964 Kawakita published Pati Gaku (party boat), which described an early form of the KJ Method and gained considerable recognition in the Japanese business community. Three years later he published Hassoho (abduction), presenting the KJ Method more generally in book form. From 1970 onwards, the KJ Method began to gain ground in management and quality theories, becoming one of the seven fundamental «Management Methods» in Japan, along with methodologies such as tree diagrams and prioritisation matrices. The method integrated particularly well with Japanese management culture, which focused on consensus building and group harmony. Then in the 1990s, the method began to spread in the West, spreading as a tool for strategy, research and design around the world.

A tool for change

At the heart of this methodology is a profound experience of self-discovery and patience. The transcription of one interview can generate hundreds of quotes, and dozens of interviews can produce a thousand objects to sort through. The amount of information can be overwhelming:

Once all the papers are in place, it is then time to read them all, patiently and calmly, starting at the ends or in the middle or anywhere. It is not really necessary to read them all; it is more a matter of looking at them. A three-hour discussion can produce up to two or three hundred sheets of paper, and this can be overwhelming for some impatient people. However, there is no need to panic. Just look at the whole sheet and start from anywhere. After a while, a sense of familiarity will appear between the pieces of paper. Noticeable connections will appear between the documents, such as «this document says the same thing as that one» or «these documents are very similar». Once you find such connections, move the pieces of paper next to each other. In this way, clusters of papers will start to appear all along the table. In a sense, small teams of individual sheets of paper.

Jiro Kawakita

It is therefore an exercise in selflessness, patience and active listening, which makes us stewards of a meaning-making process that can be transformative. It is impossible to spend hundreds of hours listening, recording, transcribing, moving, grouping and tagging topics on one subject or another without the process changing you in some way. And as in any process of change, any shortcut is a trap.

Bibliography

• Gray D. “Affinity Map” (2010)
• Iba, Takashi. Yoshikawa, Ayaka Munakata, Konomi. Philosophy and Methodology of Clustering in Pattern Mining: Japanese Anthropologist Jiro Kawakita's KJ Method. Hillside Proceedings of Conference on Pattern Language of Progress. 24 (October 2017)
• Roosen C. “What Came Before the Affinity Map - Reconsidering Professor Jiro Kawakita and The KJ Method” (2020)
• Scupin R. (1997). The KJ Method: A Technique for Analyzing Data Derived from Japanese Ethnology. Human Organization. 56. 10.17730/humo.56.2.x335923511444655.

 

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