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An Affinity for Thinking
personal, processes & methodologies
April 15, 2003, 10:22 PM
As part of my website redesign (which will be coming any day now! Really!) I'm attempting to come up with a good set of categories to help organize the content of this here weblog you're reading. I tried brainstorming a list of my interests and stuff I'm likely to want to post about, but the list quickly grew to unmanagable proportions. So I decided to try a novel exercise: I built an affinity diagram of my (intellectual) life.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the process, to build an affinity diagram you collect a large amount of unstructured information (could be brainstormed ideas, could be problems users are reporting with your product, in my case it was the list of my interests) write each piece down on a separate sticky note, then post the sticky notes to a whiteboard. When you put up a new sticky note, you place it near other sticky notes that it seems "related" to. When all the sticky notes are placed, you look at the mass o' notes and pull out the larger groups and categories that magically appear from your organization process. The magic comes from helping you to translate a complex cognitive task performed on lots of data (pulling together all that information in your head) into a spatial organization task, which we humans are much better at.
In my case, I brainstormed a list of my interests that I might want to post about. Then I augmented this list by scanning the titles of the books on my bookshelf, the lectures I listen to, the bookmarks in my browsers, etc. to pull out any interests I may have overlooked.
I then went to the whiteboard I have at work (had lots of stickies; needed big board) and started affinity diagramming. One discovery I made as I went along was that every time I'd built an affinity diagram in the past, it would inevitably break down into "bucket sorting" before all the stickies were up, meaning that we'd come up with the categories too soon and just start plopping stickies into the appropriate category instead of considering their affinities with other nearby stickies. This time I carefully avoided doing that, and I think I wound up with a more insightful affinity as a result.
Then I stepped back and started drawing categories. There was a lot of overlap between the groups of stickies, which is good; that means my interests are fairly interconnected. I was also encouraged to discover that technology-related interests, although significant, did not dominate the entire affinity. So it appears that I'm not becoming too narrow in my intellectual foci.
Somewhat less encouraging was how disconnected my "charity" interests were from the rest of the diagram. Also, some of my professed interests, such as playing music, martial arts, and eastern religions, didn't appear or only appeared in small, disconnected pockets. I certainly have more developing to do in some areas.
All in all, I'd say this was an interesting exercise; I gained a little bit of a deeper understanding about myself as a result of the process. I may repeat it again in a few years just to see how the landscape of my thoughts has changed.
I'd recommend giving it a shot if you have an hour or two to kill and a pack of spare stickies. Of course, whether it has actually solved my original problem of developing good weblog categories remains to be seen...