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Affinity Technique
What is it?
The Affinity Technique is a consensus-building technique that you can use with your team to systematize brainstorming and involve community members and staff.
Who uses it?
The team, the manager, and the users can use this technique.
Why use it?
This technique allows the team to quickly create and organize a large number of ideas, with minimal conflict or power struggle. It is also used
to involve the community in quality improvement issues.
When to use it?
To explore the mission of the institution, to analyze the causes of a problem, or to generate indicators.
How to use it:
Form groups of five to eight participants.
- First phase: individual work
- The facilitator asks the group a specific question.
- Instruct each participant to write their ideas on four or five cards.
- Each card should have only one idea containing five to seven words.
- Second Phase: ordering of cards
- The cards are posted on the wall, and the ideas are reordered in groups, by "affinity" (category). Each person can move any cards to group them into a category, until all participants agree about the grouping of ideas.
- Third Phase: group consensus.
- When the cards are not being moved anymore, the facilitator and the group should try to summarize the central idea of each group of cards into one simple and short phrase. If the summary is longer than one phrase, it is probable that the groupings are too broad. Try to split the groupings into smaller categories.
- After summarizing each group of ideas, the facilitator can put the central ideas in sequence to form a series of phrases, to answer the main question.
Example:
Here is an example of using the Affinity Technique for developing strategies.
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Case Study
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