 Welcome to this module on using an Affinity Diagram. You just wrapped up an all-day team meeting designed to find ways to improve the bottom line on your most recent widget. Your team spent the day collaborating, discussing and finding solutions. Your conference room walls are covered in sticky note suggestions. Now what? How do you take the chaos of the sticky note hurricane and turn it into an organized plan that can actually help your company? You use an Affinity Diagram. In this module, we'll explore what an Affinity Diagram is, discuss how it can be used to solve problems, and end with some real-world applications to show you how these can help you in any manufacturing role to bring order to chaos. Affinity Diagrams sort, organize, and consolidate a large number of ideas and data related to a product, process, or problem. They're commonly used to sort and organize a lot of ideas into groups based on how similar the ideas are to each other. While Affinity Diagrams are most often used after brainstorming sessions, they can also be used to organize notes from field interviews, survey responses, support call logs, or any other large data sets. Affinity Diagrams help you solve problems by allowing you to quickly group and categorize data by similarity, which allows you to see larger patterns and meaning. This way, you can avoid spending too much time focused on all the individual suggestions, and instead spend your time on the bigger categories of content. It also means that by addressing one larger problem, you are also addressing all the associated problems tied to it. Affinity Diagrams can also help stimulate new ideas because you're looking at the bigger picture, which also helps you specifically define your problem and goals. Let's see this in action. As part of a problem-solving methodologies course, students choose a real-world problem and apply structured methods to solve that problem over the course of the semester. Occasionally, students struggle with completing the assignment. We asked a group of students to answer the question, why do you think students don't complete the assignment? These are their answers. Looking at all their answers, we can start to group them into five categories. Problems with the software or programs, we will make these green. Problems with understanding, we will use blue. Problems with an example problem, we will make these red. Problems with student motivation, these will be purple, and problems with equipment will stay yellow. This is what our organized affinity diagram looks like. Notice how grouping the problems into related categories lets us tackle problems together instead of individually. It also lets us be more creative with our solutions. For example, instead of only focusing on no feedback so the student isn't sure if they're doing it correctly, we can focus on the larger category of understanding, which means we can solve problems that may not even be on our list. We can also see that there are five problems associated with understanding, which suggests it's the biggest cause of problems with the assignment and should be solved first. Now we can talk through ways to improve student understanding to address not only the causes we've listed, but also the causes that may not have been raised during this discussion. We can also use the affinity diagram to produce a cause and effect diagram, which allows us to generate additional potential causes. For instance, when we look at the two causes associated with software, unable to use Blackboard and not good at Word or Excel, we can see that there may also be a problem with students using iOS instead of Windows. Same with the equipment category. The two causes of a poor internet connection and not having the book triggered us to also think about a slow computer as a cause. Seeing all of the potential causes grouped like this makes it easier to see the bigger picture and think about additional potential causes of our problem. Now let's give you a chance to practice this yourself. Let's say you're in a meeting and the team is trying to solve the problem of why meetings always run long. Take two minutes and brainstorm all the answers you can think of. How was your brainstorming session? This is our list. Your list may look different and that's okay. There are lots of different ideas that come out of any brainstorming session. Using our list, let's practice creating an affinity diagram. Take all the ideas we've just brainstormed and divide them into categories. We've put three categories on the page. Drag each sticky note to the category where you think it fits best. Through these two examples, you can see that affinity diagrams are a great way to organize and categorize ideas. They make it easier to take the chaos of a brainstorming session and turn it into organized, workable ideas. You've completed this module on affinity diagrams.