Before starting the KJ method, there is a phase of information gathering. Jiro Kawakita called this phase “exploration” and explained it separately to internal exploration to explore inside of your heart and external exploration to explore outside.
Especially external exploration includes literary exploration. Kawakita Jiro is a cultural anthropologist. He collected information from fieldwork in Nepal and then organized information to make a theory.
Meanwhile, I have not experienced exploration and fieldwork a lot, and external exploration for me is about to read books and listen to people’s stories, so I do not talk about external exploration in detail here. If you are interested in fieldwork, Jiro Kawada’s “Exploring Knowledge” is a good textbook. In the process of making software, the process of understanding the demand of user is strongly related to cultural anthropology. (*20)
*20: In “Innovation Master!-10 human resources who create a company to be conceived” (Tom Kelley / Jonathan Littman, Translated by Suzuki Main Tax, Hayakawa Shobo, 2006), they classify people who contribute to creating new things into 10 types. The first one of the ten types is “anthropologist.” The remaining nine are “experimenter”, “carrier of pollen”, “hurdle player”, “collaborator”, “director”, “experience designer”, “stage equipment house”, “carer” and “talker”.TODO fix biblio