• Three nights, four days, three rounds on the same topic with overnight stay
    • Do the first round with no more than a few dozen sticky notes.
    • Do a second round with 100-200 sticky notes.
    • Do a third round with 50-100 sticky notes.
  • The first two of these are done individually. - The KJ method is not powerful without individual work.

First of all, it is fundamentally important to note that people who think that the KJ method can be learned with too much simplicity usually fail. Also, there are a great many people who stagnate in the middle of their training. Since the publication of party science in 1964, I myself have often been asked to train others in the KJ method, but after much trial and error, I finally arrived at a training method in 1968 that I felt confident about. To date, it has been a minimum of four days and three nights of overnight training is indispensable. Even with such a long period of time, there have been times when we have had to work almost all night, sometimes for two or three nights. The reason why such a long period of time is necessary is that, using the six-round cumulative KJ method described above, it is difficult for participants to feel that they have ā€œfigured it outā€ unless they have done at least three rounds on the same topic in a cumulative manner. The first round is a ā€œproblem statementā€ round, with no more than a few dozen sheets of paper. The second round is the ā€œunderstanding the current situationā€ round, in which one to two hundred sheets of paper are used. The second round is the ā€œEssence Pursuitā€ round, and the number of sheets will probably range from several dozen to around one hundred. Next, ā€œevaluationā€ should be added on top of the ā€œessence-seekingā€ A-type diagram.


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