jaen.iconMachine Translation from knee-swing (gymnastics)

  • Methods of organizing thought introduced by Tadao Umesao in The Art of Intellectual Production. p.202
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  • The following techniques may be helpful in constructing coherent thoughts and sentences.

  • First, prepare a piece of paper… and write on it a word, a phrase, or a short sentence, one item at a time, that is relevant to the subject at hand. Write as you see fit, in any order…

  • When you have finished, put the sheets of paper on the table or on the tatami mat…

  • Looking at each piece of paper one at a time, look to see if there are any other pieces of paper connected to it. If there are any, place them together. At this point, never sort the pieces of paper into categories.

  • Once you have a group of pieces of paper, try to arrange them in an order that seems to make logical sense. Then, fold the edges over and staple them together. This established an idea. I call the resulting series of scraps of paper a “kozane.

  • [Compared to the flow of the “KJ method” introduced in “The Intellectual Production Techniques of Engineers,” the KJ method is a more efficient and effective method:
    • Write down what comes to mind jigakusho.
    • Arrange them side by side to make a list.
    • Instead of categorizing, find pieces of paper that are connected and put them together
    • put them in an order that makes sense to you
  • In the KJ method, after putting the connected pieces of paper together, try to explain them orally to see if the stories connect.
  • The Kozane method arranges them physically.
  • The KJ method makes a nameplate after this, which is not done in the Kozane method.

  • Cards, Kozane, and Scrapbox | Shigotano!

    • Scrapbox and the Kozane Law are intertwined.
    • The Kozane method is a method proposed in [The Art of Intellectual Production
  • What I do with sticky notes when writing or preparing lecture materials is almost the same as the Kozane method.

    • I learned it from Jiro Kawakita.
    • The Kozane method does up to grouping of the KJ method, and then deals with the ones that don’t have a nameplate.
  • He wrote that, too. p. 206.

    • This method had been in gradual development among our colleagues for quite some time. However, it was Jiro Kawakita, a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology and famous as the founder of the KJ method, who developed it into a very sophisticated technique, both in theory and practice.

    • The KJ method, named after his initials, has recently been attracting a great deal of attention as a systematic technique for finding meaningful combinations of heterogeneous data. In particular, it is highly regarded as a method for “gathering the collective knowledge” of multiple people, and seems to be put to practical use by various companies. The Kozane method, which I have introduced here, is a closed-door intellectual production technique for a few individuals, and belongs to a relatively simple and rudimentary technique in Kawakita’s system. In Kawakita’s system, it is almost the same as what is called the “KJ method B”.

    • Since nishio.icon believes in originality first before co-creation, he thinks that KJ-Method should be used for intellectual production by a single individual before “gathering public knowledge. In this respect, the direction is similar to that of the Kozane Method.
  • When I first started using Scrapbox, I also recognized that a page is equivalent to a piece of paper of “Kozane” and complained “Why do you force me to put a title on it?

  • I changed my view of granularity and began to think that “Scrapbox titles are the equivalent of the faceplates in the KJ method (for a bundle of multiple cards)“.


This page is auto-translated from [/nishio/Kozane method](https://scrapbox.io/nishio/Kozane method) using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.