Jiro Kawakita is a professor at the University of Tokyo. Kawakita said that the formal KJ method can only be learned in an organization that he himself certifies, seeing the situation where the KJ method, which spread in the 1960s, is used not for idea generation but for classification of opinions, contrary to his intention. In the late 1970s, the consulting company JUSE named the A-type diagram part of the KJ method, which had been used for training, “affinity diagram,” and used it in training as one of the “Seven New QC Tools. As one of the Seven New QC Tools, the group organization work of the KJ method and the affinity diagram, which is an A-type diagram, have been introduced overseas as Affinity Diagram.
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