First collect with “for some reason or another”. After that, ask yourself, “Why did I collect this? Then, in most cases, you can easily come up with an explanation for the reason. You can write a short, compressed version of that explanation.
This story is about making a table nameplate in the KJ method as a context, but I think it is a useful technique not only in the KJ method but also in a wide range of intellectual production techniques.
- When organizing a group using the KJ method, collect pieces of paper that are somewhat seem relevant, then think about why you collected them and make a nameplate afterwards.
- For example, when itemizing in an outliner, first gather lines that seem vaguely related to each other in close proximity, and then create a parent element by considering why the lines were gathered together.
- For example, in Scrapbox, after writing a series of thoughts on Diary page and so on, collect contents that seem somewhat related and then cut them into pages with titles.
Ideas p.74-75
When a number of small teams have been gradually organized in this way, one of them should pick up a group of pieces of paper and look at it carefully. For example, let us take a team of five pieces of paper. These five pieces were gathered in one place originally because there was a “feeling” of closeness between the five pieces. But now, when you pick up the five pieces of paper and examine them again, you will not say, “I had a vague sense of familiarity,” but you will clearly read the contents of the five pieces of paper carefully. Read them carefully. And then, you will rationally ask yourself, ”[* Why did I collect the five pieces of paper here? In such cases, sometimes we realize that we made a mistake in collecting them in one place. Sometimes it is discovered that one of the pieces was added to the team by mistake, even though it really had little to do with the team. But most of the time, the content of the five pieces of paper tells us why we should collect them. You could say that it is an implication. Then you ask yourself, “If I were to compress the contents of these five pieces of paper into a one-line heading, what would it look like? If you find a one-line heading that can be compressed into the contents of the five sheets of paper, you write it on a new sheet of notepaper and place it on top of the five sheets of paper of the team. In other words, this is like a nameplate. It is a nameplate for each team of five. To make it easier to distinguish the nameplate from the notes written with graphite, the nameplate is written with a different color pencil, for example, blue pencil. Then, the five pieces of paper plus the nameplates are temporarily clipped together.
relevance - let data speak for itself
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