Need a Big Picture Starter, try Affinity Mapping

There is a ton of material on YouTube and other places about affinity mapping so I won’t repeat it all here.  But, it is often a good method to generate ideas as a starting point.  You frame the problem or opportunity in the form of a question.  It is important to stay focused on the question.  Often times if you run out of steam I encourage people to think in multiple dimensions, like people, process, technology.

As an example, I was in a small workshop with a non-profit that was putting together a sponsorship program, something new to the group.  Our “question” that framed the exercise was “What would be involved in having a successful sponsor program.”   Individually, we listed items we could think of, in no particular order.  When we ran out of steam after about 20 minutes we placed them on the wall.  Then we arranged them into groups of similar items.  We then labeled each group.  We then processed the pieces using the Big Picture from the Big Idea Toolkit.

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