Wiley & sas business Series

    Figure 9.2   Affi nity Map 

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communications platform, then that would justify a sticky 
note. If there ’s broad reluctance to doing things differently, 
there might need to be a more customer-centric culture. The 
goal is to generate as many as possible; feel free to inject a bit 
of competition to reward whoever gets the most sticky notes 
up on the wall. 
 
◼
 At the end of this period, paste these sticky notes on the wall 
and, based on consensus and discussion, group them into cat-
egories. These categories should be organically determined 
and iteratively allocated, striking a balance between excessive 
granularity and oversummarization. They might span func-
tion, outcome, domain, or activity—as long as the groupings 
are internally consistent, they ’re doing their job. For context, 
these categories will eventually form the basis for identify-
ing the streams of work that will need to be put in place to 
achieve the vision. Put any sticky notes that don ’t immedi-
ately fi t into the “parking lot” for further consideration or 
discussion. 
 
◼
 Avoid spending time discussing categories—if there is over-
lap and disagreement, write both and consider consolidat-
ing them if some categories are underrepresented. Aim to 
achieve a large number of data points with a reasonably 
parsimonious set of categories. These categories should rep-
resent initiatives that  could  feasibly be delivered in under a 
year. If they would take longer than a year to deliver, con-
sider how the initiative might be broken into smaller chunks 
of work. 
 
◼
 Once categorized, the team should then group the initiatives 
into logical phases. External value and ease of execution should 
be the focus; quick wins should be early.