Affinity clustering or affinity diagramming is one of the techniques in the Total Quality Management and Six Sigma toolkits; it has become one of the most widely used of the Japanese management and planning tools. Affinity diagramming is a technique that allows a team to organize a large amount of data according to the natural relationships between items. As these groups of natural relationships emerge from data, they are given names that are descriptive of the essence of all of the ideas in the group. This grouping and naming process continues iteratively, creating higher and higher levels of abstraction until the ideas represented by the groups are adequate for their intended purpose.
