To break the existing mental model of "collecting similar pieces" or "grouping based on similarity," it is useful to pay attention to the conflict.

A participant in a workshop was troubled with group organization. I said to her, "You can put a conflicting pair in the same group. Because conflict is also a kind of relationship."

This advice seems to have destroyed her existing mental model. She got the sense of the KJ method and did the group organization well.

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Masakazu Nakayama, author of "All of the NM method", proposed to focus on "conflict relations."

Suppose you heard the opinions of 20 people in your company on the subject of "internal company training" and you have 60 pieces of information.

Your next action is to find conflict in those pieces. The "internal company training" goes a theme of discussion. The fact means that opinions of twenty people are not the same. Then, in those pieces, there must be a pair in conflict. We focus on the conflict.

After paying attention to the conflict, we make a hypothesis that may help resolve the conflict. This way to create a new hypothesis is not a way to organize information, so I explain the details in the next chapter.

In the NM method, we focused on the conflict. In the KJ method, we can use any relationship including conflict.