Chaos to Clarity: 4 Ways of Grouping Ideas

You’ve embarked on the colorful journey of using sticky notes for brainstorming, but once the flurry of activity settles, you're left staring at a rainbow sprawl of ideas. Navigating through a sea of stickies can feel like trying to organize confetti after a New Year’s bash.

How exactly do you cluster those stickies and tease out coherent themes from what looks like a modern art installation on your wall or table?

This is a blog focused on clustering stickies. It does not cover designing brainstorming questions—which happens before this step—or decision-making with the remaining ideas. You can use these tips whether you work in person with physical stickies or online with digital stickies on an online whiteboard.

Before You Begin

Avoid participants aimlessly placing stickies on the wall, creating a mess of overlapping ideas. They will struggle to make sense of it, and you will too. The same applies to working virtually on an online whiteboard like MURAL or Miro.

Guiding the placement of ideas from the start is key. This will prevent an overwhelming mess before it forms and set the stage for a more organized and productive brainstorming session. To keep clutter to a minimum, avoid overlapping stickies as they are placed and refrain from adding duplicate ideas that have already been contributed.

If you plan to take a photo at the end and document your work (which you should), have participants write on their sticky notes with a marker, such as a Sharpie, instead of pens, which don’t photograph well.

Let’s dive into our favorite tactical approaches that can turn sticky-note chaos into meaningful insights.

Sticky Note Strategies

1-2-4-ALL

CREDIT: Liberating Structures

Each individual writes down three ideas.
Pair up and merge each duo’s ideas into a top three.
Join pairs to form groups of four, once again refining their ideas to three.
Each group of four presents their top three ideas to the group and adds them to a whiteboard, flipchart or virtual equivalent.
As each group presents, invite them to cluster their ideas with the ones already on the board.

TIPS AND MODIFICATIONS:

You don’t have to stick to the 1-2-4-ALL structure. We sometimes do 3-6-ALL or 1-5-ALL. It’s up to you, the number of participants and the time you have.
Tell groups to remove “duplicates” when they hear them voiced by another group. This will speed up report-outs as you go along. Similar (but not identical) ideas should still be shared—think “sister, not twin.”

To keep this process timely, ask groups to present their top three ideas in 90 seconds or less. Set a timer to let them know when their time is up.

Build As You Go

After brainstorming individually or in small groups, start with one participant group sharing an idea they are “really excited about.” Only one!
Then, ask, "Who has an idea related to this?"
For any participants or groups who raise their hands, grab their stickies one at a time and add them in proximity to the first idea.
Keep asking, “Any other ideas that relate?” until no one raises their hand.
Next, ask, “Who has another idea they are really excited about?
Repeat steps 2 through 5 until most of the ideas are collected and grouped
Finally, ask, “What else is out there that we don’t have?” Add the “outlier” stickies to the board, clustering any that relate.

TIPS AND MODIFICATIONS:

If you’re in a big room, you may need to enlist a “runner” to grab stickies or invite participants to walk them themselves to you so you don’t burn rubber trying to collect them all like Pokémon.
This technique can involve a lot of group negotiation. How you phrase questions is important. Let the group be the decision-maker by asking, “Where does this best fit?” followed by, “Any objections?” An idea may fit into many categories, and a compromise may be found by placing an idea between two clusters.

Delegate the Clustering

During a brainstorming session, assign the role of "Cluster Master" to an assistant or team member not deeply involved in the ideation process. If you need to enlist a participant, ask them, “Who in here is really good at looking for patterns?” Invite them to play a “special role” by clustering and organizing the stickies during a break and presenting any themes they notice to the group.

Since delegating places the “burden” of clustering on one or a few people and limits the rest of the group's ability to contribute to theming, this may not work for every group, but when it does, it encourages team members to own their process and learn a new way of doing things.

Use Technology

Gone are the days when humans had to bear the mental burden of theming ideas now that artificial intelligence tools can identify themes across mountains of data.

If you want to use these tools with physical stickies, you need to make sure you have time to transcribe them before using an AI tool. A helper or two can do this by using “voice to text” or “scan to text” applications and pasting the ideas into a shared document.

Our favorite AI theming tools in 2024:

Miro’s built-in AI enables you to click a button and cluster by keywords or sentiment.
Chat GPT (or similar tools like Gemini and Claude) allows you to paste in your data and ask it to “theme” the information.

Identifying Themes and Generating Insights

As the final step, label clusters with “themes” (usually a single word or phrase) and/or generate insights (usually a full sentence).

For example, the following is a list of ideas generated from the prompt, “What is one thing you’re going to do as a result of this leadership retreat?”:

Listen to understand
Make time for one-on-one relationship-building meetings
Build relationships, matching the ask with the commitment
Discuss the retreat with the team and staff
Schedule one-on-ones with colleagues across and outside of the organization
Connect with one person outside of my sphere of influence
Collaborate with leaders in other programs
Talk to the team about building a safe space
Stress the importance of building relationships outside of our program area to team members
Make time for health and wellness check-ins
Identify the purpose of meetings and discussions upfront
Listen without trying to solve the problem or
Implement more team building to engage employees
Communicate, communicate, communicate
Assume good intent
Foster active listening without thinking about how to respond
Celebrate successes; don’t miss the chance to congratulate
Create space and advocate for dissent
Connect with other managers
Reconnect with peers I've been too busy to check in with

Once the group organizes the ideas into clusters, identify “themes” or headers that these ideas can be grouped under.

THEME 1: Communication and Active Listening

Listen to understand
Listen without trying to solve the problem
Communicate, communicate, communicate
Foster active listening without thinking about how to respond

THEME 2: Building and Strengthening Relationships

Make time for one-on-one relationship-building meetings
Build relationships, matching the ask with the commitment
Schedule one-on-ones with colleagues across and outside of the organization
Connect with one person outside of my sphere of influence
Stress the importance of building relationships outside of our program area to team members
Connect with other managers
Reconnect with peers I've been too busy to check in with

THEME 3: Team Development and Support

Discuss the retreat with the team and staff
Talk to the team about building a safe space
Implement more team building to engage employees
Make time for health and wellness check-ins

THEME 4: Strategic Planning and Organizational Culture

Identify the purpose of meetings and discussions upfront
Collaborate with leaders in other programs
Assume good intent
Celebrate successes; don’t miss the chance to congratulate
Create space and advocate for dissent

Finally, generate “insight statements” for each theme that answer the question, “If this theme could talk, what would it say?”

These insights provide more meaningful statements that we can work with and are particularly useful in recap reports for those who were not in the meeting.

Communication and Active Listening = Active listening supports more effective problem-solving.
Building and Strengthening Relationships = One-on-one meetings strengthen deeper professional connections.
Team Development and Support = Being proactive about team-building improves overall team wellness.
Strategic Planning and Organizational Culture = Being open to different perspectives creates an inclusive work environment.

TIP: Hand each “cluster” to a breakout group and assign them the task of writing an insight statement or statements.

Clustering isn’t about making your ideas look neat and tidy; it’s about paving a clear path from brainstorming toward actionable insights. Next time you find yourself drowning in sticky notes, take a breath, pick a strategy and start clustering! You might just find that organizing ideas can be as creative a process as generating them.

If you need help drawing out ideas, never underestimate the power of an open-ended question. Grab a free copy of our Questions Library for examples of harvest and clarifying questions you can use to generate and cluster ideas.