Many people have a difficult time sitting down at a computer or with a piece of paper and creating a visual representation of ideas that are running around in their minds, or of information that is coming into their sphere of influence. There is very much information on the web right now about how to get started with mind mapping or some other visual mapping technique, but not very much beyond the basics. It is this gap between green-field theory and everyday practice that makes visual thinking impractical for many people. I have been using visual mapping tools and techniques for many years, and thought that I would share some advice about hurdles that I’ve overcome or am struggling to clear.
The two major categories of skills that are useful in developing a set of tools and a visual language to express yourself and your ideas in are analysis and composition. I’ll begin with the analysis skills, because this tends to be the area that people need the most help with.
Some of the major analysis skills I’ll be discussing are:
- Decomposition
- Semantics
- Embedded Action
- Implied Results
- Audience
- Purpose
- References
- Grafting Knowledge Trees
I’m hoping that these will be helpful to many readers, so please stay tuned as I continue composing them.
There’s a new beta of PersonalBrain available. It seems to provide some significant improvements in speed and reliability and a bit more configurable of a user interface.
4.1.0.9 - Speed and Reliability - TheBrain Technologies Message Board
This release includes the biggest speed optimization we have done yet and significant reliability improvements. Plus, there are several fixes to the UI of the tools layout. Highly recommended and worth upgrading if you are using the beta.
Watch idea mapping creator and trainer Jamie Nast explain about the “bloom” and the “flow” and more.
Idea Mapping: Jamie Creates a “To Do” Map - Watch the Live TV Clip
The Brothers Grimm wrote a fairy tale about a poor cobbler and some helpful elves. Part of the story goes like this …
Then he cut his leather out, all ready to make up the next day,
meaning to rise early in the morning to his work. His conscience was
clear and his heart light amidst all his troubles; so he went
peaceably to bed, left all his cares to Heaven, and soon fell asleep.
In the morning after he had said his prayers, he sat himself down to
his work; when, to his great wonder, there stood the shoes all ready
made, upon the table. The good man knew not what to say or think at
such an odd thing happening. He looked at the workmanship; there was
not one false stitch in the whole job; all was so neat and true, that
it was quite a masterpiece.
I believe that there is a valuable lesson to be learned here. This is true of many such stories.
I have had experiences similar to the experience of the cobbler in the story many times. Our subconscious mind is capable of continuing to work on problems while we sleep, sometimes with astounding results.
Years ago, when I was learning how to program in assembly language for the Intel microprocessors I came to a point that I could not get past. I could not understand one problem, a part of how a particular program was operating. I could get it to work, but I couldn’t understand why it worked. I read and studied all of the information that I could find about the issues surrounding my problem, but I just couldn’t make it work and so needlessly beat my head against the wall for hours without getting anywhere.
When I went to sleep that night, I had a strange and vivid dream. I dreamed that I was inside the computer’s memory while the program was running, moving values in the program around by pushing them with my hands, watching the part of the program that I couldn’t understand working from the inside. When I awoke, I went to the computer and understood the program perfectly. While I was asleep, my unconscious mind figured out what my conscious mind was too nervous and frantic to understand.
Since that time I have come to appreciate this effect, especially in situations that are complicated or difficult. Here are some tips to get the elves working for you.
- Do as much as you can. Like the cobbler in the story, cut out the leather and get it ready for the next day. Sometimes I like to create a mind map with parts that are blank or missing to help this process.
- Don’t blow out the day’s schedule for something that’s eluding you. Instead, have a normal, balanced day. Before you go to sleep, give your subconscious its orders in as much detail as possible and go to bed thinking about it. Don’t stay up half the night trying to figure it out.
- Don’t get stressed out and drive everyone around you crazy. Spend time with family and friends. Love someone. Sometimes, distraction will allow your subconscious mind to get to work and you’ll have more success when you return to your problem.
- Be grateful when the answers come. Your mind is a fantastic invention, and the fact that it can help you when you’re sleeping is an incredible gift. Realize that you are not your problems, and that somethings seem difficult one day and easy the next. Maintain perspective.
Thanks to the Mind Mapping Software blog, I’ve discovered the latest in a flood of visual mapping tools, Cayra. Read the rundown of features over there and then check out this screen cast I made that shows how Cayra moves. It’s pretty impressive. It looks like Cayra will do a better job than most mind mapping tools of adapting to the context of a particular bunch of information by shifting irrelevant stuff out of the way with smooth animations. It seems to achieve a compelling compromise between the contextualizing and 3d-ness of PersonalBrain and the gestalt of more conventional mind mapping software. It will be interesting to watch this tool grow. Oh, and it’s apparently free, at for now.
The Mind Mapping Software Weblog: Cayra, a new desktop mapping program, is announced
Cayra, which is currently at release 0.8.2. It’s built around the Microsoft .NET framework, and claims to combine mind mapping, concept mapping and topic mapping. The screenshot (above right) looks quite colorful and elegant.
A great article at Litemind discussing how visual thinking may be used as an aid to memory.
Improve Your Memory by Speaking Your Mind’s Language
“The pegging memorization technique is just a small demonstration of how powerful visual thinking is. In fact, visual thinking is behind many mind-enhancing techniques such as mind mapping and is the core component of most other more advanced memorization techniques.”
Jamie Nast has been posting some really nice examples of a pilot’s emergency procedure training idea maps. Click on each map for the complete article & links to larger images.
This article, which appeared in Prodigal Son magazine, is a nice, brief overview of the process of mind mapping.
Life: Career:: Mind Mapping
Mind mapping is a technique that organizes your thoughts and ideas into a visual map or diagram that is easier to process. It can be quite useful in brainstorming or problem solving, and some pastors, like Ed Young, use it to organize their sermons. If you would like to learn how to mind map, Innovation Network offers the following 8 easy steps to mind mapping.
It is a reprint of an older article in the Church Relevance weblog. I found another article on Church Relevance pointing to bubble.us as a tool that may be used fororganizing sermons and ideas, with an example of a mind map created in bubble.us. Theres a similar, more recent article about using bubble.us in the context of a church service at the Church 2.0 weblog with a really nice example of how a bubble.us map may be embedded into a web page.
The Church Relevance article mentions Pastor Ed Young, who makes his incredible sermon mind maps available for sale to other pastors and interested parties. He links to some examples in this article from a while back.
It would be nice to see more of this sort of thing. Spirituality, with its vast and endless ontology of ideas, texts, and values is an ideal area to apply visual thinking to.
I wrote a guest post for the MindMapping 2.0 blog about linking to external documents in desktop mind mapping software as opposed to the kind of linking that you can do in web-based mind mapping software.
Mindmapping 2.0: Linking to External Documents: Desktop Software vs. Web-Based Software
One of the primary concerns when deciding whether to implement a particular mind map in desktop mind mapping software or web-based mind mapping software is the issue of linking the map to related documents.
Wall Street fat cat Merlin Mann sees the future …
One reason your boss is so twitchy | 43 Folders
I think one of the emerging leadership skills of the next five years will be learning how to do brilliant filtering — either programatically or by delegating information-sorting to others. To ultimately become someone whose system accounts for incoming data in smart ways and who never has to make excuses about too much stuff.
