Mind Mapping – The Culture of Business Communication and You

By   2017-10-16

Do you find you have difficulty getting started on a project or idea? Do you find yourself puzzled or just overwhelmed with “Where do I start? What are the next steps?” Tackling this task of organizing your thoughts is the strongest capability of all mind mapping tools. Just start writing words or phrases that come to mind about your project. Soon you will begin to see relationships and hierarchy in the relationships. You will begin to organize topics in the right sequence by dragging topics and forming branches. Watching a video of someone performing this task will help your understanding of how mind maps work.
Getting your ideas written down is the first step. By dragging topics and reconnecting them quickly you begin to see these topics with greater clarity and insight. When you recognize related items you change the order, fill in gaps, and group like items together, reorganizing those ideas into a sequence and hierarchy that makes more sense.
Link to a 50sec video on creating a business_card_design
Link to the mind map in the video

You don’t have to use the mind map as an end product. Many business environments have not adopted a mind mapping culture. That’s really how you need to look at mind mapping, as a cultural medium of communication. Without that culture and corresponding integration of mind mapping as a language of that culture there is little or no acceptance of a mind map as a business document in that environment. Think of how prevalent reports, memos, emails, and spreadsheets are in the workplace. Imagine if one of these were missing. It would seem strange. You would feel hindered in your ability to perform. These are tools that you have become comfortable using and rely on daily.
Mind mapping for the first time is different, maybe even a little uncomfortable. Maybe it is the lack of structure (that you are used to seeing) or like any other new activity you are finding “muscles” that you never knew you had. Once you have tried making a few mind maps and experience a new level of understanding with relatively little effort you begin to see value not only in the map but in the process of getting to that stage in the map. You find you can get the details out of your head and into a trusted system you can rely on to revisit those details with all your inspired insight at that moment preserved.

I took this article and presented the points I wanted to make in the form of a mind map. This mind map is interactive so click inside and discover its features.

Make your own mind maps with Mindomo.

Your workplace may not have made mind maps a part of their supported document types or their culture of communication. That’s OK. The mind map is for your benefit first and foremost. Your productivity improves. Your anxiety over managing details is reduced. You benefit with or without the participation of anyone around you.

Additional reading
This blog post describes most of the benefits I get from mind mapping in much greater detail about the features within the tools. Please bookmark Advanced Mind Maps so you can return here for more of my articles on mind mapping.

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