Mind maps can be used for just about anything, and last time I demonstrated how you can use mind maps for setting goals and objectives. Mind maps are popular because they’re easy to produce and the gratification from using them is immediate, and this is why visual companies have their employees use them to create meeting agendas, such as the one below:
Click here to see a full-sized version of this meeting agenda mind map.
This is a mind map a CFO created in order to outline her talking points for a regular financial performance meeting. This meeting agenda mind map probably took her no longer than five to ten minutes to prepare in SmartDraw.
She began her agenda by adding four major discussion topics to her mind map:
- Last month’s revenue;
- Last month’s expenses;
- Profits; and
- Upcoming initiatives and expenses for this month.
For each of these discussion items she added a number of important sub-items, such as last month’s expenses broken down by department and annualized profit projections basted on the year-to-date profit figures.
If the CFO wanted to add more detail to her agenda mind map such as trends in an individual department’s expenses or more detail on sources of new income, she could easily do that by adding additional topics to her mind map, which she can do in SmartDraw with a single mouse click or a keyboard shortcut.
Creating a meeting agenda with a mind map like this is a great practice, not only because it’s easy to do, but it because helps busy CFOs like the one who produced this mind map get their thoughts organized quickly so they can spend less time thinking about discussion topics will be and more time preparing the facts, figures, and content needed to enable productive discussions.
