Tutorials

Illustrating Ideas with Mind Maps

When we are presented with a task our brain's natural response is to immediately begin conceptualizing a number of different approaches towards completing the task.

When our mind develops a plan to attack a problem it does two things:

• It develops sequences of tasks to solve the problem and
• It tells us what information that we will need to complete the problem.

Our mind doesn't develop a plan all at once—instead it adds new information and new tasks to the picture as the mind digests the problem over time.

A mind map is a way of intuitively illustrating this process on paper. A mind map begins with a central idea, usually the problem or task at hand, and makes room to insert any number of tasks and pieces of information needed to solve the problem. It's brainstorming, illustrated.

So if you were tasked with developing a new sales plan for a software company you'd begin your thought process and your mind map accordingly:

Then you'd start thinking about your first level of tasks and information — where would the new sales leads come from? What is your target audience? What are your sales priorities? And so forth.

The three ideas connected to the main topic are just the tip of the iceberg. The next step is to expand on each of your three initial sub-topics.

And expand some more.

And maybe we might even need to add a fourth sub-topic after we've thought about our initial three — don't we need to come up with some sales materials like pitches, comparison charts, and prospecting presentations?

And that's similar to how the brain works, but by putting your thought process down on paper you can also:

• Make it easier to direct your thoughts in any single direction rather than wandering all over the place;
• Easily reorganize your ideas;
• Include other team members in your brainstorming sessions, as a mind map can be used to represent the collective ideas of a whole group; and
• You can refer to a mind map whenever you need to remember what you or your group came up with during a previous brainstorming session.

Why Mind Maps?

Before mind maps people used outlines or lists. Let's consider our "sales plan" from the previous mind map example — here's what it would look like in list format:

New Sales Plan

1. Sales Priorities
   1. Sell to New Customers
   2. Upsell Current Customers
      1. Single Seat to Multi-Seat
2. Sales Targets
   1. New Customers
      1. SMB Owners
      2. Middle Managers
      3. IT Managers
   2. Customers
      1. Single License SMB Owners
3. Sources of Leads
   1. Warm Leads
      1. Pricing Inquiries
      2. Evaluation Requests
   2. Cold Leads
      1. Trade Show Prospects
      2. Email Marketing
4. New Sales Materials
   1. Presentations
   2. Sales Emails
   3. Pricing Guide

This list isn't nearly as effective at capturing, communicating, and creating our plan as our mind map is because:

• You can't easily visualize the relationships between the elements;
• You can't easily reorganize ideas using an outline — reorganizing your thoughts into a coherent plan is a key part of the idea forumulation process;
• The outline doesn't help direct your thoughts in one direction or another;
• Outlines don't lend themselves to "group brainstorming" in the same way that mind maps do; and
• If a list/outline gets too long then it becomes a big blur that most people skip over, whereas a mind map is easy to take in all at once because our minds are adapted to absorb visual information more readily than verbal or written information.

Are They Easy to Draw?

Mind maps are trivial to draw by hand, but it's far better to draw them using an automated tool like SmartDraw 2009. You don't have to worry about drawing shapes, spacing elements on the page, or any other tedious task using automated tools like SmartDraw — it does all of the work for you. You can also more easily reorganize your ideas as you form them, something that is much more difficult to do on paper.

All you have to do is just add your elements to the drawing using a simple user interface or keyboard commands, and in the next lesson in this eCourse we're going to learn how to use SmartDraw 2009 to draw a full mind map in a matter of minutes.