Torture by meeting — we’ve all suffered it at some point. If we haven’t been forced to sit through PowerPoint presentations that merely replicate the speakers’ tedious monologues, then we have endured chaotic brainstorming sessions that ignore the good ideas and promote the bad.
Who doesn’t shudder at the prospect of scribbled flip-charts that make no sense, and the tedium of eating stale biscuits in stuffy rooms?
But what if meetings could be brief, truly productive and efficient? What if ideas could be captured, harnessed and put into practice quickly without having to wait ages for someone to write up the notes? What if there were clear lines of responsibility, clear goals and timetables?
Proponents of “mind-mapping” techniques think they have the answer. “Mind mapping” is the term for the representation and organisation of thoughts and ideas in graphic terms, using colours and images as well as words; the mind mappers’ argument is simply that we human beings are visual animals who respond as much to visual cues as to words.
The more we find out about how the brain functions, the more we realise how important images are when it comes to memory. Gamblers and magicians have long used visual cues to help them remember vast amounts of data. A graphic representation of a concept is usually easier to digest and understand than a turgid slab of text.
Educators have known this for years, and the technique of mind mapping — usually by writing all the elements of a topic on a large sheet of paper and drawing links between them — is now a fairly common study aid used by teachers to help students organise their ideas and material before embarking on an essay or revision. They do this because it’s a way to make the subject matter more accessible and immediate.
So how can we apply this to business? When it comes to discussing complex projects, generating creative ideas and implementing decisions, can organised graphics actually improve business productivity? Can they help people literally to see the big picture and all its components?
Dustin Newport is managing director of Mindjet UK, a company that has adapted mind-mapping techniques to create software to help businesses manage projects more efficiently.
“We call our version business-information mapping,” he says. “It incorporates the same free-form creative capacity but synchronises this with traditional desktop tools, such as PowerPoint, Excel and Word. This helps businesses move from creativity to implementation much more quickly.”
What this means in practice is that as ideas for a project come up — actions, people, timelines, research, whatever is required — they can be added to a “map” on the screen. Ideas radiate out from the central concept, showing the links between the different elements of the grand plan, rather than as a scrolling list with headings, sub-headings and bullet points in an unrepresentative linear progression. The different elements of the project can then be connected to other software on the company system so everyone can get on with what they have to do.
Think of Tom Cruise in the futuristic thriller Minority Report wearing “techno-gloves” and shuffling and sifting live images on a large transparent computer screen. Software pioneers see themselves working towards this type of integration of the visual and technological.
John Cheney, chief executive of BlackSpider Technologies, an e-mail security company based in Reading, Berkshire, says: “I’ve used mind-mapping techniques for about five years. They’re good for logically working through the stages of a project, whether you’re starting a company or launching a new product. They allow you to group concepts and categories together and help you prioritise better.”
Cheney argues that software applications exploiting such techniques go several steps further in that they help organise the practical implementation of ideas and then track progress of specific activities.
“This kind of software has fundamentally improved the way we communicate at a management level,” says Cheney. “We meet, mind map our ideas, put a structure around those, then distribute activities and responsibilities. We all know what we’re doing and when we’re meant to do it. The visual style is easy to digest and understand.”
Stuart Ager, a business strategy consultant and trainer based in North Newington, Oxfordshire, is another devotee of mind-mapping software. But he warns: “Not everybody gets this way of thinking straight away. Those who are set in their ways find it harder to think visually because they’ve been used to linear ways of absorbing information, involving numerical and alphabetical lists. It took me about three years to learn how to use these techniques.”
Ager, a former fighter pilot and defence industry executive, explains further: “Collecting, storing and retrieving information is more suited to visualisation techniques — it’s how the brain works. So graphic conceptual methods help to achieve clarity of thought and to move from complex ideas to concrete decisions, to getting things done.”
Ager also argues that graphic representations of ideas help us to see relationships between subjects that we might not have noticed before. “In the Harry Potter novels Professor Dumbledore uses a ‘pensieve’ — a magic bowl of water that he can download his thoughts and memories into,” says Ager. “He can see them more clearly in the surface of the water. J K Rowling obviously approves of mind mapping!”
Putting your own company’s ideas into practice is one thing, but understanding the needs of your clients is another. Often clients can be unsure about what they are after. You come up with a business proposal only to have it thrown back in your face because it is miles from what they thought they wanted. All this wastes time and money. Taking a client through the mapping process can clarify their thoughts.
In an increasingly data-rich society we need to be able to handle information efficiently and creatively. The software developers who are turning mind-mapping ideas into business-information mapping offer one route to creating order out of chaos as we work. They might also put an end to the inhuman suffering of torture by meeting.
