NovaMind News

Here is another video about NovaMind 5 - this one deals with topic editing and resizing, and image placement and resizing. Enjoy!

More information about NovaMind 5 is available at http://www.novamind.com/features/nm5.php

 

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Mind Maps are an excellent tool for helping sufferers of ADHD / ADD because they allow you to jump around to different topics quickly and easily, organize information, focus on what is important, and explain your ideas to other people in terms that they can understand. I have just posted a brief article and Mind Map about ADHD and Mind Mapping at http://www.squidoo.com/adhd-mind-maps

Enjoy!

“Power Brainstorming: Great Ideas at Lightning Speed” by brainstorming expert Hazel Wagner draws on her wide range of experience as a mathematician, business owner, public speaker and consultant to Fortune 100 companies, to produce a book that covers everything required to conduct individual and group brainstorming sessions.

The book is aimed at anyone who owns, runs, or works in any business. It provides practical tips and examples that can be applied in any business to cut costs and open up new business opportunities. Existing products and services can be improved, processes streamlined, and new product lines and services added as a result of the brainstorming processes taught in this book.

Processes are taught in the book to super-charge the innovation of the company and instill a culture of effective brainstorming throughout the company.

In the current business environment it is critical to differentiate a company to stay ahead of the competition. The techniques taught in this book are specifically designed to provide the tools necessary to achieve and maintain that differentiation.

Illustrations are provided throughout the book to show how to implement the concepts, including a number of NovaMind mind maps. There are two parallel tracks in the book: Track 1 is filled with instructions and methods to make brainstorming sessions productive and fun, and gives so many choices that your brainstorming efforts will never get boring. Track 2 tells the story of a group of employees that begin brainstorming with a young novice facilitator. This team’s efforts start to catch the attention of the firm’s executives who want to learn how and why the methods have been so effective.

This combination of presentations makes for a book that is both thorough in its coverage of the topic and easy to implement in a practical way in the workplace.

The book is available as an eBook from http://www.novamind.com/mind-mapping-books/power-brainstorming.php

Gideon King, founder of NovaMind said “I was privileged to be involved in the development of the book, and am impressed with the thoroughness of the book and the practical advice that is provided. This is the kind of book that could be picked up by anyone and used to learn all you need to know about brainstorming quickly and effectively. The NovaMind Mind Maps included in the book are a great example of the power of Mind Mapping when used in conjunction with brainstorming.”

About Mind Mapping

Mind Maps are diagrams that work the way people think — they organize the information in the same way our brains organize information. They make it easy to understand, remember, and communicate complex information.

Our brains like thinking in pictures. The smooth curves and colorful pictures used in Mind Mapping create powerful images for your brain to remember.

Mind Maps cater to both logical left brain thinking and pictorial right brain thinking at the same time, which makes them a very good way of storing and recalling information, presenting things to other people, and brainstorming new ideas.

About NovaMind

NovaMind is used by businesses, in education, and for personal effectiveness, for tasks such as note taking, managing to-do lists, brainstorming, research, problem solving, decision making, presentation preparation and delivery, project planning, knowledge management, writing, and many other uses. NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 7 years, and has been available for Windows for over 3 years. It is rapidly gaining recognition for its many unique and innovative features and ease of use. NovaMind makes Mind Mapping intuitive and fun.

For more information about NovaMind, please visit www.novamind.com or e-mail Gideon King at gideon(at)novamind.com.

NovaMind Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of iBlueSky version 2. iBlueSky allows creation of Mind Maps in iBlueSky on the iPhone or iPod Touch, which can be sent to NovaMind or vice versa.

Having iBlueSky Mind Mapping software available in your pocket on iPhone or iPod touch means that the user has at their fingertips (literally) the ability to:

• create to-do lists whilst in the moment so as to avoid forgetting anything
• take notes in meetings where there is no laptop available
• jot down ideas as they arise, and organize them
• be productive anywhere and everywhere, in those spare moments waiting in line etc.
• solve problems and make decisions using Mind Mapping techniques, at any time
• brainstorm in places where it would be impractical to take a laptop
• summarize and memorize information no matter where you are

iBlueSky 2 is now available as a free upgrade for existing users, and features the following new capabilities:

• Huge page size (nearly 1500x screen size)
• Import mind maps from NovaMind
• Branches with more than one line of text
• Attach notes to branches (optional “T” indicator shows branches with notes)
• Double-tap to zoom in/out
• Change branch colours using an intuitive colour picker (option to apply to sub-branches)
• Toolbars are now translucent and auto-hide when no branch is selected
• Attach a message and set the email subject when exporting projects
• Export destination email address can now be entered manually, or selected from the address book
• Remember last used email address when exporting projects
• Change project sort order (Preference setting: Creation date, modification date, alphabetically or Manually)
• Tap status bar at top of screen to scroll back to the root branch or selected branch (if a branch is selected)
• More responsive when dragging branches around
• Improved branch layout
• Compatibility with iPhone OS 3
• Minor bug fixes

For further information about iBlueSky and NovaMind integration, please see http://www.novamind.com/ibluesky/

Gideon King, founder of NovaMind said “We are very excited about the possibilities that this integration of NovaMind and iBlueSky brings. iBlueSky 1 was very popular with our customers, but a frequent request was two way integration of NovaMind and iBlueSky. This new version offers great flexibility with the file transfer, and also provides an excellent Mind Mapping experience that feels comfortable when using your iPhone or iPod Touch.”

About Mind Mapping

Mind Maps are diagrams that work the way people think — they organize the information in the same way our brains organize information. They make it easy to understand, remember, and communicate complex information.

Our brains like thinking in pictures. The smooth curves and colorful pictures used in Mind Mapping create powerful images for your brain to remember.

Mind Maps cater to both logical left brain thinking and pictorial right brain thinking at the same time, which makes them a very good way of storing and recalling information, presenting things to other people, and brainstorming new ideas.

About NovaMind

NovaMind is used by businesses, in education, and for personal effectiveness, for tasks such as note taking, managing to-do lists, brainstorming, research, problem solving, decision making, presentation preparation and delivery, project planning, knowledge management, writing, and many other uses. NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 7 years, and has been available for Windows for over 3 years. It is rapidly gaining recognition for its many unique and innovative features and ease of use. NovaMind makes Mind Mapping intuitive and fun.

For more information about NovaMind, please visit www.novamind.com or e-mail Gideon King at gideon(at)novamind.com.

NovaMind is moving office this weekend and Monday. We will try to keep disruption of support services to a minimum. The web site will continue to be fully operational during our move.

With the growth in the number of users of NovaMind (over the last 9 months in particular), and the massive interest in NovaMind 5, it’s time for us to move to bigger offices to cater for additional staff as we continue to expand. With the new office, and new procedures to handle our international staff, we should be able to grow the company to at least 5 times the current size using the new office as our home base. We’ll be gradually increasing our staff numbers in the short term, as we can’t bring too many people on right in the middle of the ramp up to NovaMind 5 without negatively impacting the delivery of NovaMind 5, but following the release of NovaMind 5, we expect to be growing rapidly.

The new office is a brand new office building, so we have had the privilege of designing the entire layout exactly the way we wanted it, and we’re very excited about moving into it. Here are some pictures during the construction. They say it will be ready by Friday - I hope so!

2009 is definitely “the year” for NovaMind, with exciting new developments happening every week. It’s been over 7 years of really hard work to get it here, so it’s very rewarding to see it finally really get past the point of critical mass and be heading into a massive growth phase. I guess I was a little worried about the “global economic meltdown” everyone is talking about, but it appears that companies and individuals are actually realizing that they need to work smarter and more efficiently, so we have seen strong sales throughout the economic turmoil.

And of course, we couldn’t have done it without you, our customers who have told your friends and colleagues about NovaMind, and have bought NovaMind and upgraded as we release new versions.

You are just seeing the beginning of what NovaMind will become, as I reinvest the profits into building better software, support systems and services for you.

For the first couple of years of the existence of NovaMind, we didn’t have a proper affiliate program or any reseller system, then 5 years ago, a friend in Japan, William Reed (a keen user of NovaMind himself), introduced me to Stephen Yamakami, and we put the reseller system together initially around his needs before building it into the system it is today. Stephen’s site is http://www.novamind-japan.com/ (in Japanese as you would expect), and we would like to salute him as the pioneer of NovaMind resellers, and for his continued support of NovaMind for the last 5 years.

Find out how easy it is to become either an affiliate or reseller on the NovaMind web site.

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Laurent Coussirat, President and Founder of the group, explains :

“As a manager of 3 companies, I was first a simple user of Novamind software, needing to improve my efficiency, organization and communication. As a consultant, I was also using Novamind for brainstorming, interactive meetings, and innovative presentations.

So much convinced by those useful tools, I decided to distribute them in Europe through a new shop online specially designed and dedicated to NovaMind software : www.store-become.com.

We have been working a lot on the design of the store website, to make it attractive, clear and user friendly, as well as creating a secure area where a user can log in and see details of their orders, license keys, and invoices at any time, instead of just receiving them once by email.

We created also a new department inside the company, with value added services focused on :

• Creativity methods and tools
• Map design on demand
• Mind mapping approach
• Training
• Coaching

Novamind software has changed the life of our team inside the company, and is changing, more and more, the life of our customers ! We push hard to promote Novamind solution and our value added services on the European market.

Thanks to Gideon King and his team for those amazing tools. We wait now for the fantastic version 5 ! ”

This is a version of the Mind Map they have created for their home page showing some of the main benefits of using NovaMind:

And here is a Mind Map created “on demand” for a customer who needed to do a business presentation on their commercial strategy for a chain of jewelry stores:

Laurent mentions that there are a number of other templates on the www.store-become.com web site, and more to come each month.

We are very happy to welcome Become Partners as a NovaMind reseller.

Find out how easy it is to become either an affiliate or reseller on the NovaMind web site.

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Juan Gómez-Jurado uses NovaMind Mind Mapping software to write his books…and apparently it is working out rather well for him, seeing as he has sold over a million copies of his book “God’s Spy”, and has also received over half a million dollars for his last book.

He says that NovaMind is essential for his writing process, and is very much looking forward to NovaMind 5, which will be released in September/October. In his own words:

“For mind mapping my last novel, I used Novamind 4, and I want to thank you. Novamind 4 was amazing, esential throughout the whole process.

I’m starting to mindmap my next novel, and would love to do it on Novamind 5.

I’m gonna buy the update asap…Your software is so good that I received 500K$ for my last novel. That says it all!!

And I’m really eager of grabbing Novamind 5.”

Juan Gómez-Jurado
International best-selling author
(Including “God’s Spy”, which has sold over 1 million books)
www.juangomezjurado.com

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NovaMind 5 has been completely redesigned and rewritten using the latest and best technology on both Windows and Mac platforms.

NovaMind 5 makes use of advanced features such as hardware accelerated animations and multi-core processors to give you the most advanced mind mapping application available anywhere.

This video shows you some of the user interaction within NovaMind 5 for putting images on topics, and also gives you some information about the plugin system.

More information is available at the NovaMind 5 announcement page.

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As part of the lead up to NovaMind 5’s reinvention of Mind Mapping software, NovaMind have just launched a competition to design a new application icon / company logo, representing the new state of the art in Mind Mapping applications. The design competition is being run through 99designs, and the first prize is US$200 plus a NovaMind 5 Platinum license key. The first two runners-up also receive NovaMind 5 Platinum license keys.

Details are as follows:

Brief Summary

Vector artwork required for application icon and company logo for NovaMind Mind Mapping software.

Description

We have a major new release of NovaMind coming up, and want to refresh the look of the company, web site, and application icon. This contest relates to the company logo/application icon and font used for the word “NovaMind” when used in conjunction with the logo. This contest is not about web site redesign, which will be undertaken separately.

The artwork needs to be delivered in Adobe Illustrator CS3 or OmniGraffle Professional 5 compatible format, using appropriate layers to make it easy to recolor the image.

You can see the current application icons here: http://www.novamind.com/features/

We currently have the icon in three colors representing the three editions of NovaMind - Express, Pro, and Platinum. We plan to continue this approach with the new logo/icons.

Issues with the current icons are:

• Logo is already 3D, so is hard to apply a reflection or tilt to it
• It is too detailed for small icon sizes

The new logo/icons will be used in multiple ways:

• Web site logo
• Application icon
• Filetype association icons
• Link to start the application
• Print advertising

Please also include a recommendation for the font to use for the word NovaMind when used in conjunction with the logo.

Wants

• Logo that is easy to tint to different colors. Submission should show the icon in 3 different colors representing Express, Pro, and Platinum
• Recognizable at 16×16, looks fantastic at 48×48 and above
• Suitable for use in a Windows Vista and MacOS X environment
• Suitable for use with a reflection or tilt effect
• Suitable for the uses listed above
• Something indicative in some way of Mind Mapping

Don’t Wants

• Lots of different colors
• Overly complex logo
• Does not have to fit with the current web site - we are planning to update that too
• Not like the logos of any other Mind Mapping software currently available

How to enter

Please enter on the 99designs web site.

After over 2 ½ years of research and development NovaMind are delighted to announce a revolutionary new Mind Mapping product: NovaMind 5, due to ship in September/October. Further information is available at http://clk.bz/p-novamind5

NovaMind founder, Gideon King said “We saw that none of the Mind Mapping products out there were addressing the fundamental needs of mind mappers, so starting in October 2006, we went right back to the basics. With the experience of having already had a successful Mind Mapping product in the market for over 5 years, and collecting feedback from users, and conducting surveys, we had all the information to be able to design something absolutely stunning - something that does what you expect and operates the way you want it to.”

Both the Windows and Mac versions of NovaMind 5 have been built from the ground up using the latest technologies to take advantage of hardware accelerated animations and graphics processing, multi-core processors and the latest user interface designs to give the best user experience possible.

Mr King says “Everything was up for intense scrutiny, from how the Mind Maps are formatted, and how they change when you edit the topics on your Mind Maps, right down to the structure of the individual topics and the user interaction with them on every level. We took nothing for granted. Our task was simply do whatever it took to create the best Mind Mapping software out there. Period.”

Included in NovaMind 5 is a wide range of new topic shapes, providing the opportunity to create more visually rich Mind Maps. The new design elements include things such as floating topics, attached shapes, callouts, and “FlexiLine” topics which can be shaped as desired, and have the text flowing smoothly along the line. This applies also for the link lines which are used to show secondary relationships between topics - these now have a choice of over 30 terminators for the start or end of the line to indicate the nature of the relationship, as well as the ability to scale the terminator to show the relative importance of the relationships. Text labels can flow along the lines or be attached to the line at any point along the line, and multiple labels can be used per line.

There is a wide range of new topic shapes available now, allowing you to create more visually rich Mind Maps.

One of the key differentiators of NovaMind 5 as compared with any other Mind Mapping application is the sophistication of the new layout engine which both arranges the elements of the Mind Map automatically, according to a range of layout styles, but at the same time allows user control of the positioning of the topics. This is completely unprecedented technology, and makes the whole process of working with Mind Maps a natural feel.

Another unique thing in NovaMind 5 is the theme and style system which make it easy to create fantastic looking Mind Maps using professionally designed themes, design your own themes, and reuse the styling of existing elemnents of a Mind Map.

Included are a number of new ways to automatically color topics on the Mind Map, starting from any topic, allowing the user to set the coloring up in one place and have all the descendant topics be automatically colored with the desired colors.

A plugin architecture is built in to both the Windows and Mac versions of NovaMind 5, allowing for the extension of the Mind Mapping experience by third parties.

Mr King says “this is just an overview of some of the new features of NovaMind 5. We’ll be releasing more detailed information closer to the release date. NovaMind 5 is clearly head and shoulders above any other Mind Mapping application currently available, and we’re very much looking foreward to releasing it.”

Chuck Frey of Innovation Tools says “In the 3+ years I have been reporting on the world of mind mapping tools and software, NovaMind have consistently been the innovators - the ones to watch who tend to come up with the cool yet practical capabilities that no one has thought of yet. NovaMind 5 promises to deliver yet another leap in what’s possible.”

For further information about NovaMind 5, see http://clk.bz/p-novamind5

About NovaMind

NovaMind is in use in over 90 countries and is available in 10 different languages. It is being used by businesses, in education, and for personal effectiveness, for tasks such as note taking, managing to-do lists, brainstorming, research, problem solving, decision making, presentation preparation and delivery, project planning, knowledge management, writing, and many other uses. NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 7 years, and has been available for Windows for over 3 years. It is rapidly gaining recognition for its many unique and innovative features and ease of use. NovaMind makes Mind Mapping intuitive and fun.

For more information about NovaMind, please visit www.novamind.com or e-mail Gideon King at gideon(at)novamind.com.

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NovaMind, producer of Mind Mapping for both education and business use, today announced that they have joined the Memory4Teachers initiative which will provide teachers with a range of educational resources and software applications, as well as data storage on 2GB USB keys which will be given away free to 750,000 teachers across the UK.

“NovaMind have been involved in education for the last 7 years, and being able to help out so many teachers with NovaMind Mind Mapping software is like a dream come true for us”, said Gideon King, founder of NovaMind, and internationally recognized expert on Mind Mapping. Gideon King is also the author of the seminal work on the use of Mind Mapping in education, “Teacher’s guide to Mind Mapping”, and says “The effectiveness of Mind Mapping in education has been repeatedly proven, both in the effective presentation of information, memorization, study and research. Specific techniques can be used to engage visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning simultaneously, leading to much improved comprehension and retention of the information.”

NovaMind has a number of unique features which make it ideal for education, like the ease of creating visually stunning Mind Maps, rainbow coloring, flexible branches, and an all time favourite with the students; the Suggesterator, which suggests new directions for thinking based on the existing content of the Mind Map. It also has the ability to print out Mind Maps without the text on the branches so that students can fill it in with their own keywords for better memorization of the material, and again when revising, starting with the blank Mind Map structure gives visual and spacial cues which have been proven to significantly improve the recall of the actual content.

NovaMind is dedicated to providing the best of Mind Mapping software and educational resources for teachers across the UK through the Memory4Teachers system, and will also be making educational videos available to the teachers and students to further enhance their effectiveness through the use of Mind Mapping and related thinking techniques and tools.

Since 1998, RGS Media Group has been working with the public, voluntary and private business sectors providing creative and cost efficient media solutions specifically within the UK education sector. The Memory4Teachers memory sticks are an extension of this dedication to the education industry, showing yet another initiative which will help teachers significantly through the free storage space, integrated software and resources.

The memory sticks are password secure and are preloaded with a fully interactive control panel, a diary, timetable and lesson plans as well as offering support for all national curriculum subject areas. The memory sticks also provide teachers with direct access to recommended educational websites.

About NovaMind

NovaMind is in use in over 90 countries and is available in 10 different languages. It is being used by businesses, in education, and for personal effectiveness, for tasks such as note taking, managing to-do lists, brainstorming, research, problem solving, decision making, presentation preparation and delivery, project planning, knowledge management, writing, and many other uses. NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 7 years, and has been available for Windows for over 3 years. It is rapidly gaining recognition for its many unique and innovative features and ease of use. NovaMind makes Mind Mapping intuitive and fun.

For more information about NovaMind, please visit www.novamind.com or e-mail Gideon King at gideon(at)novamind.com.

Mind Maps are a great way of gathering and organizing material for books, articles, theses, and technical documentation - in fact, any sort of writing.

The example Mind Maps in this video are taken from the two books: Teacher’s Guide to Mind Mapping and Business Guide to Mind Mapping, and are therefore only available as downloads when you buy the books, but you will be able to understand the concepts from just viewing the video.

When I write books or articles, I start by creating a Mind Map of the outline for the book, with the concepts I want to cover as the top level branches, and then details as necessary so that I have enough information there so that I know what I want to cover. At this stage, it is more along the lines of a brainstorming session, as covered in the video about brainstorming. Sometimes, it also includes note taking and research, as covered in the video about note taking, where I will add branch notes with excerpts of the material, and hyperlinks to the source material on the branches.

I have heard from people who use NovaMind for writing novels and short stories they tell me that they create similar Mind Maps with the main points of the story lines, and sometimes create character profiles with the physical appearance, language patterns, character traits, and personal history and relationships all mind mapped out. There seems to be a lot of variation in the way novelists approach their writing, and seeing as I haven’t yet written any novels myself, all I can do is pass on these suggestions.

So at the end of this process, you have an outline of the story, book or article, but it’s not usually grouped and ordered in the way you want it for the finished work. So how I approach the organization process is that I graft the branches so that the main concepts and supporting concepts are arranged as branches and sub-branches.

This gives me an idea of the size of each area of information. At the same time, I’m thinking about the order of the information so it is presented in a logical progression and the information is being introduced in order, building on the previous information.

Now I group it into chapters, and for ease of understanding, I keep each chapter to about 7 main points, because people can on average hold 7 concepts in their short term memory at once, and that’s a comfortable number to work with. Sometimes I’ll go up to 9 main points where necessary, but try not to go beyond that because there is a high likelihood of inducing information overload in the reader.

This may sound like qute a few steps, but in fact this process is usually pretty quick, and you will have the outline and overall content organized in very short order.

The next step, if it’s a book rather than an article, is to use the New Map from Branch function to take each chapter and create a Mind Map for that chapter. If your overall Mind Map had detailed information on it, you would remove the detailed level information and just have the main points on that Mind Map so that you can use it as an overview of the book.

Now for each chapter, you have your approximately 7 main points, and you extend add as many child branches as you need to cover the main points, which will become your headings and subheadings in the text, and then add the body text to each branch.

Of course, being in Mind Map format, you are not constricted to write sequentially. You can add the body text in any order you like.

When you are ready, you can export the Mind Map document with all the chapter Mind Maps into Microsoft Word format, and all the branches and sub-branches will come out as outline levels within the document, and the branch notes will come out as body text, so you can easily apply MS Word styles to the document to format it nicely, and also you will be able to generate a table of contents from it directly.

But in doing this, you are losing the power of Mind Mapping for your readers, so what I do is spend a few minutes on the layout of the Mind Maps and then export them as PDF images and then embed them into the document, with the overall outline Mind Map at the start of the book as another form of table of contents, and then at the start of each chapter, I have the chapter Mind Map which shows people the main points that are covered in that chapter.

I try to make them visually interesting by having different background colors and different styles included in the Mind Maps, but at the same time, if there is something related across chapters, I’ll use the same image in both places so you have the visual connection. Our brains love color and flow, and having different shapes and colors makes them both visually appealing as well as memorable, while the structure makes the information content easily understood and remembered too.

If the book is the type where you want people to take notes, you can include a blank Mind Map at the end of each chapter with just the main branches there so people can make their own notes as they go.

Having the Mind Maps in the book means that when a reader returns to the book later, they will be able to just take a quick glance at the Mind Map and instantly recall the content.

So using Mind Maps can dramatically speed up the writing process and at the same time lead to a much higher quality of output, and completely avoid writers block, because you have the structure in place right from the start and can work on the content in any order, and if you get stuck at all, you can just use the techniques we covered in the brainstorming video for coming up with new ideas which get your thinking going again.

I just can’t imagine writing a book without using Mind Mapping now - it would just be so slow and tedious! So get stuck in to your next writing project using the power of Mind Mapping.

 

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When I am talking to people about NovaMind, very often they ask what it is, and if I say that it’s Mind Mapping software, they say “ah, brainstorming!”, with a look of enlightenment on their faces. While brainstorming is not equal to Mind Mapping, brainstorming is a technique for generating ideas that dovetails in very nicely with Mind Mapping, so I usually agree with them…and then proceed to show them all the other things Mind Mapping is good for too.

So, enough of the background - all the Mind Maps shown in this video are available at:

http://www.novamind.com/connect/nm_documents/315

The video mentions the Suggesterator™, which is a free plugin for NovaMind which you can download for Windows from http://www.novamind.com/download/windows-support.php and for Mac from http://www.novamind.com/download/mac-support.php

The video also mentions iBlueSky Mind Mapping for iPhone and iPod touch - you can find out more information about this here: http://www.novamind.com/ibluesky/

And without further introduction, here is the video:

Brainstorming is a great way of solving problems and coming up with new ideas. It allows you to examine the problems from outside the boundaries of normal thinking, and understand the issues and root causes, and come up with alternative solutions. Brainstorming can also be used for impact analysis and decision making, as I have mentioned in other videos.

In the project management context, you can brainstorm from the objectives and goals down to the tasks to explore new ideas, possibilities and alternatives. It gives us a much more understandable and complete plan than what you would get if you just stuck to task level planning.

Brainstorming can be great for team building where you have shared discussions, and also for individual ideation, and has the benefits of improving initiative and innovation within an organization or individually, as well as improving quality and profitability, efficiency and morale.

The basic concept behind brainstorming is to capture ideas as quickly as possible so that you get past the judgment that you typically use to assess ideas before recording them, and instead we want to capture the ideas as they occur assuming no money, time, resource or any other constraint, and without judgment, building on ideas as you think of them as well as pushing yourself to think in new directions. The concept is that out of quantity comes quality - there will be great ideas in amongst the many ideas you throw out there.

As you think of the ideas, you record the keywords on branches - at the moment, you don’t care where you put the branches, because you can graft them elsewhere later, but if it isn’t slowing you down, you might like to do some high level grouping by putting some of the main branches in place and adding related ideas as sub-branches. In order to keep up with the recording of ideas, in NovaMind you have the BranchStorm™ system which you can turn on in the Windows version of NovaMind by right-clicking while you are editing text, and turning it on in the context menu, and if you are using the Mac version, you can show the tool palette from the Window menu and then click on the lightning bolt icon to turn on BranchStorm™. With BranchStorm™, you just press return after each idea, and the sub-branches are automatically created and you can keep typing.

Sometimes when you are brainstorming, you will get stuck and run out of ideas completely or you may just think that there should be more ideas related to an idea you have on the map already, but you can’t think of what it might be at the time, so let’s look at some ways of getting unstuck.

Firstly, if you think there should be more ideas related to an existing branch, or additional concepts to come from the title of the Mind Map, add blank branches to your Mind Map, because your subconscious mind hates to leave things unfinished, and will go looking for ideas to fill the empty branches. You can also take a break, and go away and either do something else or go for a walk. Doing something else lets your subconscious mind work on the problem and come up with answers when it is not under pressure. Repetitive activities like walking are particularly good for letting the thoughts surface. If you have iBlueSky on the iPhone or iPod Touch, take it with you and you can mind map your thoughts as you go. You might find that a change of scenery like going to the park or going down by the sea may lead to a different sort of inspiration where you come up with different ideas. Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should make sure that you take something with you which will allow you to record ideas as you think of them rather than trying to remember them until you get back to the office.

Very often when we are thinking about a topic, we get stuck in a groove where there is a well worn track in our thinking and it is very hard to come up with new ideas. This is where the Suggesterator™ comes into play, and you can select a number of ideas related to the selected branch, and add them as sub-branches. Note that the Suggesterator™ is a free extension to NovaMind which you will need to download and install. At the top of the list are words that are linguistically reasonably closely related to the word on the selected branch, and as you get down the list, the ideas are more “off the wall” to take your thinking in completely new directions. This helps break the train of thinking and introduce completely new ideas.

Another idea is to look at similar problems in different domains and seeing if you can apply solutions that worked in that domain to the idea you are brainstorming about.

You can also ask the question “How would others solve/approach this?”. This is particularly useful when you take the point of view of other parties involved in the problem or impacted by the solution.

You can ask questions like:

• Who?
• What?
• Why?
• When?
• Where?
• How often?
• Who does this impact?

…to encourage yourself to look at the problem from a different perspective.

And finally, ask the question: “If there was another solution, what would it be?”. This is an idea that comes from Neuro-linguistics, and brings your imagination into play. It’s like saying, “I know that there is no other option, but just for a moment, imagine that there was another option, if there was another option, what would it be?”. And almost every time, your imagination kicks in and supplies another idea, and then once that door that was closing off ideas has opened up, it’s often like floodgates opening up and you start coming up with dozens more ideas.

Now, when you have recorded enough ideas, you need to reorganize them by grouping them so that you start with the overall concepts and then organize the ideas as sub-branches so that you can see the the big picture and the details. Where there are important ideas, make sure they are highlighted with adornments or images or by color etc, and also if there are ideas that are related to more than one group, you can show the secondary associations by the link lines.

Now let’s just drill down a bit and have a look at some important points for both brainstorming by yourself and in a group.

The most critical thing is to define the problem or topic clearly first. Have a look at the problem solving video to remind yourself of the four cartesian quadrants of problem definition by asking the questions:

• What is the problem?
• What is it not?
• We have this problem because…
• We don’t have a solution because…

And apply these thoughts to the topic you are examining.

Also define your desired outcome, so you know when you have achieved your objective.

Now start with the subject as the Mind Map title, and imagine that you have your “inner advisor” giving you the ideas and solutions, using the techniques we have already mentioned. Start adding top level branches and then children branches as required, without judgment or limitation, and not worrying about organization.

Stop when you have either run out of ideas and have exhausted the ideas we just mentioned for getting unstuck, or when you have collected enough ideas.

It is only after you have collected the ideas that you evaluate and organize them, and in the process you sometimes need to expand the best ideas to give more concrete detail.

Now when you are mind mapping in a group, you need some structures and methods in place to make sure that the whole process goes smoothly.

You should appoint a recorder, a session leader, and everyone else is the “panel”. You don’t want a huge group - groups of more than 10-15 people can get quite difficult to manage, and it may be best to split into different groups and then combine the ideas later, or consider different aspects of the topic.

Now the next point is very important: there have been at least 25 studies done since 1958 which all show that if you try to brainstorm with an entire group without individual brainstorming first, you end up with fewer and lower quality ideas. So, first go through the definition of the topic and the intended outcome with the participants to make sure you are on the same page, and then do the individual brainstorming and return to share ideas, making sure that you give everyone a fair say. As the ideas are mentioned and recorded on the overall Mind Map, there are going to be ideas relating to those topics come up from other participants, and these should be recorded without judgment or constraints, and also without elaboration - you just want the keywords. Then the process of grouping, culling, and elaboration is much the same as for individual brainstorming.

With this structure in place, and using these techniques, you will be able to brainstorm ideas and solutions either individually or in a group, and come up with better solutions and ideas.

 

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As we saw in the last video, there are a lot of areas of strategic planning where Mind Mapping gives you a strong strategic advantage, both in the planning process and also in explaining what the business is all about to investors, staff, and customers.

When you get to the level of business planning, some of the same theories and techniques apply, and certainly the use of things like the SWOT analysis Mind Map is very valuable as you put together the shorter term business plans, but there are a lot of other things you can use Mind Maps for at the business planning level.

There are several Mind Maps referred to in this video, which you can find at these locations:

Business planning; annual review; business plan outline

Elements of a marketing plan

Marketing plan

Mind Maps in planning

Running meetings using Mind Maps; Mind Mapped agenda

One of the significant issues with more traditional business plans is that they tend to end up as long boring documents that few people read and even fewer understand, and therefore they are ignored by precisely the people who could benefit most by following them.

By contrast, using Mind Maps for business plans allows you to create engaging, unique, memorable business plans. The color, shapes, images, and summarized nature of the Mind Maps makes them memorable and useful.

When creating a business plan, we once again brainstorm the particular areas we are interested in at the time, but this time, everything is cross-checked with the company strategic plan to ensure consistency, and to make sure that the business plan is advancing the company in the direction of the long term goals.

Just like the strategic plan in the previous video, you can create individual Mind Maps for each of the key areas of your business, and then produce a summary Mind Map which highlights the key points for use with clients and general staff, and you have the more detailed Mind Maps available to use with the staff who are employed in that particular area of the business.

When using Mind Maps for planning, it is important to use the general planning principles, as shown on this Mind Map. The first step is brainstorming, where you start at the center of the Mind Map with the subject, then add branches for each main idea or objective, and then generate the ideas for the sub-branches as quickly as you can, without worrying about organizing them at this stage.

The second stage is one of organization, culling and scoping, so that you have the main objectives at the first level, and then the supporting goals and objectives, and eventually down to whatever level of detail you need in the Mind Map. At this stage, you are comparing the things that you are putting on the Mind Map with the strategic plan, to make sure you are going in the right direction, and also looking at the feasibility and desirability of the ideas. Some ideas are not appropriate for the particular business plan being created, but may be worth keeping for later, and these ideas can be put into another Mind Map for later implementation.

From the resulting Mind Map, you refine it until you get to an action plan for each area of the business, by confirming the objectives and making sure the tasks have been identified properly, and then prioritize and schedule them.

The last, and most important part of the process is to make sure you have appropriate measures in place for tracking and feedback into future plans. These mechanisms can be built into the Mind Maps, so you record the feedback in the appropriate places on the Mind Map as the plan is put into action.

Let’s look at one area of your business planning to give you some ideas of how it could be helped by the use of Mind Maps - let’s pick marketing plans.

So you would start at the high level and perhaps draw in a Mind Map from your strategic plan and update it to match the needs of your current business plan, so we look at various aspects of the current market position, an overview of the market, do a SWOT analysis of the market, set your objectives, and then work out what strategies you are going to apply.

From there, you might create a plan for use in your detailed planning, where you address specific issues. The example Mind Map gives pretty typical issues and structures, so you might like to download the Mind Map from NovaMind Connect and customize it for your needs, but of course at the same time, it is just an example which shows you the concept which you can apply across all areas of your business plan.

So those things all relate to your business plan itself, but there are so many other areas of businesses where Mind Mapping can be used, that I thought I would mention some of them just to give you some ideas that you can work with and further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your work.

Here are some ideas around using Mind Maps for meeting planning.

Before the meeting, you can put together a Mind Map for the agenda and distribute it to the attendees. This is a good way of limiting the scope of the meeting and also showing on the Mind Map the objectives just the same way as you would for a project plan. Then during the meeting, when you have the Mind Map in front of you, it will help maintain focus and also pace the discussion because everyone can see how many topics still need to be covered. You can record the meeting minutes directly on the agenda Mind Map, recording the main points and action items as sub-branches below the items being discussed. Then at the end of the meeting, your Mind Map can be distributed as is for instant meeting minutes.

There are example Mind Maps on NovaMind Connect which give some specific tips to get the most out of using Mind Maps for your Meetings.

Another place where the clarity of Mind Maps can be very useful is for staff reviews.

Goals can be identified, the meetings that were held during the period, the issues that were encountered, and how they were dealt with, what the employee learned, the expenses, and finally the major wins, so you can end on a positive note. Now if you go into a review period with the knowledge that this is the way you will be assessed, you can make sure that all areas are covered well when you are going about your daily business, and get a fantastic review.

Hopefully this will have left you with lots of ideas and starting points for using Mind Maps in business planning and also general day to day running of businesses and doing your job better an more efficiently.

 

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Mind Mapping is a powerful tool for all forms of planning, and we have already seen how we can use it for project planning, but let’s extend that to talk specifically about strategic planning.

This video references a number of Mind Maps that you can download from NovaMind Connect, so here are the specific links so you can download the Mind Maps:

Strategic planning: why do it?, SWOT analysis, Strategic plans: what do they contain?

Business continuity planning, response and recovery

Strategic planning can seem like a hassle when you just want to get on and run the business, but there are a lot of reasons for creating strategic plans, as you can see here:

• they are very important for setting the long term direction of the company so you know what the company will look like in 5 or 10 years
• they form a framework for decision making when you are doing your business planning
• they are a framework for your operational planning and help you set your priorities, product lines, levels of service, and identify your target market
• they enable you to very clearly explain the business to employees, contractors, stakeholders in the business, strategic partners, and customers
• they allow you to get a clear picture of the difference between your current position and where you want to be long term, and therefore stimulate change in the right direction
• and they form a basis for accountability of both the staff (especially senior staff) and the plans you make at lower levels, like business and marketing plans.

So what should the strategic plans contain? Here is a list of some of the main items:

• the vision of where the company is going in the medium to long term
• the mission of the company - what it is all about
• the values of the company, explaining why you exist
• your specific objectives as a company
• what strategies you will use to achieve your objectives
• and the goals along the way, so you can plan to meet those goals and be able to measure your progress

For your strategic plan, you could start with a Mind Map with the main headings as in the example in the video and add sub-branches for each element, but you would probably end up with a huge Mind Map, so what I would suggest is that you download this Mind Map from NovaMind Connect, and for each of the top level branches, decide what is important for you and adjust the second level branches to suit your needs, and then for each top level branch, use the “new map from branch” option to create a new Mind Map for each of them, and then brainstorm the details under what have now become the first level branches of the detail maps.

One important part of the strategic planning process is doing a SWOT analysis, where you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your business. Using more traditional methods of doing SWOT analysis, you just consider all the strengths first, and then all the weaknesses and so on. One of the advantages of doing this using Mind Maps is that you can be open to use brainstorming techniques where you come up with ideas that relate to all four areas in any order, and you can attach them to the Mind Map as branches at the appropriate place as you think of them.

We do have a SWOT template built in to NovaMind so you can create a Mind Map based on that template, but there’s also this extended SWOT analysis template available on NovaMind Connect, which may help direct your thinking in appropriate directions for strategic and business planning.

When you have gone through the strategic planning process and identified the detailed vision, mission, values, objectives, strategies and goals, it is often useful to feed the main points back to an overall strategic plan Mind Map which you can then make into a poster for your office, and can also include with a company prospectus or bids for contracts etc. This helps everyone within the company or associated with the company in any way understand what the company is all about, and where they fit in to the accomplishment of those objectives.

Another specific strategic thing to consider is business continuity planning. Using a Mind Map such as this, again the brainstorming structure of Mind Maps comes in handy to take these ideas and build out a picture of the risks that your business faces, and then build a risk mitigation plan.

Then at the other end of the spectrum, you have the response and recovery plan and here we can use the same techniques we used for project planning and management, to ensure that everyone understands the objectives, their roles and responsibilities, and how to effect a speedy recovery from any disaster. It is at times like that, that you need to have the clear and efficient communication that is provided by Mind Maps.

So as you can see, using Mind Maps for strategic planning helps make sure all aspects of the plan are dealt with properly, in a way that everyone can understand what the strategic direction of the company is, and how you are going to achieve it.

Now the next obvious thing to be doing with Mind Maps is business planning, so we will cover that in the next video.

 

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Power Mind Mapping course released

NovaMind Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a free online video based course teaching you all about Mind Mapping. The course covers areas such as:

• How to take notes effectively using Mind Mapping
• How to prepare and deliver great presentations using Mind Mapping techniques
• How to create Mind Mapped to do lists
• Problem solving using Mind Maps - from simple to complex problems
• Decision making - how to make great decisions confidently, no matter how difficult the decision is
• Information and knowledge management and how to get the most out of what you know
• Project planning and management using Mind Maps
• Creative thinking and brainstorming
• How to write articles, technical documents and books using Mind Maps
• Business and strategic planning using Mind Maps
• Life management and goal setting

The course is produced by Mind Mapping expert and author of two Mind Mapping books, Gideon King. Mr King says “I am always looking at effective ways of teaching people about the power of Mind Mapping, and believe this is an effective way of making the information available to the widest number of people”. When asked whether this was just marketing for his NovaMind Mind Mapping software, Mr King responded “While I would love for everyone to buy NovaMind, so we could develop it faster and therefore help more people, my focus is very much on getting the word out there about the many powerful uses of Mind Mapping, whatever software you use. I would much rather someone was Mind Mapping using our competitors’ software rather than not Mind Mapping at all. I feel that it is my duty to spread the word about this tool that makes such a dramatic improvement to productivity and effectiveness, far and wide.”

The course is available at http://www.novamind.com/power-mind-mapping/ and is open for participants to join immediately.

About Mind Mapping

Mind Maps are diagrams that work the way people think — they organize the information in the same way our brains organize information. They make it easy to understand, remember, and communicate complex information.

Our brains like thinking in pictures. The smooth curves and colorful pictures used in Mind Mapping create powerful images for your brain to remember.

Mind Maps cater to both logical left brain thinking and pictorial right brain thinking at the same time, which makes them a very good way of storing and recalling information, presenting things to other people, and brainstorming new ideas.

About Gideon King

Gideon King is a Mind Mapping and personal development expert, and founder of NovaMind software. He has written two books on Mind Mapping; the “Teacher’s guide to Mind Mapping” and the “Business guide to Mind Mapping“. He brings a wide range of experience from his training and work in both civil engineering and computer software development, as well as real world experience having worked in a number of diverse industries, lived in 3 countries, visited over 40 countries, and having completely redesigned his life in every way. This knowledge and experience shows itself in the Power Mind Mapping course, where he is able to effectively cover a wide range of topics with authority.

About NovaMind

NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 6 years, and has been available for Windows for over two years. It is rapidly gaining recognition for its many unique and innovative features and ease of use. NovaMind makes Mind Mapping intuitive and fun.

For more information about NovaMind, please visit www.novamind.com or e-mail Gideon King at gideon(at)novamind.com.

NovaMind Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of NovaMind for Windows in Spanish and French. This means that the Windows version of NovaMind is available in English, Japanese, German, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Hebrew, French and Spanish.

Gideon King, founder of NovaMind Mind Mapping software said “We are happy to have the opportunity to support our growing international family of users with Mind Mapping software they can use in their own language. While it is possible to create Mind Maps in any language using NovaMind, it is easier for users when they have the user interface available in their own language.”

The Mac version of NovaMind is available in English, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, and is used widely around the world.

Mr King says “Last time I checked, which was about 3 years ago, NovaMind was already in use in at least 88 different countries. I strongly believe in the power and usefulness of Mind Mapping, so it is very pleasing to be able to help people around the world by providing software to improve their productivity and effectiveness.”

About Mind Mapping

Mind Maps are diagrams that work the way people think — they organize the information in the same way our brains organize information. They make it easy to understand, remember, and communicate complex information.

Our brains like thinking in pictures. The smooth curves and colorful pictures used in Mind Mapping create powerful images for your brain to remember.

Mind Maps cater to both logical left brain thinking and pictorial right brain thinking at the same time, which makes them a very good way of storing and recalling information, presenting things to other people, and brainstorming new ideas.

About NovaMind

NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 6 years, and has been available for Windows for over two years. It is rapidly gaining recognition for its many unique and innovative features and ease of use. NovaMind makes Mind Mapping intuitive and fun.

For more information about NovaMind, please visit www.novamind.com or e-mail Gideon King at gideon(at)novamind.com.

NovaMind Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of iBlueSky integration. This allows creation of Mind Maps in iBlueSky on the iPhone or iPod Touch, which can be sent by email to anyone on the iPhone contact list, and opened directly in NovaMind for further editing and refinement.

Having iBlueSky Mind Mapping software available in your pocket on iPhone or iPod touch means that the user has at their fingertips (literally) the ability to:

• create to-do lists whilst in the moment so as to avoid forgetting anything
• take notes in meetings where there is no laptop available
• jot down ideas as they arise, and organize them
• be productive anywhere and everywhere, in those spare moments waiting in line etc.
• solve problems and make decisions using Mind Mapping techniques, at any time
• brainstorm in places where it would be impractical to take a laptop
• summarize and memorize information no matter where you are

For further information about iBlueSky and NovaMind integration, please see http://www.novamind.com/ibluesky/

Gideon King, founder of NovaMind said “We are very excited about the possibilities that this integration of NovaMind and iBlueSky brings. Late last year we surveyed our customers, and one of the most common requests for new capabilities was for integration between the Mac and Windows versions of NovaMind and an iPhone Mind Mapping solution. We feel very fortunate to have been able to develop a very close working relationship with Tenero Software, the developers of the top Mind Mapping application for the iPhone.”

At the moment, the communication is one way, but Andrew Ebling, founder of Tenero Software says “by the end of January, we should have both directions working via our import/export web service”.

There are many benefits of being able to transfer Mind Maps to NovaMind, because NovaMind allows the user to:

• Use different branch shapes and styles, and add images and adornments to branches
• Have full control over the color of the branches
• Add notes and hyperlinks to the branches
• Add task and resource information
• Give presentations directly from Mind Maps
• Export to other programs such as MS Word, Powerpoint, MS Project and Merlin
• …and have all the capabilities of NovaMind to create stunning looking and powerful Mind Maps

“We believe that the benefits for both the iBlueSky and NovaMind users are huge, and are just really glad to have the opportunity to be able to provide this amount of value to them” says Mr King.

About Mind Mapping

Mind Maps are diagrams that work the way people think — they organize the information in the same way our brains organize information. They make it easy to understand, remember, and communicate complex information.

Our brains like thinking in pictures. The smooth curves and colorful pictures used in Mind Mapping create powerful images for your brain to remember.

Mind Maps cater to both logical left brain thinking and pictorial right brain thinking at the same time, which makes them a very good way of storing and recalling information, presenting things to other people, and brainstorming new ideas.

About NovaMind

NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 6 years, and has been available for Windows for over two years. It is rapidly gaining recognition for its many unique and innovative features and ease of use. NovaMind makes Mind Mapping intuitive and fun.

For more information about NovaMind, please visit www.novamind.com or e-mail Gideon King at gideon(at)novamind.com.

In these days of information overload, the compact way of representing ideas that is embodied in Mind Mapping is essential. You can summarize a huge amount of information in a very compact space. For us to be able to cope, we need efficient knowledge generation, management, and use.

Watch this video to find out all about knowledge management. Actually more than just knowledge management - we’ll examine how knowledge is created, what it is, and how you can use it.

We are fed with a huge amount of data all the time, and we are pretty good at sorting through the incoming data and applying our understanding of the relationships between the different pieces of data and its meaning to us, so we can turn the data into information. In this process, we delete, distort, and filter the data to fit our understanding of the world. The raw data is turned into something that is summarized, described and defined in terms that fit with the information we already know.

This massively reduces the amount of material we need to deal with, and also helps us process new data as it comes along, but still we are overwhelmed with the amount of information. We need to turn the information into knowledge, so we generalize the information and look for overall patterns that fit with our current knowledge. Knowledge allows us to have the concept of how things work, so we can develop strategies and methods that we know from experience will work. We will also be able to more easily process information because we know the patterns that we expect the information to fall into, and are able to recognize those patterns with new information.

Now if we purely operate from the level of Knowledge, we are able to implement strategies that are effective at dealing with issues, but we will not be very good at creativity or invention of new solutions.

So beyond knowledge there is what we can call Wisdom or Understanding. In order to go from knowledge to wisdom, we need to understand the principles behind the patterns we see, and the reasons that the strategies work. We recognize meta-patterns in the knowledge - patterns that define the patterns we observe. Once we recognize those reasons, it builds a framework of “truth” around our perception of reality, so we are able to form hypotheses as to what the principles are, and test them to form principles and archetypes that we can use to drive creativity, invention and coming up with new paradigms which either fit with the truth of our reality or challenge it in new ways. Having this framework of wisdom in place helps with good decision making, efficient processing of options, and creative thinking that stems from solid principles.

We thrive on being at the edge between overload on the one side and boredom on the other side. If we have inefficient ways of dealing with data and turning it into information then we will have data overload problems, and if we have inefficient ways of turning information into knowledge, then we will have information overload. What most people term information overload is actually a combination of data overload and information overload. If we get overloaded by either data or information overload, we are likely to either withdraw from the information flow and adopt a “whatever” or “I don’t care” approach, or do some sort of more mundane task or work, or blob out in front of the TV, or distract ourselves from the actual task we should be doing. In one way or another, we either cut down our input or our processing of it to avoid the feeling of overwhelm.

On the other end of the scale, if we are not stimulated with enough data, or the data we are receiving already fits with what we already know in every way, we get bored, and sometimes do things that actually sabotage situations or relationships because subconsciously we have become bored.

As you can see, our typical reactions to overload are unhelpful because we get into stuck states and just give up completely, and our reactions to boredom are often unhelpful because we sabotage things just to make life interesting.

While it is possible to go through life with very few tools and strategies to be able to cope with overload or boredom, if you live your life like that, you are likely to be very unfulfilled and accomplish very little. On the other hand, when you use the right tools and techniques to be able to deal with increasing amounts of data, information and knowledge, you will enter a “flow” state where you are able to achieve massive amounts in a short space of time, and be able to be creative and a visionary. It will both make for massive personal growth and productivity, but will also allow you to feel in control of the situation, going with the information flow.

If you feel bored, and develop the skills to be aware of that situation before you artificially introduce drama, then you will go and seek out more stimulation - more data, more challenges to tackle, and you will get the immense satisfaction of dealing with the hard problems and conquering them.

When you are dealing with a lot of data and information at once, it’s like a pipe, and if that pipe gets blocked, then all the information and data piles up behind it and very soon you have an overload situation and everything shuts down and you start using your tactics to get rid of the incoming information, or ignore it, and the whole flow process stops and you stop learning, stop gathering knowledge, stop creating wisdom, and stop being creative. One of the most common causes of this happening is when you get stuck making a decision, which is why I made the video on decision making, so you never need to have that blockage again.

But the more subtle issue is if you have more data than you can handle going in to the pipe, and the pressure gradually builds up and builds up and you don’t know how to handle it, until it eventually explodes.

Now if the knowledge is inaccessible, or difficult to understand, then it is useless to you or whoever could benefit from it. When the knowledge is readily accessible and actually used in the decision making and problem solving processes, and creative green field thinking, then you have the sum of the knowledge and experience of everyone and every situation that contributed to that knowledge at your disposal to allow you to make the most of every situation.

Of course this is where Mind Mapping comes into play.

As you gather the data, you can put it into a mind map, and as you do so, you are naturally deleting, distorting and filtering the data to become information and to match with the knowledge and information you already have. This helps deal with data and information overload. As you arrange the mind map, you are starting to group the information so that the linkages between the ideas convey meaning, and the organization is exactly the same as when information is organized in your brain. At this stage you are still operating mostly from a left brain logical perspective, but at the same time you are naturally creating an image that is attractive to your right brain too.

As you graft the branches and use the colors and branch shapes and images to indicate the commonality of ideas, you are building the understanding of the patterns within the information, and generalizing back to the root branches. This allows you to gain the level of overview of information that is necessary for it to be knowledge where you understand how it all fits together, and how your objectives are going to be met.

So you are automatically turning the data into information and the information into knowledge as you create and refine your Mind Maps. This knowledge consists not only of the keywords on the branches, but also the colors, positioning and connections the branches have, as well as the images, boundaries, task information, priorities, branch notes, and all your hyperlinks to other documents, web pages and resources. They all go to make up the sum of the knowledge contained in the Mind Map. The compactness and richness of this visual representation of the knowledge makes Mind Maps excellent knowledge management tools, so that when you (or somebody else) need the information, it is right there in an easily understood format, and with all the richness of the information and data behind it.

Having the knowledge represented graphically in this way is a great help in going the next step to wisdom and understanding where you get the picture of the principles and the underlying patterns in the knowledge, and can therefore propose archetypes and principles that can drive forward through a brainstorming process to new and innovative solutions.

Using Mind Maps in this way ensures that you can manage the volume of data, process it efficiently into information and package it up into knowledge without getting overloaded. This means you can move through wisdom to true creativity based on a solid foundation of understanding. To my knowledge, there is no other tool better suited to this process of creating and maintaining close to optimal performance than Mind Mapping.

 

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