This NovaMind document contains the Mind Maps used on this page.
Brainstorming
The first stage of the planning process is informal, and involves you brainstorming ideas. Many people think of brainstorming as some sort of completely random thing where you just sit down and come up with new ideas. Instead, it is an organized way of generating ideas, which was invented by Alex Osborn.
Brainstorming can be done either individually or in a group. In group brainstorming sessions, participants are encouraged to
share their ideas with one another as soon as they are generated. If you have a large group of people, it is often more productive to break the group into smaller sub-groups and either have them all come up with different solutions around the same topic, or break the topic down into different sub-topics and give each group a sub-topic to think about.
The key to brainstorming is not to interrupt the thought process. As ideas come to the mind, they are captured and stimulate the
development of better ideas.
In order to enhance creativity, a brainstorming session has four basic rules:
- Focus on quantity
This is so that you get the maximum spread of different ideas. It has the idea of "quantity breeds
quality". The greater the number of ideas generated, the greater the chance of hitting upon useful ideas.
- Criticism is forbidden
In a group, it is often emphasized in brainstorming sessions that you should put criticism 'on hold', but the same applies when you are brainstorming on your own. When suspending judgment,
you create a supportive atmosphere where participants feel free to generate unusual ideas. This is particularly important in an
environment where people know one another and often certain people are more confident and outspoken than others. Removing the
fear of criticism can help to build the confidence of less participative people.
- Unusual ideas are welcome
By looking at things from another perspective, or by setting aside assumptions, some unusual ideas can be generated. These ideas
will open new ways of working or thinking. It is easier to tame down a wild idea than to think up another completely new idea.
- Combine and improve ideas
The approach of combining and improving ideas leads to better and more complete ideas and will cause a chain reaction of idea
generation by using the power of association.
There are a lot of techniques that can be brought to bear on the idea generation phase, and this is an area Edward DeBono has done a lot of study on - we will go into that in more depth in an article purely about brainstorming.
Fitting the ideas together
As you are generating the ideas, you are just getting them out there - no need to think too much about where they are put on the Mind Map - just get them on there somewhere.
Now you need to organize them, and this is purely a matter of structuring the Mind Map so that the hierarchy is generated. The main objectives go on the first level branches, and then the sub-branches hold the more detailed information. It goes from general to specific. If there are topics that are related to each other in some way outside the hierarchy, you can use either coloring, adornments, or link lines to show these secondary associations.
Culling and Scoping
As you are fitting the ideas together, some of the "off the wall" ideas will probably not fit with the project as it is at the time. So the ideas that really don't fit can be moved to another Mind Map within the same document, or another document altogether - but don't throw them away. You never know when you may find them useful for another brainstorming session or a similar project.
The next step is scoping. Say you are putting together a marketing plan, you are likely to come up with lots of different, workable ideas that you could be doing, but there just aren't enough hours in the day.
A similar concept would apply to project planning where you need to scope the project to something that can be delivered in a reasonable timeframe and within the required budget.
Very often the thing that determines how the scoping happens is the resources available - whether that be time or money or people or machinery etc.
With the hierarchical structure of Mind Maps, it makes it easy to remove a main objective branch with all its sub-branches from the Mind Map, and know that you are not going to be affecting the rest of the plan. Again, these objectives can be kept in another Mind Map, perhaps for a phase 2 of the project or plan.
The Action Plan
In order to accomplish the things you are planning, you need to refine the objectives and tasks to make sure you have the resources available at the right time for each of the tasks, and that the tasks are appropriately prioritized. Again, you can do this in NovaMind to have an action plan all ready to go.
Measurement of the Results and Feedback
An important part of the action plan is to know when you have completed each of the tasks and objectives. You need to include targets for completion, cost, and other resource usage, and measure every consumable aspect of the project (and consumable does include time!). This needs to feed back into the plan, which is a living document, being updated as you go.
The lessons you learn from carrying out the plan need to be recorded so that they can both feed back into that particular plan as it is being executed, and also be used as a resource for more accurately creating realistic plans in the future.
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