Mind mapping is popular technique in the world of business. As a flexible tool for different scenarios, it's easy to see why mind mapping is so popular.

One thing that strikes me though, is the areas where mind mapping isn't used. One such area I often see where mind mapping isn't utilised is training. Whether you've been on the training yourself, or you're in charge of arranging it for others, training can be such a drain on a company's resources and time.

When you send staff on training you lose some of your companies resources, you then need to re-shuffle people about to cover that persons duties or arrange for a temp to come in and cover for them. When your staff return from training they then need to catch up on emails, meetings and other actvities that might have happened while they've been away.

Staff might then be required to apply what they've learned from their training course and apply it to their day to day activities or pass it on to others in the workplace in the form of a workshop. Now I'm not knocking training because we it's a great way for us to expand our skill sets and make ourselves better at our jobs, but how can training benefit from mind mapping?

Mind Maps As Course Material

First day on a training course and what do you get? A huge A4 ring binder of course material with a thickness that would put War and Peace to shame. Not only is the course material huge, but some courses actually have an examination at the end of it! How are you going to remember everything? Mind mapping is all about keywords right?

So why can't the keywords from the course material be used to compile a simple training mind map?

Using mind maps we can condense the course material to a single mind map or a mind map for each chapter in the course material. Whether it's one or eight mind maps, it's still easier to look through these than 400 pages of dull text.

When faced with either a mind map or an A4 ring binder, I know what I would want to look at.

Mind Maps for Note Taking

Having material to reference from is one thing, but you'll have a number of questions and points that you'll want to jot down during the course of the training. At the end of training you might want to question the instructor on a few topics or research some material yourself.

Being able to condense down pages of information down to a mind map or two means that the information is easier to have at hand and recall.

When you start your training course, start a mind map on separate sheet of paper. Add branches for the basic ordering ideas that you're going to cover. This gives you a good structure to follow which is similar to the training. Then as questions, comments, or tips come up, add them to the appropriate branch on your mind map.

Mind Maps for the Workshop

Sometimes you might be required to pass on what you have learned from your training course to others in your company. Well, here is where mind mapping can really help. Obviously you can't replicate the training environment in a workshop, but the idea here is pass on the basics from the training course so that others can build on the basics themselves.

If anyone has any questions, then they can ask you to further expand on something in more detail until they are clear about it.

Using your course materials and your notes from the course, you should be able to put together a very abundant mind map full of relevant information for those attending your workshop.

When people have attended your workshop, they'll walk away with something more valuable than a crummy 20 page summary of the course materials. Putting this all together, we can now see how staff training can benefit from mind mapping. Hopefully the next time your scheduled to be on a training course, you'll remember to use one or all of these techniques!

Note from Editor:  This is a guest post by John Gray, a business analyst with a passion for visual thinking.

I st arted down the mind mapping route back when I was at university, it was the usual quest to see if I could get through university doing the least amount of work while spending the most amount of time in the pub. I got a copy of Tony Buzan's "The Mind Map Book" and since then I have never looked back.

First I began creating my own hand drawn maps on course material, experimented with my own mind map diary and before I knew it I was up and running. Instead of trying to digest everything that was put my way I started scanning for key words, which when I look back was a big shift in the way I thought. The simple practice of looking for key words to use as Basic Ordering Ideas moved my thinking up a gear.

I began to digest information faster and when before studying was a chore to be put of till the last moment, it became a sort of adventure, like piecing together a giant jigsaw puzzle. The whole process was a great stress buster too. In the old days of trying to cram everything in, there was always the nagging feeling you had missed something, but with the mind maps you could see where there were gaps in your knowledge.

Today mind mapping is integral to everything I do, I have grown up with Mindjet's MindManager from version 1.0 onwards. I have conducted requirements gathering sessions, brainstorming workshops, designed software, created presentations and websites, you name it I have mapped it! Mind mapping has enabled me to get more done in a third of the time. Let me give you an example.

Without Mind Mapping

In the traditional requirements gathering workshop done with pen and paper you end up with a room full of post-its, an armful of colourful ineligible flip chart paper and mostly a disinterested audience. You spend the morning gathering requirements and determining what requirements are more important.

The afternoon consists of deciphering the flip chart, writing up the final requirements specification and then emailing all the participants of the workshop.  Not a lot of fun really!

With Mind Mapping

The mind mapping alternative is a lot more fun and engaging.  Turn up with a projector and mind mapping software and suddenly you have a different proposition. If some of the room haven't heard or seen mind mapping before you have  caught the audience's imagination right away. As the session moves on there is a greater feeling of participation and greater sense of moving forward towards your stated objective.

At the end of the session you can print out an mind map and a hard copy word document for your audience to take a way with them. The map can act as a trigger for anything that has been missed or overlooked. From start to finish this only takes 2 hours, from gathering requirements through to workshop attendees leaving with their printed mind map and requirements document.

Lessons Learned

We spend the better part of our lives at work, so why not spend those hours in an engaging and visually stimulating way? By using mind mapping for different tasks in your job, you'll be a more creative and productive person.  At the end of the day you will have produced more, you will feel less stressed and the kid in you gets to draw and doodle too, which is always good!

In the final part of our series, we will look at how mind mapping can be used within projects for task management.

Projects always have tasks associated with them that need to be completed in order to complete or finish the project.  For your project, you could use a mind map to collate all the tasks that need to be carried out.  There are a number of different ways to do this but I usually find that the following method works well in many projects. I usually start with a list of tasks on a seperate piece of paper.

Don't worry if you can't think too far ahead, future unknown tasks can be added later.  I then group these tasks under milestones.  Each milestone is a goal within the project that the team want to achieve.

Start your mind map with an image or keyword for your project. Next add your milestones as branches and then under each milestone add each task as a sub branch.  If your project is a big project and the task list runs into hundreds of items or each milestone contains more than 10 actions then use a seperate mind map for each milestone. For each milestone, list all the tasks that need to be completed to reach this milestone.

For each team member list their tasks.  As each task is done, team members can cross out their task on the mind map. A great benefit from this form of managing a project is that the mind map can be printed and put on a wall in front of the team. 

Everyone in the team can then see it and it is publicly available. Team members can also then see at a glance how far the project or milestone has come and what remains to be done.

Well that's it for the Mind Maps and Projects series.  I hope you've enjoyed it and maybe even applied one or two of these methods in your own project.

Do you dread going into the Monday morning meeting knowing that you'll need to write copious amounts of information in case you miss that important item?  Well here's a mind map recipe so that you will be ready for the meeting and be able to take down all those important points. Here's the structure of the mind map:

Title

At the centre of the mind map write the title of the meeting.  If the meeting is a weekly project review, use "Project Review".  Maybe it's a meeting with a client, "Client Meeting".  Try and use keywords if possible.

Meeting Details

As a first level branch create a "Info" or "Details" branch.  Then under this create these sub-branches: People, Place, Time.  For the people branch add a branch for each person who is attending and write their name.  Under the place branch, write the venue of the meeting.  Finally under the time, add a branch for the date and/or time of the meeting.

The Agenda

For the rest of your mind map add 1st level branches for each of the items on the meeting agenda.  If the meeting has no agenda, then create 4 or 5 empty branches all well spaced out around the title of your mind map.  As the meeting changes subject or topic you can use each of these branches for each topic. Lastly create a branch with the keyword "Summary".  If the person chairing the meeting will summarise the main points of the meeting, then you can add these here.

Taking Notes

Finally as the meeting progresses, you can add notes to each branch containing the relevant agenda item.  Remember to just record keywords and images where possible.  If items on the agenda are related then remember to link these branches on your mind map with a dotted line!

Be Prepared!

It's a good idea to prepare your mind map if possible before the meeting.  Obviously you will know the point of the meeting and it's location and time to record in the mind map.  If you have been notified of the agenda, then add these to your mind map before going in to the meeting.  It will mean you start recording points from the meeting straight away.

In this second part of the series, we’ll look at how we can mind map an often overlooked project document to help each member of the team stay focused on the end goal.

Most projects involve a project charter that acts as a formal document to describe the goal of the project and its members.  Instead of a long winded boring document, let’s use mind mapping to make it more interesting.  By using a mind map you can reduce the amount of space the charter takes up and make it more interesting to the members of the team.

To start with use an image to identify your project's charter.  Next we can create branches for all the elements of the charter.  If you have elements of a project charter that aren't mentioned here then add them to your own mind map. Create a branch for the goal of the project.  Here we want a short explaination of the project and what you hope to achieve at the outcome of the project.  

You may also want to create a sub branches to show the objectives of the project if there is more than one objective. Create a branch for the stakeholders of the project. 

The stakeholders are usually those people who are set to gain something from the completion of the project.  Add a branch for each stakeholder, with sub branches for their contact details.

Create a branch for the members of the project.  The members are those people who are working directly on the project.  Add a branch for each member, with sub branches for their contact details or their role within the project. In the next part of the series, we'll look at how to use a mind map to manage the tasks associated with a project.

You can download the Project Charter mind map (MindManager format) from here.

In our last recipe we looked at creating a mind map of actionable items by context, but what if you have a project or a group of actionable items? A project is simply a collection of more than one actionable items that will achieve a particular goal. This recipe will allow you to quickly create a mind map of your actionable items by project and then by context. Here's the structure of the mind map:

• The centre of the map will be the date this list is effective from. My mind maps usually consist of a weeks items at a time.  In the centre of the map I’ll usually simply use the date as a starting point.
• The 1st level of branches are the different projects you have to complete. Create branches for each of your projects, using keywords or images to represent them.
• The 2nd level of branches are the different contexts your next actions have. Under each project create branches for each context that project has.  As contexts are usually only one or two words, these are probably best simplified by images.
• The final level of branches are the actionable items themselves. For the final level of branches you can now add your actionable items.  Again like out previous recipe, I tend to keep my actionable items short in description, substituting images in where I can.

Now you have your review of your actionable items by project and then by context.  Hopefully now you will have a clearer pictures of things that need to done in order to complete each project.

Over the next few weeks we'll look at three ways where you can apply mind mapping within a project.

So you're about to kick off a new project that you alone will manage.  If you are working on a project with a team, mind mapping can help you along the way.  In this first part of the series, we’ll look at how we can use a brainstorming session to generate ideas and then collate them into a single mind map for the team.

Most projects involve a stage for generating ideas.  Brainstorming is great, as you can often generate multiple ideas and solutions to a problem.  In order to effectively collate your ideas into an initial mind map we need to identify these ideas and solutions, and group them.

So How Do I Brainstorm?

To start with, take a blank page on your flip chart and gather your team around it.  Now just start writing ideas down that the team suggest.  The more ideas you have the better and no idea is too crazy or wild.  Also, no idea can be criticised and all ideas should be welcome.  On their own, ideas might look as though they won't work within the context of the project.  However, what if you used that single idea with two other ideas?  Finally to keep a steady flow of ideas, set a time limit on your brainstorming session. 

This will encourage a more steady flow of ideas. Once your brainstroming session is finished, organise your ideas into groups.  However way you want to group your ideas is up to yourself, but look for recurring themes in your ideas so that you can group them together.  Once you have your ideas grouped together, look for duplicate ideas and combine them into a single idea, while discarding the repeated ideas.

Finally, we can create our mind map of ideas! Use main banches as the idea group with sub branches of ideas.  Remember that there's no prizes for the neatest map, as we'll be discarding the map once the team decides which idea would be best suited for the project.

Expanding Ideas

Now that you have a mind map of ideas you could build on this further.  Two ways of doing this are to take each idea as a team and expand on it, with a small focused brainstorming session, or have each team member take a copy of the mind map away with them have them do their own individual brainstorming sessions. 

Once this is done, you can review your ideas mind map and expand each idea with more branches. In the next part of the series we'll look at transforming the project charter into a simple mind map.