How does mind mapping help you to mine your best ideas?
May 27th, 2010 | By Chuck Frey | Category: Tips & Techniques
In most types of mining, the valuable mineral you’re after isn’t just sitting on top of the ground, waiting for you to pick it up. Usually it lies under a layer of “overburden” – dirt or other useless material that must be removed in order to reveal the seam of rich, valuable minerals.
Mining our very best ideas is similar in many respects.
Mining for mental “gold”
When we first start brainstorming – alone or in a group – the first ideas that emerge are the ones that are top of mind. These ideas usually are not our most creative ones. In order to access the “gold” – the really valuable ideas that usually lie at the periphery of our thinking, we need some way to record and set aside the mental overburden to make room for the high-value ideas to emerge.
If we don’t have a way to do this, or if we stop after brainstorming a handful of pretty good ideas, we’ll never get to the much richer seams of priceless ideas that lie deeper within the recesses of our incredible brain.
Not surprisingly, mind mapping is an awesome tool for dealing with these initial, lower-value ideas in a structured way. It gives us a place to record them for future reference, but more importantly it enables us to set them aside to make way for the more valuable ideas at the edge of our thinking to emerge.
Refining your best ideas
In addition, as we brainstorm and record these high-value ideas, mind mapping gives us an organized way to “refine” them – in much the same way that many types of raw minerals must be processed to remove impurities and concentrate them, which significantly increases their value.
What’s been your experience? Do you find that mind mapping enables you to tap into the deeper seams of your mind to uncover more valuable ideas?
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Yes, mindmapping in a wider sense helps me. But the valuable ideas are not like NODES on the map but rather like new, undiscovered LINKS between them. Therefore I prefer mapping applications that embrace rearrangeable floating topics, and cross references, like concept maps or topic maps. But I have not yet found the ideal application.
Matthias, I recently discovered this freeware graphing software called yEd.
http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html
It is really good for concept maps, semantic maps and Business processing maps. It will also do mind maps and flow charts and a wide range of other graphing charts but you must draw the links yourself.
It has a excellent layout system where your ideas are rearranged in a hierarchy or in circular form which can really help you see the various realtionships in new ways.
I have the same issue as Matthias, regarding Mind Maps vs. the less limited Concept Maps that allow linking nodes to multiple “parents”. So far, the only tool I’ve found that seems to do the trick is Personal Brain; but since I tend to procrastinate, I haven’t taken the time to try it out yet. I’ll check out yEd first, since it’s free…
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