The myth of the “perfect” mind map
May 14th, 2010 | By Chuck Frey | Category: Tips & Techniques
When people first start out using mind mapping – whether in written form or with a software package – they often get stymied by the feeling that they must create a perfect mind map. This mindset, however, can be detrimental to actually producing a high-quality visual map. Here’s why:
Mind mapping works by association. Your brain sees a word in a visual map, and immediately conjures up several or dozens of associated words and concepts, which you could potentially add to your mind map. If you become overly concerned about producing a perfect mind map, chances are you will be second-guessing your brain. When that happens, you may end up clogging your brain with ideas and concepts that you aren’t quite sure how to arrange or that may not be “good enough” to include in a map. This can cause mental constipation, which gets in the way of producing an excellent mind map.
To sidestep this mental tendency, remember if you are using mind mapping software that it is designed to manipulate ideas and concepts with greater flexibility than any other type of software. You can easily use it to do a “mental core dump” – capturing all of your ideas without regard to their structure – and then rearrange them with complete freedom until they make sense to you.
If you are not quite sure where to place a particular idea within your mind map, don’t let that stop you. Create a special branch called a “parking lot” and placed them there for future consideration.
Even if you are mind mapping by hand, the same concept applies: Do the mental core dump and capture all of your ideas on paper. Then, once you have converted your ideas to tangible form on paper, use the first version of your map to create a second one is closer to the ideal that you had in mind.
What has been your experience with this perfection trap? Have you experienced it? If so, how did you get around it?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Brilliant! As a long-time proponent of mapping, I often witness first-time mappers hitting this obstacle. You make two good points here.
First, perfectionists tend to bog down on a detail and can’t proceed with free association until the one detail is solved. To overcome that, I set the stage before mindmapping. I let them know their brain’s two sides need to operate (the free-associating side and the analytical side). I encourage them to let the analytical side take a short vacation while the creative side gets center stage. I assure them that the analytical side gets a chance to shine later in the process. This is enough to convince perfectionists to lighten up with spelling corrections and similar creativity-stifling activities.
Second, your solution of creating a parking lot is the exact solution I advocate to break out of logjams. When an individual or team gets stuck arguing about one item, I let them sense the logjam, then suggest they add it to a parking lot section. Once they see that their item is up SOMEWHERE on the map, they get a sense of reassurance that frees their brains to proceed.
While parking lots are always an option, during the initial brain dumps it may help to allow the same text (wording) on more than one sub branch. Then as the mapping effort progresses revisit the duplications to clarify understanding or the intended meaning. Doing so can reveal important facets about the issue(s) at hand.
Absolutely – great point! If a topic appears in more than one place in your map, it may be more important than you realize. The mind map is an excellent way to “surface” that!
This is what i ALWAYS struggle with, especially when it comes to hand-drawn mindmaps. I get completely obsessed trying to figure out the spaces and categories. I do know that I should ideally do an idea dump first, but unfortunately I happen to be the sort who finds it difficult to sustain interest… so it’s either I obsess with getting the “perfect” mindmap and do my work at the same time, or I end up dumping things down and never organizing them after that!
Still, this is a good and much-needed reminder! And maybe I should consider experimenting both ways (dumping vs obsessing) to see which turns out to be more useful!
Great post! It’s a reminder that sometimes “perfect” can be the enemy of “good”. And counter productive.
We may sometimes have to remember to give ourselves permission to not strive for perfection on the first pass.
Not only important but timely, I’ve spent a week trying to get one map perfect and a few weeks trying to take a separate brain dump/mindmap of information and put it into actionable items for client(Executive Team & Staff) and myself and a business partner. Settled in on the Covey Quadrants (Fire-Fighting, Production)
Pavel ABQ: You pointed one of the reasons I’ve always disliked the parking lot. If it’s on the map not only may it reappear on different branches but you may be more apt to create relationships to other topics on any branch. Sometimes I like to assign the topic a resource (called TBD, but could be Parking Lot) its less distracting then an entire branch or major sub-topic named Parking Lot.
The answer is some where in the middle, its just hard to find when you in the middle of creating it, so always good to have a separate resource you trust that can hint “your obsessing” or “too much dumping”.
Great article and very important. I all tell participants of my trainings that they should rather think in different versions of their Mind Map then trying to be perfect with the first trial. If you work with pen and paper there is always the chance of doing another version. This is not extra-work to be avoided but rather a chance to rethink a topic and make even deeper connections and learn.
Hi Chuck,
Once again, your post is a really inspiring topic.
Yes, the need for perfection is often the great enemy of creativity. It is the most paralyzing weapon ever…
I’m a bit afraid of this idea of “parking lot”. I prefer to explore a recurrent word through another mind map. It is the advice I always give to beginners : if a word comes more than twice in your map, that means it is something important – a new solution, a pending problem, something that was subconsciously waiting for an opportunity to emerge and your mind map is this opportunity, so take it and explore the theme further in a brand new mind map…
Thank you for your commitment in this job,
Marco.
This is something that I’ve never been able to understand in Mind Mapping, and I’ve already commented on this: why do people restrict their maps to Mind Maps, forcing you sometimes to choose what branch you’re going to link a node to, whereas with a Concept Map, you can link it to however many branches you wish (à la Personal Brain).
It seems to me that this can remove the need for a Parking Lot: just link your node to whatever branch seems appropriate at the time, knowing that you can later link it to more.
Chris.
Brilliant! As a long-time proponent of mapping, I often witness first-time mappers hitting this obstacle. You make two good points here.
First, perfectionists tend to bog down on a detail and can’t proceed with free association until the one detail is solved. To overcome that, I set the stage before mindmapping. I let them know their brain’s two sides need to operate (the free-associating side and the analytical side). I encourage them to let the analytical side take a short vacation while the creative side gets center stage. I assure them that the analytical side gets a chance to shine later in the process. This is enough to convince perfectionists to lighten up with spelling corrections and similar creativity-stifling activities.
Second, your solution of creating a parking lot is the exact solution I advocate to break out of logjams. When an individual or team gets stuck arguing about one item, I let them sense the logjam, then suggest they add it to a parking lot section. Once they see that their item is up SOMEWHERE on the map, they get a sense of reassurance that frees their brains to proceed.
This is what i ALWAYS struggle with, especially when it comes to hand-drawn mindmaps. I get completely obsessed trying to figure out the spaces and categories. I do know that I should ideally do an idea dump first, but unfortunately I happen to be the sort who finds it difficult to sustain interest… so it’s either I obsess with getting the “perfect” mindmap and do my work at the same time, or I end up dumping things down and never organizing them after that!
Still, this is a good and much-needed reminder! And maybe I should consider experimenting both ways (dumping vs obsessing) to see which turns out to be more useful!
Great article and very important. I all tell participants of my trainings that they should rather think in different versions of their Mind Map then trying to be perfect with the first trial. If you work with pen and paper there is always the chance of doing another version. This is not extra-work to be avoided but rather a chance to rethink a topic and make even deeper connections and learn.
All those perfect mind maps you see have been re-drafted several times.
A map that I have for accessing my businesses financial information was started two years ago has 268 topics, 774 words and 119 hyperlinks. It has had 95 revisions (saving after a period of editing). It will never be perfect. http://ow.ly/3qTWx
A map created as a draft and then edited to produce a good representation of a speech has 129 topics, 433 words, 8 hyperlinks and 29 revisions. I tend to save these maps frequently to reduce my chance of losing the editing. http://ow.ly/3qTMY
You can leave this inhibition behind, even as a new user, if you use concept mapping software that does not impose any 'reorganization' limitations. SmartIdeas is one that is fluid and since it's concept mapping, it does not even enforce a hierarchy: http://smarttech.com/smartideas