“Information anxiety… causes people to put off decisions so they have more time to think.  Time drags out as they try to process information.  It takes so long for them to find, understand and prioritize their options that business processes slow to a crawl.  By the time anyone takes action, situations have turned into crises and stress levels are high – the worst possible environment for good decision-making.”

As Steve Rothwell points out in a recent post in his Peace of Mind blog, the same thing often happens when a team is struggling to define a new project, and no one wants to commit themselves to it until it is defined. Perfection becomes the enemy of the good, and paralysis once again results.

Both of these challenges can be tackled by visualizing them, Gray explains:

“A visual explanation clears away this fog of confusion by depicting complex information visually, in order to make it more clear, concise and concrete. This allows people to quickly grasp key issues and make faster, better decisions.”

“A picture can connect to the strategic with the tactical in a way that no other communication possibly can. It can clearly articulates who does what, with whom, and when. And that is surely worth at least a thousand words.”

Visual mapping gives you a flexible, open “canvas” where you can capture key questions, gaps in your existing information, key contacts you need to approach to find that information, and track tasks, assignments and deadlines. It can also help you to evaluate the information that you have gathered, separating the proverbial wheat from the chaff and enabling you to overcome information overload. And it can become a potent tool for collaboration among team members and for tracking team and individual progress, capturing lessons learned and other key information. In short, it’s the perfect antidote to project paralysis.

If you haven’t tried to employ mind mapping software to bring structure, definition – and, most importantly, desirable action – from a new, ambiguously scoped project, why not do so today? I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results!

Successive approximation is a problem solving strategy that many of us use without even being aware of it. Conversation between two people is a perfect example, Gray explains. You say something to the other person, and they reply. Based on their verbal and non-verbal feedback to what you said, you discover something about that person, which you then incorporate into your next reply.

How does this concept apply to visual thinking? When you’re first trying to solve a problem or create a plan, your first efforts are an approximation, a guess – an incomplete picture, if you will. This is especially true if you’re facing a unique problem or challenge that you’ve never experienced before, because in situations like this, you have no prior context to rely upon. In these types of situations, your problem-solving power comes not from using a linear style of thinking, but from getting feedback and then improving your thinking, in a fast-moving, iterative cycle, as Gray explains here:

“If you wait until your plan is complete – till every contingency is covered – you will never get anywhere. Progress, not perfection, is the goal… Build feedback loops into your execution mechanisms, so you can improve as you move… (Use) feedback… to enrich your thinking and improve your understanding of the situation.  Feedback is the most important and often neglected piece of the puzzle. When you first contextualize, you are guessing. When you incorporate feedback and use it to re-contextualize, you are improving… Success does not come from perfect execution, but from a fast-moving cycle of continuous improvement. The faster you go, the more you learn. The more you learn, the stronger you get.”

Finally, how does this concept apply specifically to mind mapping? Your first iteration of a mind map is an approximation of the existing situation. To get feedback, you can share the map with others; they can annotate the map with their comments, or you can simply walk away from the map for a day or two, and then come back to it with fresh eyes. In either case, you are improving your map from a rough approximation to a more accurate representation of the situation, using an iterative feedback cycle.

Mind mapping software has another benefit when it comes to successive approximation: As you implement your project, you can incorporate what you’ve learned into your map. In this way, it becomes a living document, not something you create once and then forget about. It becomes a management tool that you can utilize to help envision and make mid-course corrections to keep your project on track.

I think this is a powerful concept that is very relevant to the needs of many business-oriented visual mappers. What do you think?