No matter what your line of work, chances are you must deal with ideas. Either you’re creating them as part of your work, or are having them submitted to you by your subordinates. In either case, having an effective process for evaluating ideas effectively and selecting the best ones for implementation is becoming critically important.

In this new Effective Mind Maps report, I analyze a mind map that brings a simple, common-sense process to creative problem solving – from clearly defining your problem or challenge, to listing potential solutions, evaluating them and identifying the best one for implementation.

In this report, I go deeper than ever, not only analyzing what the author of this mind map has created and what can be improved about it, I show you what these recommended changes would look like. So I’m not only telling you, I’m showing you what to do. This makes it easier for you to adapt these ideas to your needs.

This report is only available to members of the Mind Mapping Insider membership program. It contains a wealth of resources that can help you to be more productive, creative and have a greater impact in your job. It’s not enough to have a mind mapping tool – you need the insights to use it in ways that deliver value and enhance your reputation. That’s what this program is all about! Click here for more details.

Most often, we become aware of the problem when we experience the symptoms. The engine in your car begins sputtering. Customers are angry, because they did not receive their shipments of widgets on time. Your company’s employee retention rate suddenly plummets. These occurrences do not represent the problem itself, but rather are indicators of a deeper root cause. Once you have documented the symptoms, you can follow them back to the root causes.

On the other side of the mind map cluster we have results. This mind map depicts what the ideal future situation should look like. Your car runs smoothly. Customer satisfaction is at an all-time high, and so is employee retention. Once you have a clear picture on the screen of what the ideal result should look like, you can then begin filling in the intermediate steps, brainstorming ideas that will take you from your present state to your stated objectives.

Thompson’s mind map cluster does an excellent job of helping us to visualize the relationships between the root causes of our problem, its visible symptoms and how we’d ideally like to solve it. Once all of this information is arrayed in a mind map, it clearly suggests potential solutions.

In Thompson’s vernacular, a trigger word is the central word or concept that the middle of your mind map. He encourages the reader to generate several mind maps utilizing the following trigger words or phrases:

When solved… This phrase refers to a desirable future state, and helps your mind to a picture what your situation will look like when the problem is solved. You can then make some inferences about the steps that you need to take to get there.

Comes from… This phrase is designed to help you to get to the root of your problem by identifying symptoms, which are the result of underlying causes. Don’t be surprised if this map doesn’t generate a lot of killer ideas, warns Thompson. But it should give you a better understanding of your problem, challenge or current situation. And that is indeed a valuable thing!

Metaphorical trigger word: To gain a different perspective on your problem, Thompson recommends utilizing a metaphor or simile to reframe your thinking. To select an appropriate metaphor or simile, ask yourself, “my current challenge is like…” This should help your mind to break loose some fresh ideas and insights.

Opposite trigger word: As Thompson points out, you can often figure out what something is by exploring what it is not. Instead of putting your problem at the center of your mind map, write down or type in its opposite, and then brainstorm around that.

Random trigger word: To give you yet another perspective on your problem, use place a random trigger word at the center of your mind map. You can generate one of these words in the following way: Go to the dictionary, turn to a page at random and blindly point to a word. Use that word as your trigger word. If you don’t have access to a dictionary, take a walk, and look for things that catch your eye. Use the first one of those as your trigger word.

Good luck trying out this intriguing set of creative problem-solving techniques! If you do all five of them, you should end up with five new perspectives on your challenge, which should put you much closer to brainstorming a breakthrough solution to it!

If you were to ask every manager on Earth to list their five least favorite managerial activities, all of them would include “putting out fires” on their list. We all know what it’s like to have to put out a fire – a fire starts when somebody screws up and suddenly your project is in jeopardy. You, being the person in charge, inevitably have to swoop in and put the fire out, and putting it out requires a lot of last minute scrambling, long nights, weekends in the office, and plenty of stress.

Fires occur because of poor communication. Perhaps someone doesn’t understand why what they’re doing is important or who is actually responsible for what. But somewhere along the way some part of a major project or assignment falls apart and you, the manager, are the lucky one who gets to put it back together. It gets worse: bad communication is endemic, so you’re going to be putting out lots of fires. You move from crisis to crisis, fixing care of one urgent, mission-critical screw-up after another. You’re stressed, you have too much to do, you can’t go home early, it becomes harder to schedule vacations, and on and on.

But wait a minute – we identified the disease responsible for creating crises: bad communication. Rather than treat the symptoms of bad communication, the fires, why don’t you start treating the disease of bad communication? How can you communicate in a manner that makes your specifications absolutely clear and easy for your co-workers to remember?

A better way to communicate

How can we communicate both clearly and memorably? Do we simply repeat ourselves more? Communicate slower? No.

Instead, we should communicate visually. We’ve all heard the expression “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and it’s true – what takes one thousand words to explain correctly can be described much more easily using a simple picture.

Not only is it easier to communicate something using a picture, but it’s also much easier for people to remember things that have been communicated to them visually. Psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University has studied the art of communication, and his studies have shown that:

• People remember 10% of what they hear;
• 20% of what they read; and
• 80% of what they see and do.

Most people are visual learners; a recent study by the U.S. Federal Government suggested that up to 83% of human learning occurs visually. The study also indicated that information which is communicated visually is retained up to six times greater than information which is communicated by spoken word alone.

Managers’ problems can’t resolve their mis-communication problems with their teams by merely speaking more or writing more – you can’t scale failure into success. Instead, we should augment what we’ve been trying to say with pictures. It’s that simple.

What can be communicated visually?

Let’s say that you’re managing a project for your company; like any project, you have to come up with a project plan before your team can begin work. Most folks simply use their project plans to provide answers to the six classic questions:

• Who?
• What?
• When?
• Where?
• Why?
• How?

However, in project manager speech, these six questions usually look something more like this:

• Who is responsible for this?
• What needs to be done?
• When will this be done?
• Where will we focus our efforts?
• Why is this important?
• How are we going to do this?

So, how can you be sure that your answers are clear and easy to remember? By communicating visually. For instance, if the project you were managing were a construction project, you might answer these questions using the graphics pictured above right.

None of these graphics are particularly difficult to produce with today’s visual diagramming software. These types of graphics are called “business graphics” because they are simple and easy enough for the average businessperson to use; you don’t need to be an artist to be able to produce clear business graphics which communicate your plans clearly and memorably.

Mind mapping software can be an  excellent tool for deconstructing a challenge, analyzing  its root causes and envisioning creative solutions to it.

The Tom Peters Times e-newsletter for October contains  a story that does an excellent job of illustrating this  principle in action:

“As a young Army Officer, I was once tasked with  planning an attack on an enemy position. For hours I  pored over maps, studying known friendly and enemy  dispositions, weather, tide, intelligence reports, and so  on. I got completely bogged down in my thinking. I had  lost clarity. My Commanding Officer offered me a twenty-  minute flight in a helicopter to sight the ground over which  we were to advance. Twenty-one minutes later I had a  crystal clear plan in my head and knew exactly what we  had to do. I had quite literally gained altitude over my  problem. Heightened my awareness.

“Do you have ‘altitude’ over your organization, or are you  bogged down in the detail? Do you have a brutally clear  view of your current performance? Can you define the  competitive challenges and disruptive forces at work on  you?”

I love this story, because mind mapping software enables  you to create a “helicopter view” of your challenge that  reveals its core elements and relationships – and therefore  helps you to solve it faster and more creatively!

Please share your thoughts in the comments section below this post on these questions:

• How has the fundamental nature of business problems changed during the last decade?
• Have they increased in complexity? If so, why?
• How can mind mapping software help in problem solving?

I look forward to your thoughts!