Many diagramming software programs today are like Swiss Army Knives – they can create almost any kind of diagram you could imagine, including mind maps. But mind mapping isn’t usually their strong suit. If you try to use Visio, SmartDraw or other similar programs to create mind maps, here are the shortcomings you will run into:

1. The map creation process is time-consuming: The process of dragging and dropping a shape to the workspace, typing text into it and then adding a connector line is too slow to capture the “flow” of ideas when you’re brainstorming alone – and completely inadequate for a group brainstorming session, where the ideas may come fast and furious. Contrast that to the typical mind mapping program, which enables you to use keyboard hot keys to quickly add topics. A number of the programs actually have brainstorming modes, which are designed to enable you to quickly add a succession of ideas to your map, helping you and your colleagues to keep the creative “flow” going.

2. No ability to attach documents, links and notes to individual topics: This is where a lot of the value of mind maps in business resides. If you’re working on a project or conducting research, you can attach many different types of resources to your mind maps – in effect, creating a flexible visual database of all of the resources you’ve collected. Diagramming software enables you to create a set of shapes and connect them to each other in different ways. That’s all.

3. Limited ability to expand and collapse branches: One of the unsung capabilities of mind mapping software is the ability to expand and collapse branches, either on an individual basis, or by level. This enables you to see a high-level overview of your topic (with the lower-level branches closed) AND drill down to the details (with all of the branches opened) within the same visual document. Diagramming software only does this on a rudimentary, topic-by-topic basis.

4. Limited ability to export your map’s contents to other formats: Most mind mapping software enables you to export all or part of your maps to other types of productivity software, such as Word, PowerPoint and Project. This enables you to utilize it as a “front end” tool, where you gather and organize your information in skeletal form and then export it to one of these other applications to put flesh on the bones. Diagramming software can’t do this. At most, you can export your diagram in a view-only, image-based format, such as a JPG, GIF or a PDF. I just tried this in SmartDraw, for example. Exporting a simple mind map to Word opens a new document and simply copies the map into it as an image. You can’t really output your diagrams in a format where you can still manipulate its elements.

5. No ability to import data: A number of the high-end mind mapping programs enable you to pull data from other applications into your mind maps, such as Excel spreadsheet ranges, e-mail messages from Outlook, RSS feeds and the results of SharePoint searches. Diagramming software is self contained. This limits the number and type of business applications for which you can utilize it. If you want to create an art element that will be placed within a report, that’s fine. But if you want something you can interact with, a diagramming program won’t help you.

6. No project or task management capabilities with a mind map: Most mind mapping software enables you to treat selected topics as tasks, adding start and end dates, status (percentage complete), priority and any resources assigned to it. Some of these programs enable you to convert your project map into a Gantt chart, where you can see a visual timeline of your project and any dependencies.

7. Not easy to embellish topics: Mind mapping software enables you to embellish topics with images, symbols and icons – which add visual interest to our mind maps, but more importantly, help us to visually classify the information contained in our mind maps. Mind mapping software ships with hundreds of symbols and icons, which you can use to designate urgent items, priority levels (A,B,C or 1,2,3), flag items as needing additional research or attenion, and more. Diagramming software doesn’t usually contain such symbol libraries.

So there you have it. Clearly, diagramming software leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to mind mapping. If you think you’re going to need to do both mind mapping and other types of diagrams, then I would consider investing in both types of software. I personally use SmartDraw 2012, and highly recommend it for producing many types of business diagrams.

It’s time to set goals in preparation for the new year. If you’re like most people, you take whatever you accomplished this year and will increment it upward by X percent. But what if you had a way to dream bigger dreams for 2012, to set ambitious goals that would help you to get much closer to your ideal future? Here’s a simple, two-step visual method for doing just that:

1. Envision your ideal future state
2. Work backward from there to the present, “reverse engineering” the steps you need to take to get there

That’s it! Yes, it’s simple. But it works like a charm. Some of history’s greatest thinkers and business leaders have used this method to achieve phenomenal success: Henry Ford, who envisioned a car that would be inexpensive enough for the average working man to afford, or Steve Jobs, who envisioned “insanely great” products and then pushed his people and suppliers to extraordinary lengths to bring his ideas to life.

Like mind mapping, this goal-setting technique is non-linear. It forces your brain to leap out of its well-worn, comfortable, incremental paths of thinking and take a creative leap into the future. It forces you to ask yourself, “What could I accomplish or bring about if there were no limitations?” Once you know what the end goal is, you can work on identifying any barriers or limitations and making plans to eliminate or sidestep them.

So what are you waiting for? Dream big for 2012!

This diagram was created using SmartDraw 2012. To download the .SDR file used to create it, please click here.

Sometimes you want to add a little pizzazz to a report. You don’t want a complex mind map that’s going to potentially confuse the stakeholders to whom you need to share a report. You just want something that’s going to jump off the page, that’s going to command attention AND communicate some useful information, visually. That’s when you may want to consider creating a highly stylized mind maplike the one above. It’s simple, but it packs a lot of visual impact.

In this new Mind Mapping Insiders tutorial, I demonstrate how to create this type of visual map, using SmartDraw VP.

This report is only visible to members of the Mind Mapping Insider program; if you’re a member, please be sure you’re logged in, so you can see the link to the video and its associated resources.

To sign up for the Mind Mapping Insider program, please click here. You’ll open yourself up to a wealth of advanced strategies and techniques that will help you to become a better visual thinker, problem solver and project manager – all for the cost of a premium coffee per week. Why not make an investment in yourself today?

The company has a very talented artist who can translate my ideas into polished, professional looking finished products. But I needed a way to communicate my ideas clearly to him. And I was looking for something a bit better than a simple pencil sketch.

My tool of choice for prototyping my marketing and promotional ideas during the last year has been SmartDraw. Although it has been designed to help users to create many types of business diagrams, I have found it to be equally adept at creating mockups of marketing materials. I simply open a new flow charting diagram, which gives me access to the shapes and tools I need.

As you can see from the examples in this blog post, it’s very easy to import images into the workspace, and resize them as needed. I haven’t found a way to crop them to remove extraneous elements, however, so I do that in Photoshop and them import the trimmed images.

Examples of what I’ve created in SmartDraw

Frames of an animated GIF ad: Each frame is represented by a separate rectangle, so the artist can see the wording I’d like to appear, in order, from top to bottom (shown at the top of this blog post).

A direct mailer for a new product: Note the wording and arrow to the left of the mailer design (red highlight in the image at right), which I used to ask the artist to make some modifications to this image. In this case, I used SmartDraw not only to “show,” but also to “tell.”

A wireframe layout for a web page redesign (not pictured here).

Why does SmartDraw work so well for this type of work? Because most marketing materials are based upon a grid type of layout. In other words, brochures, web pages, flyers and other marketing materials are designed using a combination of square and rectangular regions – which are very easy to approximate in this powerful business diagramming program.

Benefits

Here are some of the benefits I’ve discovered by using this approach:

• The artist has a clearer idea of what I want to see created.
• I’m able to bounce a rough prototype, including text headlines and major copy points, off of my boss – without tying up even an hour of the artist’s time.
• Once I have my boss’ feedback, I open up SmartDraw, make the necessary modifications to the mockup and then give it to the artist for further development and refinement. I encourage him to use his creative license to improve upon what I have created.
• This process eliminates a lot of back and forth iterations between me, my boss and the artist. What I give to the artist is much closer to the wording and design of the final piece – which enables the artist to use his time working on higher value added activities, rather than making repeated tweaks to the design and wording of the piece.

Other marketing applications of SmartDraw

I also use SmartDraw to develop illustrations that explain how a product works. In this case, I used the program to depict a high-level overview of a complex training curriculum. I was asked by my employer’s salespeople to create a new diagram (pictured at right) that drilled down into a single lesson, showing how all of its elements fit together.

In summary, I have found SmartDraw to be an essential tool as part of my job as the marketing manager for this safety training products firm.

Topics covered include:

• Uses of PersonalBrain vs. traditional mind mapping programs
• Publishing visual maps to a web page that can be viewed without Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Which mind mapping programs enable you to attach multiple objects per topic?
• What is the best way to share maps and collaborate with people who don’t do mind mapping?
• What do you know about SmartDraw? How does it compare to mind mapping software?
• Recommended Android apps

Please be sure to send me your questions for the November mind mapping coaching call. You can use the contact form on this blog to submit them.

At the end of this year, the coaching calls will become part of the Mind Mapping Insider membership program. In other words, the contents of coaching calls starting in January 2011 will only be available to members. Click here to learn more and join the Mind Mapping Insiders program.

Topics covered include:

• An assessment of SmartDraw as a business diagramming tool
• Embedding mathematical formulas into mind map topics
• Mind mapping programs with a personal wiki view
• Mind mapping apps for Android smart phones
• How to manage a weekly to-do mind map more effectively
• The best strategy for managing multiple mind maps, so none of them get “lost”
• The “brainstorming” mode on Microsoft Visio

Here are links to the software programs I mentioned in this audio presentation:

• SmartDraw
• MindView Business 3.0
• Microsoft Visio
• Thinking Space for Android
• Mind Map Memo for Android

Please be sure to send me your questions for the October mind mapping coaching call. You can use the contact form on this blog to submit them.

Please keep in mind that my plan is to make the first few coaching calls public, so you can get a sense of their format and value. After that, the contents of future coaching calls will only be available to Mind Mapping Insider members.

All that changed in January when I took a new job as marketing manager for a small safety training products firm. My first major project has been to help this company to launch an ambitious, multi-faceted training curriculum to the mining industry. Based on a blended learning model, it incorporates web-based training modules, a PC-based simulator, and a variety of on-the-job training tools for trainers and trainees. It can also include a learning management system and several other elements.

The bottom line? This is a complex product. Obviously, it would take a mind-numbing volume of words to adequately describe how all of the pieces worked together to provide a powerful training solution. How could we communicate it quickly and simply to prospective customers?

Being a visual kinda guy, I realized almost immediately that one of the best ways to do that would be to create a visual that showed how all of these elements work together to provide a complete training solution. Using SmartDraw 2010, I created a series of diagrams that became awesome talking points with my boss, as we worked our way through successive iterations and came closer to a complete and accurate representation of the training curriculum.

Here’s what I learned about SmartDraw 2010 in the process of working with it during the past two-and-a-half months:

• It is intuitive and easy to use; all of its functions behaved as I would expect them to, and there were no ugly surprises.
• It makes great use of right-click commands, so you can accomplish common tasks without mousing over to the ribbon toolbar.
• The set of templates in SmartDraw 2010 is very impressive, and more importantly, very useful. You can easily take one of them and use it as a starting point for your own diagram.
• The straightforward, well-designed set of diagramming tools in this program made it easy for me to quickly create some compelling, great-looking diagrams that got incorporated into a number of planning documents, and could also be given to our developers and designers, to incorporate directly into sales brochures and web pages – or to inspire them to create something more polished and colorful in Adobe Illustrator.

The bottom line is that SmartDraw 10 has helped to make me look good to my new employer. I think they appreciate the fact that I’m able to think and represent my ideas visually – thanks to this excellent program.

Software for process mapping

Doug: I was asked today to recommend a software tool to help a company map out the work processes for its advertising executives.  The reflexive response was “Visio.”  However, something gnawing away inside me suggests this might be a good mind mapping application.  Have I lost my marbles and entered the realm where everything looks like a mind mapping application?  If I haven’t lost my mind could you suggest a place where I could turn to demonstrate this makes sense?

Chuck: If you’re planning projects, then mind mapping software can be an excellent “front end” tool to help organize them. On the other hand, if what you’re doing is purely business process mapping, then I’d recommend Visio or SmartDraw, which is a great, less expensive alternative.

ConceptDraw MINDMAP

Stuart: I don’t recall seeing much about ConceptDraw MINDMAP, yet I have it on my Mac and like it better than others I have used including MindMatters. Are you familiar with it?

Chuck: Yes, I am. It’s a good program, which I last reviewed here. It is powerful enough to handle the needs of most business users, plus it enables you to do some unique things as far as adding vector-based drawings to your maps – because ConceptDraw MINDMAP is produced by the same developer as the powerful ConceptDraw vector illustration program.

Which mind mapping software is best for me?

Jawn: I’m lost in this ocean of choices. Do you have a guide on which software is best suited for me?

Chuck: Yes, there are too many mind mapping software programs on the market today, with more being introduced on a regular basis. The best software for you depends upon what you want to get done. Some programs are better suited for brainstorming, while others have some strengths in the area of project management. I would start with a clear picture of what you want to DO, then download the trial versions of the programs that are focused on those areas. You really need to do this in order to figure out which one is the best match for your workflow. If you’re completely new to the concept of mind mapping, you may want to start out with a free program like FreeMind or XMIND, or one of the new genre of web-based mind mapping tools, which are free or available at an inexpensive subscription fee. You can find reviews of many of the best mind mapping tools here and a comprehensive list of links to these tools on the resources page of this blog.

Boundaries for non-contiguous topics

Glen: Do you know of any mindmapping software that enables you to draw a “cloud” around topics in more than one parent link? (in other words, a cloud that extends across several branches that may not be adjacent to one another in your map).

Chuck: No, unfortunately, I don’t know of any mind mapping tool that is capable of doing this. As I understand it, what you want to do is show that these disparate topics are related. You can accomplish this using relationship lines.

Send me your questions

Got a question for me? You can submit it using the contact form on this blog.

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.

SmartDraw.com has just launched SmartDraw 2009, a new version of its popular diagramming and mapping software that features a wealth of improvements – including the ability to animate or “sequence” your diagrams when exporting them to PowerPoint, and several new mind mapping enhancements.

What is sequencing and how does it work?

Sequencing in SmartDraw 2009 is the ability to reveal parts of your diagram, one mouse click at a time, so as not to overwhelm your audience. For example, sequencing could be used to display each quadrant of a 2×2 matrix and its contents, one at a time, in much the same way as you can control how individual text and image elements are transitioned into a PowerPoint slide.

This new functionality is available via a new PowerPoint tab in the SmartDraw 2009 ribbon toolbar. Many types of diagrams in SmartDraw 2009 are “pre-sequenced” so they will display their contents in the most advantageous way possible when you export them to PowerPoint. You can also manually tweak what appears at each step in your diagram’s sequencing by selecting a “frame” number from a drop-down list and then manually editing your diagram’s content in that step of the animation. The “what’s new” page on the SmartDraw website contains a brief video demonstration that clearly depicts how this works. It looks very simple and intuitive to work with.

Enhanced mind mapping capabilities

For a number of years, SmartDraw has been able to create rudimentary mind maps. With each new version, the developer has added new capabilities to create this type of diagram, and SmartDraw 2009 is no exception. The upgrade page contains a video that shows how these new capabilities work:

Automatic styling: This new capability, which can be toggled on and off, automatically alters the size and shape of topics to correspond to the level they are within a map. For example, let’s say you drag and drop a sub-topic from the fourth to the second level of your mind map. The topic’s shape, color and font style changes to match the style of other second-level topics.

Promote and demote commands: The mind map dialog box in SmartDraw 2009 now includes buttons that enable you to promote and demote topics within your map, one level up or down.

Show and hide detail: Topics which have sub-topics now display an icon. Clicking on it collapses the levels below it. This is pretty rudimentary functionality for most mind mapping programs. I’m surprised it took SmartDraw this long to add it to this program.

Export to outline: Another new button in the mind map dialog box exports your map to a text (.txt) format, with topics indented based on their level within your mind map. SmartDraw says this makes it easy to share your map with others – but actually it only shares the information that you have gathered and organized. I’m still not sure if you can actually export a mind map in other formats. I’ll have to take a closer look at this when I receive a copy of the program from the developer.

Other new features

While sequencing is the most important new feature in SmartDraw 2009, it’s not the only one. Here is a summary of some of the other new and improved capabilities of this robust diagramming program:

• Smarter flowcharts: You can now insert split paths in your flowcharts (where one step in a process splits into 2 or more sub-processes) with a single mouse click.
• Enhancements to project management charts: SmartDraw 2009 enables you to insert dependencies into Gantt charts, group tasks, add milestones and assign resources to tasks.
• Smarter organizational charts: Similar to the functionality in a mind map, you can now click an icon to hide or show branches within your organizational charts.
• 3D charts: SmartDraw’s bar and area charts can now be rendered in 3D, a big plus for presenting data in business presentations.

Conclusion

From what I can see, SmartDraw 2009 looks like a worthy upgrade to this powerful diagramming program. I hope to get a copy to play around with soon, and I’ll let you know what I think. I wasn’t that impressed with SmartDraw 2008, and the way its new diagram wizard tied my hands behind my back. Hopefully this new version has corrected that!