Such is the case with this week’s Effective Maps subject. The author of this map was apparently trying to fit as much as possible on a single sheet of paper. The result is a densely-packed mind map that is somewhat hard to read and interpret.

In this new Effective Mind Maps report, we’ll look at some ways in which this regional planning mind map could be improved.

This report is only accessible to Mind Mapping Insider members. If you’re ready to step up and become a more strategic player in your organization, sign up today to join this group of MMI members who have made the decision to be more influential and creative in their jobs.

In some cases, these lines go behind existing topics, which is really a pain in the butt. It just looks dumb. Several programs provide one or more drag handles that you can use to change the curvature of these lines, but you’re limited in how much you can reshape them. Why can’t you draw more complex lines, like you can in a vector drawing program like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw?

Finally, one developer has done just that. NovaMind Pty. Ltd. recently launched an update to NovaMind 5 for Windows that enables you to draw more complex relationship lines, and does so in a very intelligent manner (click on the map image above right to view a larger version). The NovaMind Blog also contains a video where Gideon King shows what the new link lines feature can do.

You know me: I can’t just take a developer’s word for it. I’ve gotta download the update and play around with it, so I can tell you if it’s everything the developer says it is. I’m quite impressed with NovaMind’s new “link lines.” Here’s what I like about them:

• You simple draw a path that you want the line to follow, and the program smooths it out. Nice!
• Multiple control points along the line give you a finer level of control over the line’s shape; you can easily delete control points to further smooth its curvature.
• Adding a new control point is as simple has hovering the cursor over the line; a hollow circle appears on the line and you simply left click your mouse to insert a new control point at that location.
• When you select a control point, a faint line appears that extends to either side of it and it has a pair of handles, one at each end, which you can drag in or out, or rotate it to further shape the line (see close-up image at right).
• Right-clicking the link line gives you access to a properties palette that gives you further options for tweaking the appearance of it.

In short, this new feature is easy and intuitive to use, and is ideal when you want to show a relationship between two widely separated topics in a larger mind map.

If you already own NovaMind 5 for Windows, this is a free update. If you don’t, then I strongly urge you to check it out. The program’s development team is committed to ongoing innovation, and they continue to gain ground as one of the key players in the mind mapping software market. Keep up the great work, guys!

“A mind map is like a CD. You can jump right to the information you’re interested in. Linear notes are like audio tapes. You waste time wading line by line through the content in hopes of getting to what you want.”

Fond memories of audio tapes – not!

For those of you too young to have had much experience with audio tapes, they were the ultimate linear medium in the 1960s and 70s. With a music cassette, it was impossible to fast forward to the beginning of a specific song. You were guessing, at best. And you usually got it wrong. The whole concept of moving to a specific spot on the tape was foriegn in those pre-CD days. Often, it was more efficient just to listen all the way through the audio tape until you got to the part you really wanted to hear. It was a pain in the ass, honestly!

(Just to clarify: A linear medium is any form of information that forces us to move through it in a straight-line progression. We can’t jump to the pieces we want. We must follow a single path from beginning to end.)

Think about how much a succession of paragraphs is like the audio tape – an endless procession of sentences and paragraphs, with little to differentiate them. The context of a paragraph is hidden in its words and sentences.You have no choice but to start wading through all of those words to find the one key idea that matters to you, especially if you’re looking at words on paper (where keyword searches aren’t possible).

Linear information 0, mind maps 1

Mind maps make finding the information you need much easier and faster, obviously, because it’s easy to see the key piece of information you want in context. You can easily drill down to it, and view its parent and child topics as well as adjoining branches to see what else is related to it. That often spurs new ideas.

I think this is an awesome analogy because it really does a great job of comparing something that may be unfamiliar to some people (a mind map) with something that is familiar (an audio tape).

Do you have any analogies that you use to explain mind mapping to others? Please share them in the comments below.

That’s why I created this new report, 12 Building Blocks of Effective Mind Maps. It goes deeper to explain the best practices for using each these elements. It’s now available for download for Mind Mapping Insider members:

If you’d like to access this report, I urge you to try out the Mind Mapping Insider program. As I pointed out in a recent post, it’s a modest investment (less than US$20 a month) that can make a much larger impact on your effectiveness.

This example from the XMind map gallery is particularly well done. It is well organized and communicates the structure of its subject website very clearly – even though part of the map is in French. There is much to like about how this mind map is designed, which we will analyze in my latest report in the Effective Mind Maps series.

In these reports, I deconstruct visual maps and analyze what’s good about them and what could be improved – all in the interest of helping you to understand the principles of effective mind map design.

To access this report, you must first login to the Mind Mapping Insider area. If you don’t have one, please click here to learn how to get one.

To help me to better understand this concept, I recently visited some of the leading websites on the topic of thought leadership, gathered some of the best ideas, strategies and tactics about it, and distilled them into the mind map above, which summarizes:

• The commonly-accepted principles of achieving thought leadership,
• The tactics that appear to work to establish one’s reputation as a thought leader in their niche of choice,
• How mind mapping can help (we’ll talk more about how that works in just a moment),
• Some key ideas and concepts for you to think about can help you to enhance your thought leadership, and
• Some websites you can visit to learn more about this concept.

You can view a larger, expanded version of the mind map above (including clickable links to a number of thought leadership resources) by clicking on the image above.

How mind mapping can help with thought leadership

Mind mapping software is an incredible canvas for exploring your thinking and recording, manipulating, distilling and converting your insights into white papers, blog posts, presentations and other forms of content. No other type of productivity software gives you this level of flexibility and creativity.

Mind mapping software is particularly valuable in helping you to build thought leadership because:

It exposes your thinking, converting it from indistinct thoughts in your head into concrete words and phrases on your computer screen. That’s very powerful, because your conscious mind can only hold only 6 or 7 thoughts at one time. By freeing up your “mental RAM,” mind mapping helps you to tap into a deeper level of thoughts and ideas. Because mind mapping leverages your brain’s powerful associative capabilities, it helps you to access ideas that are at the edge of your thinking. This may be territory you rarely get to explore, unless you have thinking tools that can help you to drill down below the veneer of your usual thoughts.

Mind mapping is a marvelous tool for enabling you to view both the forest and the trees, and to see connections and relationships that weren’t visible any other way. It’s a marvelous tool for systems thinking!

Finally, mind mapping is a boon to thought leaders because it enables you to envision “white space” ideas – ideas that are between the existing or known concepts, strategies and orthodoxies in your niche.

The bottom line: Thought leadership equals thinking differently

The bottom line is that thought leadership is all about thinking differently – about having a distinct vision about your organization, your customers, your industry or profession and the forces that are shaping it. You need to communicate a unique perspective – and I’m convinced that mind mapping is a powerful tool that can help you to develop a deep, well-thought out position on issues that matter to the people you’re trying to influence.

How are you using mind mapping software to think deeply about your industry, profession or niche? I’d love to hear your insights!

MindWave enables teams to collaborate on a mind map that anyone can add to or edit, and which can be “played back” like any wave so that new participants can see how it was constructed. Mind maps can also be downloaded and developed further in the desktop version of ConceptDraw MINDMAP.

MindWave 2 improves the application’s functionality in a number of ways:

• It opens with a “getting started” map to introduce new users to its functionality, so they can begin collaborating on mind maps more quickly within Wave.
• A horizontal scroll bar makes it easier to work with mind maps that are wider than the right-hand pane in Google Wave. This is important, because MindWave doesn’t appear to have a zoom feature. In practice, however, I found this horizontal scroll bar to be so thin that it was hard to see. Plus, your map doesn’t “float” within the workspace the way it does in desktop- and web-based mind mapping software. You must scroll downward to the bottom border of the MindWave application, where the wave of discussion begins, to access this miniscule navigation control.
• Web addresses are automatically reformatted to URL links
• New keyboard shortcuts have been added

If you go to the MindWave page on the CS Odessa website, it provides full instructions on how to install this gadget. Best of all, Google Wave is no longer invitation, only, so anyone can try it out.

Judging from the buzz on Twitter during the last couple of months, a large number of people are intrigued by the idea of creating mind maps within Google Wave. It’s good to see that at least one developer of mind mapping software continues to push a head in this brave new world of collaboration. I’m still not sure I quite understand how to use Google Wave, but recognize that it is still a work in progress and will continue to evolve in the months ahead.

So what, you may be saying to yourself? Aren’t there are dozens of RSS feed readers available? Why would I want to track news stories, blog posts and really smart ideas from people I admire using mind mapping software?

The fact is that mind mapping makes it possible to do some things with the content of your feeds that just aren’t possible with a conventional RSS feed reader. And, as I explain in the video, that’s where the real magic happens.

This valuable new report is only accessible by Mind Mapping Insider members.

P.S. Why not join the Mind Mapping Insider membership program today? If you’re satisfied with my weekly posts, that’s fine. I thank you for being a valued reader of this blog! But if you want to become a master visual mapper, then you ought to consider joining the Mind Mapping Insider program. Nearly every week, you’ll receive exclusive access to new reports, interviews, videocasts, and soon a new monthly webcast where you can ask questions and get answers from me.

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?

This is a valuable exercise, which shouldn’t be overlooked by project teams. After all, if you don’t learn from your mistakes, then you’re probably doomed to repeat them again.

Such a “lessons learned” mind map is the subject of my latest report in the Effective Mind Maps series, in which I deconstruct visual maps and analyze what’s good about them and what could be improved – all in the interest of helping you to understand the principles of effective mind map design.

This mind map is very well designed, and contains some features that significantly increase its value. In addition, it contains several elements that you may want to consider incorporating into many of your business-focused mind maps, because they are simply effective mapping practices.

To access this report, you must first login to the Mind Mapping Insider area. If you don’t have a login, please click here to learn how to get one.