Making delicious cookies and building exceptional mind maps — both are better with a recipe.
Baking cookies makes my mouth water. Chocolate chip cookies with walnuts are one of my favorites. Making them “just right” takes a specific recipe, however.
So does creating an exceptional mind map.
Making delicious cookies requires the right ingredients and tools, plus a specific process that you must follow for combining the ingredients and baking the dough.
Creating an exceptional mind map is no different. The best ones follow a specific “recipe” — a process and best practices that lead to a successful outcome: a visual diagram that enables you to work more productively, creatively and effectively and conveys your ideas clearly to others.
But there’s a problem…
Many people struggle to create mind maps using software. One of the biggest challenges is that they’re left on their own to figure out how to do it. Many of them can master the basics pretty quickly — adding topics and arranging them, and using mind mapping software as a visual outliner to capture their ideas.
But then they never progress beyond that point.
Mind mapping software is actually a very powerful, multifaceted thinking, planning and project management tool. But it’s hard to find training or best practices to help them move beyond the basics.
Also, many beginning mind mappers don’t understand that there’s more to mind maps then a spider-like network of words. There’s much more that can be added to enhance their maps, enhancements that make them much more valuable. But once again, the best practices for doing so have been hard to find online.
A recipe for better mind maps
Based on over 15 years of writing about mind mapping software and teaching people how to get the most out of it, I created a four-step process called the FAST framework to address these needs. It’s a recipe that’s designed to help you create effective mind maps, every time. It contains these stages:
- Foundation
- Associate
- Synthesize
- Transform
You don’t bake cookies using trial and error. You could if you really wanted to. But you’d probably waste a lot of time and ingredients, and you may never achieve the results you’re hoping for.
A recipe is a shortcut — a set of steps that, if you follow them, will help you achieve consistent results, every time.
The same principle applies to creating effective mind maps. You shouldn’t be creating them by trial and error, hoping for the best.
Let’s take a closer look at the FAST framework through a delicious metaphor, baking chocolate chip cookies.
Foundation
When you’re getting ready to bake, what’s the first thing you do?
That’s right. You find a recipe and read through the list of ingredients so you can gather them in one place — eggs, flour, chocolate chips, walnuts, milk and more. You also gather the tools you’ll need — a mixing bowl, a hand or electric mixer, measuring cup and so on.
During the foundational stage of building a mind map, you need to establish a solid foundation for it. Without one, you’ll be challenged to create a cohesive, understandable visual representation of your thinking.
In a mind map, the foundation is composed of first-level topics. They are the key concepts that will serve as mental “hooks” that will guide the rest of its development. The right first-level topics will help you to produce the greatest number of mental associations as you develop and organize your thoughts.
A really useful way to think about the first level of your mind map is to imagine it as a book with chapters. What are the chapters or divisions of the information you need to capture or share in a mind map? Add them to the central topic of your map.
Associate
Next, you make the cookie dough by adding in the ingredients, in the order specified by the recipe, paying close attention to adding the correct amounts. But this step of the baking process doesn’t have to be formulaic. There’s still room for improvisation. What could you add to make your cookies even more delicious? A touch of vanilla? A few more chocolate chips? Bits of white chocolate? Get creative! The best bakers do.
During the associate step of building an effective mind map, your job is to expand the content of your mind map by employing your brain’s power of association. Like adding ingredients to make cookie batter, you are adding information and ideas — the ingredients of your mind map — during the second step of the FAST framework.
Here are five questions to help you build out the content of your mind map:
- What knowledge or information do you need to capture?
- What’s essential to make this section of the mind map complete?
- What don’t you know?
- What questions do you have?
- What needs to be explained more clearly or in greater detail?
There is one major difference between baking cookies and building a mind map: there is no practical limit to how many topics you can add to your mind map. Capture all of your thoughts and ideas. You can always organize and distill them later.
Synthesize
Once you’ve added and thoroughly mixed all of the ingredients of your cookies together, it’s time to step back and take a look at the batter. Does it have the right consistency? Are the ingredients well mixed? Double-check to make sure you didn’t forget any ingredients. Taste the batter. Does it have the flavor you’re looking for?
The point is that a good baker always takes a step back to make sure that the dough is as good as it can be before he or she forms it into little balls and places them on a baking sheet.
During step 3 of the FAST framework, synthesis, you do something similar. You assess what you’ve captured so far, and decide how to organize and rationalize it. In the process, you add clarity and impact to it. One way to do that is to ask yourself questions like these:
- What’s related and should be moved and grouped together?
- What’s missing and needs to be added?
- What’s superfluous or irrelevant to the topic of your mind map and could be removed?
Don’t be afraid to move topics around and experiment a bit at this stage of your map’s development. Remember, if you move a topic to a new location and it doesn’t seem to “fit” there, simply move it back — or use your program’s “undo” command to return it to its former location.
Transform
You’re now at the final step of your cookie-baking adventure. Your dough is tasty and ready to go. You roll it into little balls and place them in neat rows onto a greased cookie pan. Then it’s into the oven, where they bake for a precise amount of time at the temperature specified in the recipe.
Finally, after a mouth-watering aroma has filled the kitchen and the stove timer has gone off, it’s time to pull the sheet of warm, crispy cookies out of the oven. After they cool, it’s time to decide how to present them: In a decorative holiday tin or on a pretty plate to share with your family or holiday guests?
Step 4 of the FAST framework, transform, is focused on embellishing your mind map with topic enhancements that will multiply its utility and value. These enhancements include:
- Icons or symbols
- Images
- A legend
- Call-outs
- Topic shape and color
- Links (did you know that there are 8 types?)
- Task data
- Boundaries
- Tags and resources
- Custom fields
The goal of doing this isn’t just to add window dressing to your mind maps — it’s to add meaning and context to them to help others understand the meaning of your visual diagram and to make it more useful to you.
It’s hard to find best practices for utilizing these tools anywhere.
But they’re essential to take your mind maps to the next level of utility and value.
Better mind maps, based on a recipe
In conclusion, by following this simple four-step mind mapping “recipe” you can significantly improve the quality of your thinking, your ideas and your work.
Learn more about the FAST framework for effective mind mapping here.