MeetingRunners Screencast 3: Mindmapping Surfaces Unknowns

Mindmapping: The Dropped Step Between Thoughts and Action

Often we have a feeling. It can signal that we are near overload, stuck, or unable to comprehend a complex situation in its entirety. We run into this especially when we are putting plans over time together. Here's a key use case for mindmapping: when you feel that feeling, it's an urge to come to clarity. When you feel the urge to manage that complexity, get everything on paper and try to diagram the relationships by mindmapping.

A mindmap directly reflects your current understanding of your situation and will help you inventory everything that's happening, needs to happen, and needs to be planned for. It will also tell you exactly where your clarity is and isn't. Anything that helps us surface our unknowns and formulate questions is a powerful tool indeed. So if we hadn't made it clear, the advantage to mindmapping is in giving yourself the ability to work with your thoughts as though they are someone else's. You can engage your thoughts as objects and see what happens when you organize them visually. Spotting faulty or incomplete assumptions, spotting redundancies or conflicting elements, and generally allowing new inference and insight are all unlocked when you take your thoughts, put them on paper, and attempt to diagram the way they interact. Take as many drafts as it takes, because the process is the point. These aren't usually very useful for sharing with others in their raw form. The use of a mindmap is usually in the conversations and plans they make possible and clarify. So if making lists isn't doing enough, get your bullet points one step closer to reality and arrange them in space. There are no rules. Give yourself a virtual environment to experiment and engage your own mind.