More than a thought

By Jonathan Andrews
Illustration: Blair Kelly

New mind-mapping tools are available to open new realms of possibilities and set your imagination on fire

It was 10:30, Friday morning. It had been an eventful week for Greg Parfitt of Future Systems, and it was about to become more so. The day had begun with a visit from Jane Gonzales, newly appointed CEO. Gonzales had talked enthusiastically about her latest new idea.

Parfitt was nonplussed. “You are asking a great deal. Several topics are interrelated. Once I have my thoughts together, I’ll need to work with my team to prepare a presentation to the board. This is all new — successfully presenting a new idea like this is going to be a real challenge.”

Gonzales was oblivious to Parfitt’s concerns. “You can handle it, Greg. The board meets Tuesday — we need you to develop it as a project and implement a pilot by the end of the month. That isn’t a problem is it? Anyway, let me leave it with you. Have an enjoyable weekend.”

With that, Gonzales left the office.

Each new challenge has many dimensions; Gonzales’ latest idea was no exception. Parfitt’s thoughts began to multiply. How could he bring all this information together and organize it in such a short period of time?

Parfitt turned to look out the window; a small framed photograph of his family caught his eye. Eight-year-old Josh was looking into the camera in his characteristically intense way. Last night, he had been so excited to show a new method of taking notes at school; it was helping him tremendously. Parfitt had been struck how effective the approach had been. Topics had been brought together visually and presented in such a way that was immediately understandable.

Now, if only…

Creative thinking
Creative thinking has always been essential to survival in business, but never more so than today. In A Whole New Mind, author Daniel H. Pink provides striking examples of how he believes business thinking is changing. Dominant left-brained (or L-directed), logical, mechanistic approaches are tempered increasingly by right-brained (or R-directed), creative, non-rule-based thinking. The author observes that the demand for master of fine arts programs has increased while the interest in master of business administration programs has decreased.

On a personal level, people only use a fraction of their mental capacity (much in the same way that they will only use a limited number of the features of a software package). One reason for this is that a creative act can become a struggle between the right-brained “writer” and the left-brained “editor.” Our natural creativity can stall and become stifled as a result of this struggle.

The problem becomes exponential when we collaborate with others.

Mind mapping
It is not unusual for a person to experience competing thoughts; for some it may be at the beginning of a day, for others the end of the day. To be effective, we have to process a thought thoroughly. The time-honoured practice of daily journal-writing encourages us to work completely with an individual thought, even though other thoughts may be clamouring for our attention. Those other thoughts may be more important yet may be lost in the process.

Mind mapping may be the solution as it consists of recording and arranging thoughts or ideas almost simultaneously in a chart or diagram. As an approach to organizing thoughts, mind mapping has been in existence for centuries. For example, Porphyry of Tyre is said to have used a similar concept in the third century to visualize the concepts proposed by Aristotle.

A typical mind map is built on an initial thought or idea, followed by any number of intuitive thoughts or ideas. Each thought, as it occurs, is recorded on a chart. The interrelationships of those thoughts are then mapped, with the emerging context providing structure and meaning to what otherwise may appear to be a random representation of data.

Mind maps are typically used in brainstorming exercises for a group ex-change of thoughts and ideas. The results may be recorded on a flip chart or intelligent board and the relationships mapped. This process encourages thinking outside the box to identify solutions never thought of before.

Technology
Inevitably, software solutions have now evolved to help prepare thought charts or diagrams. These solutions allow you to work with your own thoughts and ideas, giving them meaning, structure and context. At a group level, individuals can collaborate face-to-face or at a distance.

There are several software products available, some proprietary and others made available at no charge. Some are limited to Windows or Mac platforms, and others will run on several different platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Unix, or Linux. (Wikipedia is a source for information about various mind-mapping tools, and provides download links.)

Products such as iMindMap, MindManager, MindMapper and MindGenius can take you through several key stages of thought or idea processing at personal or business levels. For example:

thought formulation — this is where mind mapping begins. The first central thought is recorded. Subsequent thoughts follow and relationships are mapped. This type of approach stim-ulates creative thinking at a personal level and brainstorming in groups. Collaboration is encouraged, ideas visualized, and new connections made.
thought organization — the time will come when all of the raw information has to be organized into a discrete view, with all of the unconnected data discarded. A popular form is the organization chart.
planning and development — involves project management, to ensure effective identification and employment of resources, and the use of Gantt charts and timelines.
implementation — business processes and process flow management allow the project steps to be implemented.

An enthusiastic supporter of the use of mind-mapping software is Ron Salole, CICA’s vice-president of standards. “I use Mindjet MindManager 7 quite extensively. It permits me to think through, marshal and review my argument on issues in a way that I find intuitive and akin to the way that I think.”

And beyond
Traditional mind mapping is based on a static information hierarchy. In personal computer terms, this is the equivalent to a hierarchical structure consisting of drives, folders and files. To reflect the L-directed and R-directed forces of the human brain more accurately, mind mapping needs to be dynamic. When you record a thought, and then have another thought, you need to map it immediately and not search for where it fits into a hierarchy. Visual information management (VIM), a component of knowledge management, allows you to map a thought wherever and whenever you like by enabling you to connect a current thought to a new or existing thought.

An example of this type of approach can be found in products such as Tinderbox, PersonalBrain and BrainEKP. Tinderbox is for the Mac platform, and The Brain products are for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

PersonalBrain and web-based BrainEKP meet conventional mind-mapping requirements, but they are better known for their VIM capabilities. Each element within a “brain” is a thought and each thought can have multiple attributes, including links to websites and files. With this approach you can have thoughts about a particular need and develop a fully functioning business process within a very short period of time.

VIM can be used by all types and sizes of business. For example, it can be used to manage several small companies, switching from company to company or from functional area to functional area (e.g., websites, bank accounts and accounting software) within seconds. Relationships between thoughts, and information supporting these thoughts, can be changed immediately, demonstrating an approach that is truly dynamic.

Larger organizations use this approach for many applications, such as project management, business workflow and customer support. The latter application can be striking — every customer experience or problem can be recorded in a central brain, becoming accessible to others in the organization.

VIM tools
Two enthusiastic users of advanced mind-mapping software such as PersonalBrain are Mike May, senior vice-president of IT with the Katz Group Canada Ltd. of Markham, Ont., which operates 1,900 drug stores in Canada and the US; and Michael Legary, chief information officer with Seccuris Inc. of Winnipeg, a company specializing in information risk management, trusted security architecture, digital forensics and security information management.

For May, this approach is the next level of knowledge management and information sharing. Legary says, “It was enhancing, not just replacing, anything I had.”

VIM applications
To gain more insight into how May and Legary use VIM tools, let’s take a look at some typical applications:

thought management — May wanted a tool to gather up and relate the large number of topic areas that he had to oversee as head of IT. Since a VIM tool is a visual integrator of every type of information, May found he could take all the factors that concerned him about that topic, group them, gather research on the facts he needed to represent the nature of the issue and then document the solution and integrate Word documents, text documents, web links and PDF documents within the properties and attachments. Even the smallest piece of research could be included and yet six months later it could be easily recovered.
brainstorming — Legary used a VIM tool to bring together ideas from marketing, design and operations. To build a service for the company to offer, the ideas from the brainstorming process were modelled across all three domains.
collaboration — Legary never intended to use a VIM tool as a collaboration tool, but in the past six months, it has started to become that. “And we started to see the power,” he says.
compliance mapping — Legary has used the approach extensively for compliance mapping. He found he could take a compliance requirement, map interdependencies and determine what level of risk might exist in the environment before completing a detailed assessment. When he began to model those interdependencies, logical groupings became apparent very quickly, especially when it came to cross-compliance requirements.
operating systems — information, whether based on an individual computer, network or a website, can now be mapped out using a VIM approach. Because of this, May believes this approach surpasses the operating system as it can be tightly integrated with the operating system and key applications. “In many ways it is a super-set of the operating system. The classic operating system as we know it has served its purpose and gone beyond. There is a layer of abstraction that makes computers more valuable,” May says.
presentations — presenting information possessing complex interrelationships can be very difficult. As Legary notes, “The long, drawn-out meetings don’t seem to get the same points across.” For May, the use of a VIM approach has made all the difference. He found it helped very quickly to convey the relationship between all the topics being discussed, whether he was doing a presentation to direct reports, giving a presentation to peers or, more important, when presenting it to the C group.

“What’s interesting is the tool itself garners a ‘wow’ when you first show it,” says May, “but far more important, once the wow is gone, it allows you to gather up all the facts necessary for the individuals to understand what the issues are and to help make a decision. So I will have web pages connected to it. I will have diagrams, pictures, articles. And the goal is that any question that anybody could ask me about the topic, I have sitting right within that circle of connected thoughts.”

Legary agrees about the initial wow factor. During a compliance presentation, for example, he found that once people had become accustomed to the tool, it helped shape the flow of the presentation a lot quicker. Compliance topics, by their very nature, can be dry and hard to follow but the VIM tool allowed him to talk quickly about key topics for each of the areas — the executives could see the flow. It was clear to Legary that the audience was able to follow the structure of what he was discussing, causing fewer follow-up questions afterward.

Conclusion
The ability to manage thoughts lies at the heart of mind mapping. The new technology can help you to process thoughts, collaborate with colleagues and present the results to others in a way that can be immediately understood and acted upon. Mind-mapping tools can open up a whole new realm of possibilities — ones you never would have thought of — and, in the process, set your imagination on fire.

Jonathan D. Andrews, CA•IT, CISA, FCA (England and Wales), is president of NetLearn Services Inc. He can be reached at jandrews@netlearn.ca

Technical editor: Yves Godbout, CA•IT, CISA, director of IT services, Office of the Auditor General of Canada