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Mindmapping is an essential tool that merits more use in many business processes. It increases quality and productivity. Whatever you’re currently using mindmapping for, you’re not using it enough.

This article could easily become a ‘40 uses of mindmapping’ list. It could be a mindmap. But I’d rather focus on a few examples, leaving the rest to your imagination.

Example 1: meeting management

  (source: Mindgenius)

The lifecycle of a meeting lends itself well to be managed by a mindmap as a live document:

1. Announcement of the meeting, with meeting objective, practical information and agenda. You can add reference documents, necessary preparation, …
2. As confirmation of attendees come in, record them in the mindmap
3. During the meeting, you can use the mindmap for notetaking. At the end of the meeting, or shortly after, add actions and decisions. You now have a full documentation of the meeting to circulate the next day, rather than cold and sterile ‘minutes’ a few weeks later.
4. As an option, you could transfer the content of the mindmap into a narrative report, if you need to circulate it more widely.

Mindmaps can be used for a variety of management tasks. You can use them to define your organisation (especially its informal portion), define a business plan, plan a campaign, develop a roadmap, for planning & managing projects, …

Example 2: brainstorming

  (source: Mindgenius)

Since mindmaps are good to capture complex information, they are very useful in knowledge management. For example, you could use a mindmap during a brainstorming session:

1. Explain the rules of brainstorming and go around the table a few times
2. Note down ideas in a flat hierarchy. Do not structure in any way. Use subsidiary nodes to enrich ideas.
3. After completion of the session, remove duplicate nodes, order the list and, if desired, structure ideas into clusters

Other knowledge management tasks that mindmapping could support are SWOT analysis or 6-thinking hat exercises. You could use it for note taking when running a series of intelligence interviews, or when you perform a literature research.

Example 3: planning a campaign

  (source: Mindgenius)

Setting up a communciations campaign requires keeping track of a myriad of aspects, while not losing sight of the overall objective. A mindmap can help in the various stages of planning and executing:

1. Define the objective of the campaign, and its basic parameters - target, content, media
2. Define an implementation plan and success indicators for the campaign
3. Keep the mindmap live and revisit it a few times during the campaign

You could equally use mindmapping for launching a blog (or setting up the editorial plan for your blog in the coming quarter), setting up a strategy to participate in a social media platform, planning a product launch, …

Example 4: (copy)writing

(source: Mindgenius)

Writing is about collecting, analysing, structuring and presenting information. During any or all of these steps, mindmapping can be useful. Other applications in structuring content are setting up a website, creating a new publication, a presentation, developing a course, a book, a workshop outline, …

Other uses

Above examples are just a glimpse. What about genealogy research? Or process flow charts, manuals, checklists, networking, …. The list is almost endless.

Tools

The simplest tool is just pen and paper, which allows you to start immediately, anytime and anyplace. But if you need to collaborate and share mindmaps, or want to reorganise and expand information, a software tool is more practical. There are various open-source (and even web-based) tools, but I stick to MindGenius, a productive and versatile tool allowing you to produce mindmaps in graphical or textual format, or even as a website. It allows you to present mindmaps in a variety of formats - in short, MindGenius is almost as versatile as mindmapping itself. And it comes with a library of templates and examples to inspire you. The example drawings in this post are created with it.

Concluding

Once you accustom yourself and your organisation with mindmapping, life will never be the same. So why is mindmapping underutilised in business? I can imagine a few reasons, all of them quite big barriers, but none of them a reason not to use mindmapping except possibly the last one:

1. Microsoft Office does not include a mindmapping tool
2. Mindmaps do not appear ‘professional’
3. Reading mindmaps can be intellectually challenging
4. Everybody else is using memo’s and reports
5. Mindmaps are planning tools. It’s easier to just shoot.
6. Mindmaps cannot be used to explain things.

So the safe bet is to continue writing reports that nobody reads, write long narrative plans that nobody refers to, or hold meetings that everybody forgets the moment they end. But if you want to be effective, consider mindmapping.

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