In another web life I wrote some on mindmapping.It's just a jump to the left
And then a step to the right
With your hands on your hips
You bring your knees in tight
But it's the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane,
Let's do the Mind Map again!
While it may seem a sort of dorky indulgence in graphic gadgetry, when you are as cognitively challenged as I -- memory, dyslexia, aphasia, and kin like symptoms -- you grab any tool that may up your capacity to think stuff.
And Mindmapping is a very useful tool.
I mindmap all my projects, my 'to do' lists, my talks and presentations. It's a habit.
I usually use a note book and 'map on' so to speak -- often while commuting on electric trains.
I now also do my 'to do' lists online using a platform called mindmeister. This tool also allows you to share mindmaps so that you can draw other people into the business of laying them down and tweaking them -- a sort of team customisation.
So much for team theory as I've never been able to entice others into sharing the same mindmap experience (example).
Of course if I was doing this on a white board in front of a workshop like grouping of ideas makers, keen as mustard to invest graphical interface, then the experience would be very different I'm sure.
That said -- the main advantages of mindmaps are:
- You create a graphic summary of your perspective which is not lineal.
- You invest that summary with as many relevant items, features or 'points' that you deem relevant.
- You link all relevant items by building relationships and fostering dynamics.
- You embrace 'ideas' and thinking as a cognitive spiral which is a very crude abstraction which parallels the dialectic of cognition -- ie: buidling to more concrete conclusions by pursuing inter-relationships and contradictions.
