Mind mapping and Brainstorming

I’ve spent two days this week in an off-site management meeting. One of the purposes for this meeting was for us to consider how we progressed some areas of our business.

We did this using a classical brainstorming technique – groups of people with a question to consider where all things were allowed and discussion was discouraged. The recording technique was a little different though, each team had a copy of MindManager into which they hammered the thoughts in without any structure. This didn’t really help the brainstorming activity, it was just normal brainstorming, but it wasn’t intended to make any difference.

Later sessions in the day were aimed at putting some structure to the thoughts, and that is where mind mapping and the power of MindManager came in. Structuring the disparate thoughts into themes using a mind map was really easy, and very powerful.

Presenting these themes back was also very powerful with people able to see how their thoughts had contributed straight into a structure.

It’s something I’ll definitely do again.