U.S. AIR MAGAZINE
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September, 1988
Mind Mapping By John Grossmann
ichaelGelb sometimes gets strange looks from passersby. People will see lllm busily filling a sheet of paper with an octopus-like diagram, scribbling away in several colors. Asked what he's doing, Gelb may, depending upon the task at hand, explain that he's planning his workday, or writing a speech, or even generating a fiveyear plan for his company. "It looks like you're having fun," someone usually says. "I am," replies Gelb, by then often well on his way to landing another client for his High Performance Learning Center, based in Washington, D.C. As director, Gelb has presented his three-day seminars to managers at mM, DuPont; Polaroid, Digital (i~:,;,c:(:if:'/';~ Equipment, and even the :'!;j':j,;';''''',r,
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U.S. Army. One key part of his program is a detailed explanation of the meaning behind these frequent scribblings, a technique called mind mapping that more and more executives are using to boost creativity, organize their thinking, and even dramatically increase meeting productivity. Mind mapping was created by Gelb's colleague Tony Buzan, author of Use Both Sides of Your Brain, as a tool for tapping the seemingly limitless power of the mind. Imagine, suggests Gelb, the total number of connections in the entire global telephone network. "The neurocircuitry of the human brain is 1,400 times more complex," he says, adding that research now indicates a person probably uses less than one-tenth of one percent of his or her brain power. What is mind mapping? A mind map, Gelb explains, is a nonlinear way of organizing ideas: "It's a picture of the way the brain works. It allows you to get access to your smarts." Faced with the task of writing a speech, most executives would ready a batch of Roman numerals and revert to the outlining skills taught to them in high school. That's a big mistake, says Gelb: "Outlining is a prematurely linear way of expressing your thoughts. You're forced to order your ideas before you come up with them, which puts a severe clamp on your ability to generate ideas. "Say your speech is on marketing bowling balls. YQumight start by drawing USAIR
a picture of a bowling ball with a dollar sign on it-after all, that's what your speech is about. Sure, it's corny, but corny and silly will make it more memorable. It also makes it fun and will help loosen you up. People who are overly serious tend to furrow their brows, hold their breath-and think less effectively." The next step, Gelb explains, is to free-associate key words having to do with the topic. "I'm not a marketer nor a bowling ball salesman, but I'm going to make up a speech on marketing bowling balls," he says, pen raised for just an instant. "Who will my customers be? Where are we going to get the bowling balls? Where will we manufacture them? What problems might we encounter?" As he speaks, he draws pinwheel lines radiating out from the bowling ball he's drawn at the center of his page. Atop one line he prints "customers" and on another he writes "manufacturing." "Make sure you print; don't write cursively," Gelb emphasizes. "One : of the biggest problems people have with note-taking of any kind is that i later they can't read their own writing. Printing also tends to encode ideas more clearly in your memory. Writing one key word at a time helps you get the essence of what you're thinking. Research has also shown that key words and images-which we'll get to in a minute-are the fundamental units of our memory. We don't remember paragraphs; we remember key ideas and phrases." Gelb's pen darts about some more, adding branch lines and other important words to the page: sporting goods shops, union, foreign. "It starts to create itself," he says. "Give me another 20 minutes to mind map this, and I could just about give a speech on marketing bowling balls. Part of what I teach people is learning to trust their native intelligence. Once you start to really think, it's remarkable what you can come up with. "This first phase is called the generative phase of the map-when you're just letting your brain go. When you're done, you'll have your speech on one piece of paper, and you can easily see all the elements and how they relate. For instance, the union might stop us from getting manufacturing materials, which might USAIR
lead us to alternative sources, which might lead us to foreign markets. "By outlining," he continues, "I'm less likely to think about marketing bowling balls overseas-say, in the Soviet Union. Some of your mindmapping ideas might be dopey or irrelevant. That's fme, because the next step is to eliminate those that seem irrelevant or off the main subject. Next, you say, 'Okay, I'll talk first about who are our customers.' Put a number one next to it. Then, 'I'll talk about the kind of organization we need.''' Gelb's eyes widen. "Ah, I just got a new idea: the history of bowling and bowling balls and how that relates to manufacturing." He adds a line for "history," gives it a number three, and then draws an arrow to manufacturing, which he marks with a four. "Then I'll talk about various union problems," he continues, "and that will lead me to alternative sources and foreign markets. The thrust of my speech is now becoming clear." Suddenly it's time for a splash of color. Says Gelb: "I might go around with my yellow marker and highlight the things that are most important. With my blue marker I'll highlight the things that I have questions about or need to develop further. With my green marker I'll highlight the things that I think might be funny. I'll use an orange marker to highlight areas where I've raised the same point in different branches. With regular color codes I can get instant access to the material at several different levels." The next step, Gelb explains, is to redo the map on a fresh sheet of paper and organize it by numbered topic, moving clockwise around the bowling ball hub-customers at one o'clock, organization at two o'clock, and so on-until the entire speech is on a single sheet of paper instead of on a thick stack of index cards. Gelb is not quite finished, however. To help cue him when it is time to talk about foreign markets, he draws a quick picture of a Frenchman in a beret. He looks up and explains: "The better you get with this, the fewer words you need. Your little pictures will set off memory keys. The result: You don't wind up giving a wooden, rehearsed speech. You're not just reading something. It becomes alive, more fun both to receive USAIR
and to give. It's conducive to spontaneous creativity. That's one of the real advantages of mind mapping. It's not just good in the short term for generating more ideas and for organizing those ideas in a new and more effective way. Keep doing this, and it trains you to think more creatively." Mind mapping has many other uses. Gelb credits the technique with cutting his long-distance phone bill and all but eliminating timeconsuming and sometimes embarrassing call-backs. "How often do you make an important phone call to someone and immediately after you hang up, think of other things you wanted to say? Why does that happen?" he asks. "Because your mind is still associating around that topic, that person, that company. Just because you've hung up the phone, that process doesn't stop. "Before you make a phone call. make a quick map of everything you want to talk about. Youwill, by doing that map, make note of not only the things you want to talk about, but you'll also get those two or three 'ahas' you'd otherwise remember after you hung up. Furthermore, while you talk, you might want to use mind-mappingtechniques to take notes of important information by jotting down a few key words or symbols." Gelb also recommends mind mapping as a way to analyze and energize perhaps the biggest productivity sinkhole of all: meetings. Beforehand, he suggests, have everybody draw a mind map of what they think the meeting is about. The meeting might then begin with a comparison of maps, a sly focusing of the agenda. Gelb's most striking suggestion, though, is to assign someone to map the meeting in progress-on a chalkboard, perhaps, or better yet, on a sheet of paper that covers the wall. "We've sometimes covered all the walls with paper," he says, comparing the result to a big flow chart. "The mapper assigns a different color to each person and maps his ideas as he speaks. You get instant feedback. If you see blue everywhere, you can realize, at a glance, that maybe blue is talking too much. Map a meeting from start to fmish, and you'll get a much better sense not only of who said what, but of the real dynamics of the meeting." 0