Mapping Your Business Ideas

21/05/09

Mind Maps have become a very useful and versatile tool for expressing and understanding concepts and for developing ideas. Andy Coote, a mind mapper himself for 20 years, examines why and suggests that Mind Maps can be a useful tool for business leaders.

I have been an active mind mapper for some 20 years since it was first introduced to me on a Time Manager course, much of which, now I think of it, I don’t actually apply — but the mind mapping stuck. I’ve since used maps for many purposes, some of which will appear in this article and,...

...like Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, I’ve ‘gone electric’ in recent years, using a PC and mind mapping software. This article was planned using mind maps.

“People can be successful using only 10% of the cognitive potential of their brains. Mind Mapping is capable of unleashing the power of the other 90% and tapping into latent genius. When people look back on how they were operating before they learned to Mind Map, they say it is as if they were working in the dark using the wrong tools.”
Tony Buzan

My first encounter with Mind MapsTM, back in the 1980s, was in a BBC book called Use Your Head written by Tony Buzan. Buzan has claimed Mind Mapping for his own since he developed his form of it in the 1960s, though it is suggested that mapping in similar forms may be age old in its origins. The words Mind Map are trademarked by Buzan’s organisation in the UK and USA. When I refer to mind maps and mind mapping in this article, however, I will be referring to maps that do not necessarily conform to Buzan’s rules.

Mind mapping is a flexible way of... continued on page two >

 

 

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