Unleash Productive Creativity through Mind-mapping,
Part II
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People used to mind-mapping in their professional lives can also use them
effectively for setting personal goals or planning activities, so as to be
creative and productive even at home.
But it is for business organizations that mind-mapping has perhaps the
best value.
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Mind-mapping can become a guided group activity in an organization and can prove
invaluable in terms of productive creativity. When an organization facilitates
mind-mapping in a group, tricky issues like change management or quality control
can be sorted out with relative ease. This is because a cross-pollination of ideas
during brainstorming
can have astoundingly creative results when combined with mind-mapping.
Think-tanks and policy review meetings can benefit from the range of ideas
generated during a group mind-mapping session; because research shows that each individual has
unique and totally original takes on a given concept during mind-mapping.
The best part is that the ideas can be combined on one final page, and the top
management can make decisions on actionables and follow-up programs based on a
quick but very effective overview. Devising strategies and planning how to
execute them is easier if the relationships between the factors involved, risks
and task priorities are clearly visible on the board in a snapshot.
If the mind-mapping session involves various levels, the organizational team
spirit gets a boost. This happens especially because nobody’s ideas are
discounted at the initial stage, no matter how weird or irrelevant, and there is
an open channel of communication of issues, problems and ideas between various
levels in the organization. A good team spirit encourages productive creativity.
Many organizations have realized the importance of mind-mapping for developing
productive innovations (case
study pdf), solutions and strategies. But a hand-written mind-map lacks the
formality of an official report document, and cannot be easily passed around or
restructured.
These issues have been solved by the emergence of various mind-mapping softwares
like Mindjet, Novamind, iMindMap and scores of others. Most of these softwares
can make official-looking mind-maps, allow export into office software, easy
editing and restructuring as well as simultaneous contributions from various
entities to a single mind-map.
There are blogs on mind-mapping
software and
websites totally devoted to mind-mapping, which can give
interesting insights into the range of software available and their pros and
cons.
Mind-mapping can be productively used by both individuals and organizations,
because it is time-and-labor saving. It is also a creative hotbed of new ideas
springing from brains that have been allowed to function in their natural
associative manner. With the use of mind-mapping, productive creativity can
become more of a core competency than a challenge.
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