The Monthly Huddle: Mind Mapping

Welcome to the July edition of The Monthly Huddle– A short, sweet, and to-the-point advice blog for tackling some of business management’s most difficult questions! We’ll look at a thinking strategy called “mind mapping,” ideal for business leaders who like organizing their thoughts through notetaking, listmaking, and the like. 

What is Mind Mapping?

When we think about a concept, idea, or project, it’s usually not a neat and orderly list. Instead, it’s more like a series of branching thoughts that build on each other. 

In the more traditional ways of writing down our thoughts, we try to process everything mentally before actually putting a pencil on paper. Often, we make categorized lists– topics with subideas listed underneath. When we look at lists, though, they don’t spark up our brains. 

Similar to how we can get overwhelmed by vast chunks of text, our brains have trouble processing the entire context of a list. By the time we get to the end of it, we’ve mostly forgotten what was at the beginning. 

Mind mapping turns our usual thinking process into a visual tool that helps us get our thoughts down on paper without the added task of organizing them into a neat, orderly format. It transforms a list into a centralized concept with branching ideas, broken down into their parts, in a way that stimulates our thoughts when we look back at it later. 

It also engages multiple parts of our brain– both the analytic and the creative– giving us more outlets for our thinking through imagery, color, words, and connections. 

The image and color piece of a mind map is critical. Our brains naturally process visual input far better than it does text or sound. Studies have shown that people remember 80% of what they see, 20% of what they read, and 10% of what they hear, making a good case for shifting from traditional notetaking to mind mapping.

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What Can Mind Maps Be Used For?

One of the best things about mind maps is that they can be used to replace most of the notetaking tasks you do in a day, including:

• Planning out your day
• Collaborative brainstorming
• Communicating and presenting ideas to others
• Outlining and planning larger projects
• Decision making and revamping pros vs. cons lists

How to Create a Mind Map

It’s easy to create your own mind map! 

1. In the middle of a blank sheet of paper, write the central concept or idea. 
2. As you reflect on the idea, create “branches” coming off of that central idea. These are the subtopics. 
3. From those branches, create the “twigs” or details surrounding your subtopics. 
4. Use color and images. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself an “artist.” If digital notetaking is your preferred method, you can even use icons or clip art to illustrate. 
5. Keep the text short and to the point. The goal is to use the image and color to spark your thinking, with the text there to support your imagery, not the other way around.