Mind Mapping is a graphical way of organizing your thoughts, ideas and plans. It works just the way your mind does, allowing you to handle tough decisions and a lot of information in a very compact space.

It is used by millions of people worldwide in business, study, presentations, and for improving personal effectiveness.

If you are new to Mind Mapping, you may like to have a look at my article on “how to Mind Map”.

Clarity is essential to the growth of any business. Clarity of vision, clarity of direction, clarity and completeness of business and project plans, and the effective communication of those plans to other people.

Recently I was in London, and I met up with a guy, Stephen Feber, who has been using Mind Mapping in his business for some time, and for him it has totally revolutionized his business.

He had been in a bidding war for a contract worth £22m (US$43.5m). There were 312 other people bidding for this contract, but he was victorious.

I had a chance to interview him about his use of Mind Mapping in his business, and I have put together an extract of that conversation for you in the video below.

And here is a link to a PDF document which explains some other aspects of the project: How to get £22m (US$43.5m) project funding using Mind Maps.

Very often plans in businesses are put together at great expense, only to be ignored by the people who should be using them. Pages and pages of notes about strategic directions, stakeholder needs and so on, are dead boring!

That’s why nobody takes any notice of them. We were brought up in the visual age. We have been watching television and movies from a very young age, and text just doesn’t grab our attention.

Dr Paul Martin Lester, in his Syntactic Theory of Visual Communication says: “Something is happening. We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished, not through reading words, but by reading images.”

Mind Mapping was a key differentiator in Stephen winning this bid. It enabled clarity of understanding and communication between the many people on the project, so that they could work together effectively and efficiently.

But Mind Maps trick you. They trick you into thinking this is interesting and fun and colourful and exciting. They cut down on the words and stick to keywords, using the association between the words to give the meaning. They use colour, pictures and smooth flowing lines to hold your attention.

This combination hooks your right brain where you do your creative artistic thinking, and your left logical thinking brain, and gets them both working together understanding the whole picture in a way that is only possible using Mind Maps.

And the payoff is there. As we saw, Stephen Feber won a $43.5 million contract using it. When Boeing first started using it they saved $10 million off the implementation of their project in just a few weeks, and also massively reduced their training costs because the engineers can see where everything fits together.

In an article on Mind Mapping by Bill Gates (in Newsweek and NBC) he stated that Mind Mapping is “the road ahead” and that mind mappers are “leading the way into the next stage of our new information democracy”.

When you are planning a project, you can create a Mind Map that has the project name at the center, the first level branches are the main objectives, then these are broken down at the second level to required outcomes, and then at the third level to tasks.

Using this structure, you can brainstorm the project requirements in any order – it doesn’t matter if the ideas that people come up with are related to a different branch – you can jump around all over the Mind Map in any order. This avoids the artificial limitations of the linear attention focus that is forced upon us by “traditional” techniques.

Now that you have the structure, you can work out the scoping of the project, and if necessary remove an entire branch from the Mind Map knowing that it is not going to affect any of your other objectives for the project.

Once the scope has been defined, you can assign resources to the tasks. You can do this either by just going through the task branches and assigning the resources as you go, or get the actual people who are working on the project to come and volunteer their skills on the places where they can see that they will be able to contribute best.

You will find that when presented with the project plan in this form, they will be able to see instantly where they fit in to the project and how they can contribute. They really buy into the project when it is presented like this.

Then when you go to present the project to management, project sponsors, potential clients or other stakeholders, instead of presenting them with a big dollar amount without them being able to see where all the money is going, you are able to present them with a Mind Map that shows them clearly what the objectives and outcomes will be, how you will achieve them through the tasks and resources that are assigned.

They will get the full picture and be able to both understand where all the money is going, and have complete confidence in your ability to deliver what you have said you will. Good Mind Mapping software will have a presentation mode in it so that you can present the information in a compelling way.

A recent study by innovation tools (PDF) shows that most companies who use Mind Mapping increased their productivity by more than 20%. This is an amazing result from one single simple to learn tool!

The report highlights many other benefits of Mind Mapping, but found that 75% of the respondents said that the main reason that Mind Mapping isn’t used more widely is that people just plain haven’t heard about it, or don't use it because others in their office don't use it.

I’m taking that as a challenge, and will continue to spread the word about this powerful technique far and wide. I believe it is my duty to introduce as many people to the benefits of Mind Mapping as possible, and in order to do that I have put together a software company to build the best Mind Mapping software for both Mac and Windows – bar none! …but that’s another story – sorry if I get carried away – this is something that I am very passionate about.

Most of these people had just picked up the general concept of Mind Mapping as they went along, yet almost all of them got at least 20% productivity improvement from it. Imagine what the results would have been had they known what they were doing! (My apologies to those who did the survey and actually do know how to make the most of Mind Mapping).

Sometimes I just get overwhelmed by the number of things I have to do, and the seemingly impossible deadlines I need to get them done by. I just don't know where to start and so I flit around from one thing to another, distract myself, or do non-urgent or unimportant tasks. I'm sure you've been in situations like this too, haven't you?

Come on, admit it!

Thank you. So here's what I do about it. I create a Mind Map that shows the major objectives that I have, and add sub branches down to the level where I have the specific tasks identified. Then I prioritize them, and look for opportunities to delegate or to group tasks in order to achieve objectives quicker. In this way, I can complete an entire objective and have the sense of satisfaction that goes along with that to keep me enthusiastic for completing more tasks.

Suddenly the overwhelm is gone! With a little discipline on the implementation I'm achieving my goals easily and feeling good about it (I set a timer for 48 minutes at a time, and spend that time in complete focus on the task and will not stop for anything).

With the clarity that Mind Maps bring, you can communicate project tasks, company directions, and marketing messages clearly and consicely, increasing the comprehension of your message by your audience.

You can further increase your efficiency by Mind Mapping the agendas for meetings, and then adding on to the Mind Map during the meeting, and having that as your meeting minutes.

...and the list goes on, but now I would like to talk about the main areas of business growth, and how to achieve massive growth in your business.

Mind Maps give you the focus, clarity and organization, while allowing you the freedom to brainstorm new ideas.

You can see a lot from the Mind Maps above, but to extend on that, I have put together a three part video series explaining how it all works and how easy it is to grow your business using these techniques:

Scroll down to the links below, and click on the links to find out more information about Mind Mapping both for business and other purposes. In particular, I would recommend you should visit the NovaMind web site where there is plenty of information about Mind Mapping and you can download your NovaMind trial, and get the feel of using it yourself.