We’ve been using MindManager to create weekly and monthly reports (status update and accomplishments maps), which we find to be a better format than PPP and Excel dashboards. The Excel Range function that we recently discovered is extremely helpful. It allows us to display selected data from a parent spreadsheet residing in SharePoint on the map by creating a dynamic display. This eliminates duplicate data entry – once a parent spreadsheet is updated, data in the spreadsheet within the map is updated automatically and there is no need to update data in the map manually. This saves us a lot of time and helps in prevening errors that come from double entry. We’ve been very excited about this function.
There was a problem though – a person who doesn’t have access to a parent spreadsheet will not be able to see data on the map. I called MindJet CS and was delighted to find out that you can actually break a link to a parent spreadsheet, which in turn will convert the datasheet on the map to a static form. It is very easy – just right click on an Excel icon shown on a map’s spreadsheet and select Disconnect from Microsoft Excel. Problem solved! 😎
Last week, an Idea Mapping workshop took place in the Palm Beach Hotel, a nostalgic establishment from the Gilded Age that is still quite charming and awfully affordable considering its location. It was great to see old friends and meet new people, all united by deep interest in the Idea Mapping and inspired by the Idea Mapping guru Jamie Nast.
The fact that the four Certified Idea Mapping Instructors (CIMI) attended the workshop is a proof that the workshop has a lot to offer, even to seasoned instructors. For me personally, the workshop was an excellent review of the material and helped raising my confidence level as a new instructor. This is the third workshop I attended, and every time I was able to learn something new. Another great benefit of retuning is that we get a chance to network with like-minded people and learn from each other. I hope that we’ll continue this wonderful tradition.
I’ve been impressed with the caliber of first-time workshop participants. They come from all walks of life – business people, entrepreneurs, academia, aviation, education, information management, etc. Like myself, they all seek new and better ways of improving their business and personal life, and they turn to Idea Mapping as a universal whole-brain learning and thinking tool to achieve new level of success.
We were very fortunate to meet Vanda North and Richard Israel who gave us a snick pick into their new global initiative Mind Chi (I’ll share more on Mind Chi in my next post).
On the last day, Jamie led us, CIMIs, through instructions on how to build and maintain a successful blog. She deserves a lot of credit for creating a worldwide viral network of Idea Mapping enthusiasts using popular social networking sites. And this is just the beginning!
This fiscal year that started October 1, 2009, we are looking at our business processes to see what’s been working and what’s not, and how we can apply what we’ve learned in the last few years to get better results faster.
One of the first processes we’ve reviewed was the process of library introduction to new hires. This is the first encounter a new employee has with the library and, as we all know, the first impression is most lasting and thus critical to a person’s intention to use the library as a resource for his/her investment research. To help evaluate the process, we’ve turned to idea mapping, creating an idea map (or mind map) of the process. In addition to identifying the process’ gaps, this map replaces a multiple-page Word document we used as a process description and guidelines, creating a single-page view of the process which is easy to use in preparation to the session with a new library client and as a guide during the session.
We’ve been very busy and made significant breakthroughs since my last post in April. Although it is hard to measure scientifically, I see a direct correlation between the team’s participation in the Idea Mapping workshop and the explosion of new ideas. Just between January and July, we’ve developed and released two conceptually new services transforming the way we research and present information. We are also transforming the way we communicate. I already wrote about map meetings in the past. We took collaboration a step further and now we report our weekly accomplishments together, in a single map.
It’s always been my intention to use idea maps and visualization in the library’s information research and distribution activities. We haven’t figured it out yet how to best use MindManager to do that, but we’ve been experimenting. For example, attached is a map created by Prakash Doraswamy, who attempted to capture key ideas from literature review and analysis he is doing for the health care reform.
I hope you are enjoying the summer time. I’ll be in Russia most of August and will resume writing when I come back.
I’d like to highlight Safique Hazarika’s comment from the April 4th‘s post as it describes quite tangible benefits of switching to the mapping method (i.e. saving up to 20 minutes during each meeting).Following Safique’s feedback below, I’ve included a map from the most recent Mumbai team’s planning meeting. I am proud of the team’s creativity and commitment to innovation!
Written by Safique:
“This is creative and interactive. I want to convey the result and confirm how effectively this tool is working for the Mumbai Global Research Library team. I must agree with Larisa that being a global virtual team the challenges of collaboration/networking/idea sharing/tracking are enormous, and I guess this is true for all other virtual teams as well. But this alternative is undoubtedly a ray of hope.
Immediately after transitioning our weekly global meeting through MindJet workspace with the agenda map template mentioned by Larisa, we in Mumbai adopted the same approach for our local Monday weekly planning meeting. Unlike earlier, using white board to write agenda/task for the week and one person taking minutes meeting and later drafting notes, this time we used the projector and run this agenda map. Map template was already filled by respective team members with their task/comments in respective fields before coming to meeting – hence no more white board and no more meeting minutes. Agendas, tasks, comments in the Map are more clear, with pictures and mapped to its objective and expected desired results with deadline & follow up. Though we yet to evaluate the complete benefit and pros & cons of this application but I must say the result is impressive so far and also saves 15-20 minutes each meeting.
Apart from meetings, the most potential and promising is the use of idea maps in new projects, from the idea generating stage to the post-project evaluating phase. Team members have embraced this process quite generously, as it is getting interesting, and most importantly, this process tickles the creative minds and evoke thoughts to bring better results”.
We are currently working on an information guide to global stimulus packages and government bailouts around the world. The goal is to provide our clients with high quality information and resources to help them learn and understand the complex topic that keeps changing. Although we’ve done big research projects in the past (i.e. Financial Crisis in Perspective), this project presents special challenges.
The topic is a “moving target” and new information becomes available every day.
The volume of information is enormous. The topic is covered profusely by media, press and experts. We need to distill it to a manageable amount by analyzing and selecting the best pieces only.
We want to create a multi-type guide that will include literature (research, news, opinions, and books), charts, graphs, metrics, web sites, etc.The challenge is that we are still developing a new methodology for this multi-sensory approach to information delivery and don’t have a clear road map for implementation.
It is a huge project with all 15 team members and 4 library locations involved in different aspects. Bridging communication and collaboration gaps is crucial to success of the project and how quickly we can deliver it to our clients.
Because the topic is in high demand, we must move fast and complete the project in 4 – 6 weeks.
After multiple preliminary discussions between different team members, we finalized our thoughts and ideas at the team meeting with the help of an idea map (see below). We’ve been using maps routinely in our work since January, and this time around – without a doubt – visualizing what we wanted to do enabled us to clearly see a big picture and at the same time determine smaller components.Through a 30-minute brainstorming session, we quickly realized the areas where we were unclear (branches with question marks) and gained needed clarity to move ahead.Without mapping, I believe we’d spend at least one more week in planning.
We are a global team.For years, we’ve depended on MeetingPlace or NetMeeting as standard communication tools enabling us to connect and work together in a virtual space during our weekly team meetings.In the past few weeks, we are taking our meetings to the next level with the help of the idea mapping method and MindJet.
As a collaboration tool, remote meetings have many disadvantages.The risk of misunderstanding increases when you have more than a dozen of people from different countries attending a call. You cannot see your colleagues (you can, of course, with video conferencing technology, but we are not there yet).Right there, you can miss a lot in terms of subtle communication including body language, facial expression, mood, worries, etc.Even with well established and time-proven rules of meeting engagement that we’ve developed and implemented over the last 4 years, team collaboration and engagement during a traditional teleconference suffers the limitations that come with that medium.Add to that the routine nature of the meetings and we can understand why some meetings are less than energizing and simply boring.These are a few reasons why we’ve decided to enhance our meetings by using real time collaborative mapping as an alternative to net meetings.
We had a lot of fun creating a meeting agenda map template (scroll down to the March 7 post for details).The map contest winner was Safique Hazarika, our Mumbai manager.His map (see below) is now being officially used for our weekly staff meetings. We all were very excited during the first map meeting and everybody was engaged in contributing comments, adding notes and – to my surprise – decisively rearranging branches and taking ownership of the map. It was fun to see small icons of people with corresponding names moving around the map IN REAL TIME.Even if you cannot see faces, there is an increased perception of personal presence that you get using this tool.There is also a sense of stronger connection between team members. In the following weeks, we’ve taken a few steps to make our map meetings more efficient (we all enjoyed that creative chaos of the first meetings but there is work to be done!).Each week’s agenda items are added to that week’s map by team members prior to a meeting, with as many details as needed, including document attachments. This material can be reviewed in advance of the meeting. To avoid multiplication of notes taking during a meeting, we’ve decided to designate a single person to add notes to the map as discussions take place. Each person can add his or her notes if he or she feels that not all important points were captured by a designated notes taker.We want the process to be flexible but not too distractive. We keep meeting maps in the MindJet Connect folder that everyone can access at any time.It is hard to say at this early stage whether or not real time map meetings will be a much better alternative to traditional net meetings in terms of increased effectiveness and better results, but we’ve already seen a few benefits including:
increased team members’ engagement
heightened sense of connection with colleagues
breaking routine – we feel energized and have fun
These are intangibles that are hard, if not impossible, to measure. But we all know how important they are for building stronger teams.
I was thrilled to learn that Jamie Nast’s book “Idea Mapping” was translated into Russian. OZON.ru, one of the most popular online booksellers in Russia that is using business model similar to Amazon.com (they even sound similar, or almost similar, don’t you think?), posted a customer review that I thought had failed to do the book justice. After reviewing a Russian copy of the book, which in my opinion was very well translated, I wrote and posted my review (text below) giving the book – with a glee – 5 stars that it deserves.
Книга очень полезная.Я не согласна с автором предыдущего отзыва, что «вся книжка – авторская самореклама».Я знаю Джейми больше пяти лет (я участвовала в её семинарах) и могу из собственного опыта подтвердить, что синдромом самопродвижения она не страдает.Напротив, Джейми использует свою энергию и признание, как ведущий авторитет в этой области, на то, чтобы помочь людям овладеть навыками визуализации мыслей и идей и улучшить их работоспособность.
Я ознакомилась с русским переводом книги после прочтения оригинального издания и мне кажется, что, не смотря на хороший перевод и соответствие оригиналу, не всё поддаётся дословному переводу. Например, ideamappingв переводе на русский дословно звучит как картирование идей, и для меня это звучит довольно странно и не органично, чего нельзя сказать о терминологии в английском варианте.Я допускаю, что подобные лингвистические нюансы могут привести к не совсем полному пониманию задачи поставленной книгой.
Визуализация мыслей и идей с помощью схем и карт не является достижением нашей эпохи, уходя корнями в историю.В современном мире заслуга разработки теории ментальных карт принадлежит Тони Бьюзену.Заслуга Джейми заключается в том, что она упростила метод и правила лежащие в основе теории Бьюзена, давая «ментальным картографам» больше творческой свободы и возможности самовыражения.Такой подход делает книгу незаменимым практическим руководством для всех тех, кто ищет новые пути по улучшению своих умственных способностей, развитию памяти и повышению продуктивности и успеха в делах.
Особенность ментальных карт заключается в том, что они отражают естественную работу мозга, в частности его ассоциативную природу.С помощью ключевых слов, простых рисунков и разноцветных маркеров, ментальные карты помогают систематизировать мысли и придумывать новые идеи.Успех многих компаний и бизнесов во многом зависит от творческого потенциала работников и служащих.Система Джейми помогает развить и увеличить творческую активность и изобретательность людей, и потому её семинары пользуются большой популярностью в корпорациях, учебных заведениях и среди частных лиц.
Книга преподносит материал с элегантной простотой, что нельзя путать с упрощённостью, используя многочислкнные примеры и иллюстрации. Большим достоинством книги является то, что Джейми делится с читателями образцами карт созданными людьми из разных сфер деятельности, давая возможность начинающим «картографам» ознакомиться с реальным применением этого метода в разных жизненных ситуациях.Конечно, надеятся, что читатель мгновенно поумнеет после прочтения книги, это наивно.Как любой инструмент, этот метод требует практики, и книга Джейми послужит вам хорошим путеводителем.
Starting this January, we’ve been adopting MindManager as a tool to enhance team collaboration, communication and creative thinking. After completing an introductory training with the team on the basics of MindManager and MindJet Connect, I invited everyone to a map contest purpose of which was to design a map template for our staff meeting agenda.That map template would be the first step towards real-time online meeting collaboration where participants from around the world could contribute their ideas and thoughts by adding them to the map on the fly.Using the map-based approach, we want to see if we can improve:
a)understanding between people working remotely
b)team members’ engagement
c)brainstorming new ideas
d)meeting effectiveness
The contest was a fun way to apply new knowledge and try new skills. We had 100% participation with great results.The top winning map, as judged by team members, became our official meeting agenda template that we’ll be using for future meetings.
For me personally, all submitted maps were winners! I was surprised and pleased to see how quickly all team members learned and applied new skills – after only three 30-munutes training sessions – and how distinctly different and creative each map was.And for many people, that was their first map!Here are a few samples.
As a global team, most of our collaboration happens remotely.Over the years, we’ve implemented good communication practices, enhanced business processes and strengthened culture of collaboration.All of this, we’ve realized in the last few months, hasn’t been enough for achieving desired results in a timely fashion. Maturing as a team, we’ve come to conclusion that one of the big issues for us is communication quality, primarily the goal of achieving understanding and preventing misunderstanding.
Physical act and volume of communication don’t automatically mean true understanding.And identifying hidden spots of misunderstanding among team members is not easy but critical to the team’s success.Team members confirming that they understood concepts, tasks or assignments may genuinely believe that they are on the same page with others.Later, the final results, being less than expected, make everybody wonder how things could go off the desired track, in spite of the best communication practices used in the process.If you work on a virtual and multi-cultural team, this scenario happens quite often and can lead to loss of productivity, diminishing trust between team members and drop in service quality.
To identify and, ultimately prevent, misunderstanding, we started to use maps. For example, at the recent managers’ meeting, we shared ideas about emerging opportunities for the library during this worst recession in history.The one-and-a-half hour meeting was set up as a teleconference, with one manager calling from Mumbai, India. After the meeting, using MindManager, I created a map summarizing key concepts of our discussion, provided additional comments that I hadn’t had time to offer during the meeting, and invited meeting participants to insert comments or questions within the map.The managers reviewed the map and added a few callouts with questions and comments (see the attached map).There were about half-a-dozen questions in the map that were not asked during the meeting (either because of time constraints or other reasons) – showing to me that those areas needed further clarification.It is possible that if I hadn’t sent the post-meeting map, those questions might have never been asked, leading to misunderstanding and all unpleasant consequences that misunderstanding entails.
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