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Information Overload: Saving Managers from DrowningA major innovation of the twentieth century was the ‘mind map’ by Tony Buzan. The mind map is even more relevant today in an era of information overload. The technique is used in Government, businesses large and small and in education. Why do so many thousands of people use these techniques? Because they:
• Use of colour, curved line and images encourages people to use both sides of their brain. (Most of us predominantly use one side or the other … analytical functions in the left brain and daydreaming/imagination in the right). All the acknowledged ‘geniuses’ demonstrably use both sides of their brain
• Use ‘radiant thinking’ (think of a snowflake with a central concept and related information spreading outwards) which allows large amounts of complex information to be logically displayed on a single page
• Are structured to enhances recall
• Encourage better planning and organization

However, paper based mapping does have its limitations including difficulty in changing a map, some people are artistically challenged finding them difficult to draw and other people’s maps can be difficult to interpret. These issues disappeared with the arrival of the software based mind map. For example:
• Making changes became a simple matter of ‘drag & drop’
• All maps looked good by the uses of inbuilt layout rules and professional graphics
• The results were clear and easy to read

The first software to successfully follow Buzan’s ‘Rules for Mind Mapping’ was software written by a German engineer (Mike Jetter, Mindjet Inc) and it fitted on a single floppy … the current version, MindManager 6 Pro in getting on for 40 MBs! There have been other software products following in MindManager’s footsteps such as Mindgenius, ConceptDraw, NovaMind and MindMapper.

So, software based mind mapping solutions make a dramatic contribution to collecting and sorting information, to sort the ‘wood from the trees’ in fact to turn the issue of information overload into structures and patterns that make sense. However these mapping techniques, sophisticated though the are, have their own set of problems, which fall into three groups:
1. Multiple maps: it is easy to end up with a number of maps relating to the same area and with no obvious way to merge them in a controlled manner
2. A single map that grows and grows (Also resulting from merging maps) so that it is really too big to manage
3. When you want to turn the above maps into a structured report

These issues have been elegantly solved buy the introduction of ‘KnowledgeLink Pro’ … a piece of software that can either work on its own or in perfect synchronization with MindManager. KnowledgeLink converts the radial mind map into a more linear format where it can be easily reorganized, edited and exported as a finished document.

Such a combination of smart solutions goes a long way to both saving managers’ from drowning in information and helping them to become smarter. These and other similar solutions can be found at www.mindsystems.com.au

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