What if there was a way to do more work with fewer resources and to reduce the number of hours spent working?
What if there was a tool that could make you more efficient and more organized? What if there was a technique to enhance your creativity and your ability to communicate ideas?
What if you could discover a resource that could change the very foundation of how you think and learn in a way that would enhance your work and life forever? Would you be interested?
Idea mapping has done just that for me and for millions of others around the world. It can offer the same success for you.
What follows throughout this book is the process I take groups and individuals through in order to teach them to use their brains more effectively. It begins with where you are to- day. Here is where it began for me.
The Turning Point
It was late on a Friday afternoon in August of 1996, and I was exhausted from a month of nonstop travel delivering leadership workshops to corporate managers and supervisors of the company for which I was employed.
At the time, I was working for EDS a large, global information technology company. I was one of eight hand-selected leaders asked to join a team that develops and coaches employees throughout the
Midwest and Canada in leadership competencies. On Monday the traveling would start all over again in another city. It was going to be my first time teaching a new course; however, there was a problem. I wasn’t close to being prepared. It was going to be a very long weekend.
Several months earlier I had been certified as a facilitator for Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Leaders” 5-day workshop. Since receiving the certification, I had not had the opportunity to teach the class. So not only was I unprepared, but so much time had passed in between becoming certified and being invited to speak on the topic that my memories of what I had learned were vague.
Familiarizing myself with the material was going to be close to learning it all for the first time. Realistically I needed at least a week to review. If you have ever seen one of these facilitator guides, you can identify with me.
It is a three-inch tome of materials (I measured my manual to be sure I wasn’t exaggerating!) in addition to many videos. Along with one of my team members, I was scheduled to coteach two of these classes to two different groups in Indianapolis, Indiana, starting on Monday.
The schedule called for us to be there for 2 weeks. On Monday we were teaching the first day of class to Group A.
On Tuesday we were teaching the first class to Group B. We were going to repeat that schedule until the classes were completed for both groups.
As a seasoned facilitator you can fake a lot of things, but demonstrating an understanding of the material is not one of them. Maybe it was self-preservation or the desire to salvage some of my weekend, but a possible solution came to me.
I had been using and teaching individuals about a unique skill called mind mapping (mind maps are a registered trademark of the Buzan Organization) for 4 years.
(Idea mapping has its original roots in the mind mapping Battle of the Brains technique.) Mind mapping is a way of taking notes and organizing thoughts into key words and pictures and is a technique that can condense mounds of data onto one sheet of paper. It also acts as a memory tool.
I knew it was powerful but had never used it for such a large (and critical) application. I was backed into a corner and had no choice. It had to work.
Here was the plan I worked out with my coworker.
Since she was much more familiar with the material that we were both invited to present, she would teach day 1 to Group A. I would sit at the back of the room and map the entire day on one 11′′ × 17′′ sheet of paper.
The following day I would teach day 1 to Group B from my map. If the process worked, we would repeat this strategy for the remainder of our time in Indianapolis. She agreed to give it a try.
I enjoyed my weekend for the most part. Although I had sufficient reason to believe the plan would work, I still carried some anxiety with me to Indianapolis.
The Indianapolis experiment, as it came to be known, began on Monday as I sat in the back of the classroom with my markers, with the facilitator guide, participant manual, handouts, and the back-up set of videos surrounding me.
I documented everything: sequence, stories, what page participants should turn to, whether I was using a flip chart or an overhead projector, where to cue which video, what to skip, when to eat; you name it.
it went on the map. By the end of the day my brain was fried from the intense concentration, but I had done it! The next day, I taught day 1 to an unsuspecting Group B from my single 11′′ × 17′′ map.
Complete success! Not only did I have all the material in front of me, but I could also see the interconnections between key points. I had internalized the material fairly well, saved at least a week of preparation time, and for future classes only had to review the map before teaching.
I was amazed! We executed the plan for the remainder of the workshop with equal success. I still have those original maps, and I would venture to say that I could still teach from them today even though the last time I taught that class was in 1997.
See Figure 1.1 for the map from that first day in Indianapolis. (See www.IdeaMappingSuccess.com for color versions of this and subsequent idea maps in this book.) I know it looks very strange, but don’t worry about that at this point.
You’re not supposed to be able to understand my map. I just want you to begin to see how these graphical creatures are structured.
That experience personalized the magnitude of the power of mapping in a way I had not yet experienced. Since then my efficiency, productivity, and creativity have continued to soar as a result of using this new skill.
Now I have a reservoir of equally powerful success stories from people all around the globe. I’ll share some of those throughout this book.
