A while a go, I reviewed a book called “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath. Chuck Frey of the MindMapingSoftwareBlog recommended it to me, and it was one of those recommendations that change your thinking.  I was very enthusiastic about it (still am) and I did a mind map of it to include in the review.

Then last night, Paul Foreman of MindMapInspiration discovered and tweeted about it (his Twitter handle is @mindmapdrawer) and it went mildly viral as @IQMatrix, @Dr_SG, @gcimmarrusti and others commented.  I’m very happy about this – that book should be known to everyone.

But one witty comment from @Dr_SG caught my eye and made me think : “This an excellent map, Roy. It really lays out the important points of the book. So well, in fact, that I’m not going to read the book at all ;o)”

So here’s the dichotomy: Mind maps are supposed to help you remember things – they certainly help me, and that’s why I did the map in the first place.  I found the book very convincing and wanted a quick overview to go back to.  Then decided to review it briefly and publish the mind map on line.

But using the mind map as a prime source of the ideas in the book would mean you wouldn’t see all the delightful and persuasive stories, and the ideas wouldn’t be Made to Stick. 

I know it was a tongue-in-cheek witticism Dr_SG, but I hope you will really read the book if you haven’t already!

Roy

BTW do not, on any account, follow @Dr_SG on Twitter, he has way too many interesting tweets for a normal person to handle    )

Adam Sicinski, well known to readers of this blog since the Great Hand-drawn Mind Mappers’ Face-off, has come out with a jaw-dropping mind map that some people could probably run their lives with.  Cleverly called the “MasterMind Matrix” it comes either as a PDF or a laminated A0 poster (that’s A0, as in 33 inches x 47).

I corresponded with him about this to dig out the back story, and the more I learned, the more I realised that it was a tale worth telling.

Adam Sicinski is a coach – a Life Coach – and he told me of a several year search for the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (not his words, I’m just a Douglas Adams fan) involving 150 books from Amazon, CDs, DVDs and seminars.  He kept diaries about interactions with others, and obsessively watched recordings of reality-TV shows so he could pause and resume while making notes about what people said, how they said it and what happened as a result. 

Although he knew of mind mapping back then, to him, it wasn’t the indispensable tool he finds it now. He started organizing this material into OneNote in what he would probably admit is a pretty non-visual way:

This took several weeks of full-time organization of years’ worth of materials.  Suddenly, he had one of those ‘Aha!’ moments: He had become a mere Information Collector (his caps) and it was getting him nowhere -  action was what he needed. 

So he started formal study at the Life Coaching Institute of Australia to get practical experience and this pushed him over the ‘action’ hump.  He told me that this was when the idea for a MasterMind Matrix began to take its first form one night in 2006, because he saw he had many disparate pockets of deep information with not much tying them together – there were gaps that he wanted to fill in and links to be made.  He sent me a snap of an early version, and if I’m guessing rightly, I think he was using Inspiration at that stage – not at all in today’s Sicinski style.

He tells me that piecing this together filled his evenings, nights and the early hours for twelve months, but as it grew he went into another round of research and reading.  By now his target was to present all this information in an easy to understand format that linked everything.

 Then it got interesting – by early 2007 the chart had grown out of control.  He even had it all over one bedroom wall and contemplated it before sleeping and when waking up.  It was rough around the edges, which is hard to imagine if you look at it now. 

Getting it to its present state took another 2 years – moving right into 2009 and its release a week ago.   

I tried to squeeze something out of Adam about his process for making this type of mind map, but he’s staying tight-lipped.  With a unique style like this that’s probably wise, though I’ve heard that he plans some courses around the technique.

So what does it look like?  (and just bear in mind that it’s normally nearly four feet wide)

To get the value from this, it’s clear you’ll be studying it for a long time (click for a larger image).

Here’s a free version of the MaterMind Matrix and Adam’s own information about this map.

Roy

Disclosure – Adam sent me a pdf of this without charge because I’ve shown enthusiasm for his work in the past.  He did not ask me to blog about it.

I walked into the room for a meeting ahead of time – and found a noisy and excited argument in progress. I was just an outside consultant, there to act as facilitator, so I focused on getting my laptop hooked up and the projector working.  I wanted to get the participants building a mindmap of agreed successful points with me quickly, as well as discussing issues found, which is all they wanted to talk about right then.

We were there to discuss what the users were expecting from a new information system, and the developers were scheduled to present the results of feedback from the first round of user testing.

That particular meeting did eventually calm down, but wasn’t a good start and would have been more productive in other circumstances.

Now, I have a different approach that brings out these problems, which were principally about trust, at a much earlier stage and deals with them differently. It changes many other aspects of getting business information systems out that really deliver what’s required – it’s called VPEC-T and you can read about it, and see a detailed mind map by following the links here: VPEC-T the 5D lens and here: VPEC-T the mindmap

If you’re involved with information systems at the intersection of businesses and information technology, take a look and let me know what you think.

Roy
Click to visit the full map:

The VPEC-T thinking framework for information systems

I just found this – a dynamic mindmap of cognition.  An elegant piece of analysis and a neat web mini-application that lets you view the map and see some of the meta-data behind it.

Will Tom Van Buskirk release this as a general tool, I wonder?

Click below to view a local image, or above to see the real thing.

Roy

[updated]

The one child policy in China has resulted in a deficit of one hundred million women. A different ‘one boy’ policy would have saved millions of lives, and provided a balanced and declining population.

Where election candidates are within less than five per cent of each other in votes, each should serve half the term. In the most recent Mexican presidential election, the difference was 0.56 per cent.  

Not my ideas (I wish …) but Edward de Bono’s.  De Bono, originator of lateral thinking, co-opetition, Six Thinking Hats, the CoRT method for teaching thinking to children, has just announced:

The World Council For New Thinking.  More information at the snappily-named domain  http://www.worldcouncilfornewthinking.org