This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
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If you get stuck with mind mapping
Now if you get a little bit stuck with your mind mapping and you get to an end of a branch and you don’t know exactly where to go. Maybe apply some of these questions to each branch on the mind map. Why? How, where? So what? That might drive your thinking a little bit further.
So hopefully you’ve generated a whole bunch of ideas that could be part of this document that you are putting together. Not all of those ideas will end up in the document, but hopefully you’ve explored it fairly thoroughly.
And as you do this thinking with a mind map, it may be that you have started to think about your topic in a slightly different way. Well, that’s really helpful. And that is one of the powers of the mind map that it can cause different types of thinking about a topic.
Mind mapping triggers the subconscious
Now, if that didn’t happen for you, that’s OK. Sometimes it doesn’t, particularly if you’ve only taken 5 or 10 minutes to do the mind mapping, because in those first few minutes what’s likely to happen is the stuff that’s at the top of the mind is what you put down. I find mind mapping can take me, you know, 20, maybe even 30 minutes to start thinking deeply about a topic. The first few minutes is just the obvious stuff. The stuff that’s top of head.
But I do find the real value of the mind map is when I come back to it tomorrow. Somehow this initial mind map triggers my subconscious. Now I’ve got no idea how the subconscious works. I just know that it does, and coming back to the mind map and the following day, often I’m able to add some different types of content and some richer ideas.
Using mind mapping in different situations
Now mind mapping can be used in lots of different ways. You’ve just used it now for your own individual thinking that’s really beneficial.
You can also use it for thinking as a group, so you might put it up on a whiteboard and you can all add ideas together. Or maybe you display it in a public place for people to add to over time.
The other place I’ve seen mind maps used really well is in meetings – if you have a skilled facilitator mind mapping the ideas as the conversation takes place. One of the problems that I’ve observed in meetings is sometimes there’s people who have a really good idea, but they take a long time to talk about it. If you’re mapping the ideas, you can map their idea on the whiteboard, let them talk about it for a little while. And then somebody else will come up with an equally good idea, but they’re just a bit more succinct in how they express themselves. And so what we end up with at the end of the meeting is we’ve got a record of the ideas and we’re not dominated by the airtime that people take.
Mind mapping from the perspective of your reader
Well, look, I did say that there are two mind maps that I think are important when we come to write any document. let’s move on to the second one.
The second one is all about the user and the questions that they may have.
So we’re flipping it over. We started with a topic mind map. All the things that I wanted to say. But now we look at things from the user’s perspective, all the things that they might be interested in.
So let me show you an example of what that might look like. Again, my topic is still indoor air pollution, so I start my mind mapping the same way and then I start to think about some of the questions that people that readers might have about this topic.
They might have questions about their health and particularly about their family and the new baby that’s come along. And can they do anything about it, and is it related to cancer in some way? And they might be thinking about, well, how can I stop indoor air pollution? Would fans help? They might be thinking about, hey, is the government doing anything? They might have some questions about what’s it like for me, what’s going on at my home and is my heater a problem?. Anything else that could be a problem at home? And what about at work, are my office machines a problem? Is my photocopier giving me cancer. Is the government doing anything?
So there could be a whole bunch of questions that people will ask or have in their mind when they come to this document on indoor air pollution. So I want to explore those questions as thoroughly as I possibly can to get an idea of what every one of those.
Now, I may choose not to answer some of those questions, but I do want to know what they are.
So again, I’m going to stop the video and ask you to build another mind map. So take a second piece of blank paper, same topic in the centre of the page, but this time you’re looking at things from the user’s perspective. All the questions that they will have.
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