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A Guide to Mind Mapping and Exploring Creative Thought
Topics: #Productivity, #Guide
Exploring creative thought is an absolutely necessary skill for any team leader or organiser to better not only themselves but the organisations they run as well.
What is Mind Mapping?
Mind mapping is one form of creative thought exploration where a diagram is used to visually represent differing thoughts into a hierarchy - to express relationships between them as a whole.
How do I Mind Map?
Some people may be familiar with this method of creative thought if they've worked in creative teams or done creative writing projects in a public school system.
However, for those who aren't familiar, we can break mind mapping down into five steps.
Choose your topic and place it in the middle of the page.
Come up with 3-5+ main ideas, then evenly space them in a circular formation around the main topic.
Draw a line from the main topic to each of these ideas.
Try to come up with some supporting details like ideas, tasks, and/or questions for each idea.
Draw lines connecting each main idea to its supporting details.
What Other Options Are There?
There are hundreds of individual ways to explore creative thought. While mind mapping is a fairly common and well-structured option, not everyone's brains work the same. Each of us needs to find our own individualised method of exploring our thought.
Brainwriting - a similar process to brainstorming - is a good option for this. In brainwriting, a group selects the main discussion topic, and then each individually come up with a list of thoughts or solutions based on that topic. It's then up to members of the group to decide if they want to take all of the similar ideas to explore further, or maybe take all the individual ideas and discuss why they would or wouldn't be good options based on their initial difference.
Five W's and One H - This method is often used in journalism, however, it can be adapted for many applications. Each member of the group should focus on these five questions: who, why, what, when, where and how. This can later be put into more in-depth questions like "who is our target audience" and "why does our audience need this action?"
Resources
I highly recommend doing your own research into various different methods of creative thought expression on your own time - it's important not to force one method onto yourself (or others). This can be extremely exhausting or upsetting if you're already focusing a lot of your energy on just coming up with the ideas in the first place.
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