Hints and Tips: Mind Map Your Next Presentation
Is Mind Mapping a serious business tool? Here Clive Lewis, MD of Illumine Training highlights the techniques that make Mind Mapping especially valuable for anyone who wants to prepare and deliver compelling business presentations.
Just imagine… you have found a simple technique that helps you pull together and organise all your thoughts for your next project, you’ve found a great way to present information, you’ve discovered a much simpler method for taking notes. Wouldn’t life be simpler, wouldn’t you be relieved, wouldn’t it help you to be more effective? Of course it would and all this can be achieved through Mind Mapping – a personal effectiveness tool that can massively improve your performance at work.
So what are Mind Maps®?
In essence Mind Maps are a way of organising and presenting information in a visual way which correlates with the way our minds actually work. We don’t think in lists or long essays – we think in images and key themes, shapes and patterns, all connected one to another.
To prove that this is the truth let me invite you to consider for a moment your next holiday. As you do so become aware that a number of key thoughts will almost instantly spring to mind… for instance you will probably consider where you might want to go to, the people you might want to go with, the time of year that will suit you, the sort of activities you might want do while on holiday, the money it will cost and so on. And if you took the time to think further you would find that alongside each of these key ideas you would have hundreds more associated thoughts.
Now this understanding of how we think provides us with our foundations for Mind Mapping. In essence all that Mind Mapping is a graphic technique which expresses the natural functioning of the human mind.
Now when I say graphic technique, does that mean you have to be an artist? Absolutely not. If you can doodle then you can Mind Map. You simply start with a core idea and then you draw thick lines in different colours representing the key associations you have made radiating out from that central image. Have a look at the Mind Map below on how to organise a business trip. It’s a classic map which depicts the issue at the centre, includes the basic ordering ideas (BOIs) branching out and then outlines a variety of other ideas that are associated with each of these branches.
So is Mind Mapping a serious business tool? Absolutely.
Mind Mapping is a technique that is proven to help learning, aid memory and is efficient in recording and storing information. For example, let us compare it with note-taking. Typically note-taking is a laborious process with an output which, let’s face it, gets quickly forgotten if it is read at all. Why is this so? Because a page of text has almost no variety, no distinguishing features; nothing stands out and the brain goes to sleep.
As a direct alternative, Mind Mapping wins hands down. It saves labour because you write down only the key words, saves reading time because you only have to read what is relevant, allows associations to be made between key ideas and is memorable because it is visually stimulating.
Preparing the presentation
Now there are all sorts of applications for Mind Mapping. You don’t have to be a compulsive note-taker to use this technique and a key application that I want to focus on here is how Mind Mapping can help with the preparation and delivery of presentations.
One of the many challenges that managers face when they are presenting to their clients and colleagues is to remember their audience. What!? Surely that is what presentations are all about. Indeed this is what they should be about, but it is an unfortunate truth that one of the main traps that presenters fall into is to believe that what they are saying is what matters most. It isn’t. What matters most is what the listeners take in and remember.
So how do people take in and remember new information?
Well most of us learned how to learn at school and typically it was a dull process involving a teacher standing at the front of the class expounding their wisdom and instructing us on what we had to remember. Chalk and talk. They spoke, we wrote. And when tests or examinations came around we read, and re-read, our notes and tried to regurgitate the same phrases which would consequently prove our intelligence.
Now such an approach clearly isn’t appropriate in a business context. As presenters we need to be able both to engage our listeners fast and do all we can to help them understand the issues that are at stake. We typically have one chance to get our message across and in this respect Mind Mapping has a valuable role to play.
So let me take an example. Let me imagine I am making a presentation on something familiar like ‘marketing communication’. How might I use Mind Mapping to help me give a compelling talk?
Well the first step in this process would be for me to be clear on what I believe are the basic organising ideas (BOIs) around such a topic and in this process Mind Mapping can help me to start gathering information and organising what I know about the subject. As you can see from the Mind Map below I have sketched out a central image and have included the main BOIs radiating off from this image as follows – Objectives, Activities, Opportunities and Barriers. If you were giving a presentation on this topic you might well have a different selection to these, but for the purposes of this article what I have drawn up here provides an example of some key themes which would certainly be relevant.
Key techniques in Mind Mapping
So in terms of the preparation I need to do for my presentation, the Mind Mapping process has given me a way of gathering all the pertinent information and putting it onto one page. This non-linear map shows me the whole picture and from it I can now consider which are the priority issues to talk about. Once I have decided this I can then start to prepare a more finished Mind Map around which I can give my presentation.
Now the process of Mind Mapping may be simple but there are some key techniques within the process that are well worth pointing out if you want to use it as a presentation tool.
- First of all you will notice the amount of colour I have used in these Mind Maps. This is not accidental. The colour used separates out the main ideas and is also stimulating for the audience. It makes the content easier to remember. But it isn’t always essential to use colours – for example when you are doing a quick map just to facilitate a thinking process you may just have a single pen to hand so don’t restrict yourself. However, if you are using Mind Maps to help an audience get in touch with a subject with which they might be unfamiliar colour certainly makes the presentation clearer and much more powerful.
- You will also notice that there are a number of images used in various places in the Mind Map. As you will see, I am no artist, but that’s not the point. The images relate to particular branches, add visual impact and can be used instead of, or as well as, words. Our brains like such visual creativity and an image opens up associative thinking and captures the attention. In effect a picture speaks a thousand words.
- You will also see that the lines radiating out from the central image are of varying thickness and that there is one descriptive word above each line. In this respect the thickness of the line denotes its relative importance and the basic ordering ideas (BOIs) that reflect the main branches on this Mind Map are like chapter headings. A good way to think of these BOIs are as key concepts which allow the most associations. The use of a single word above each line is also important because every word has millions of possible associations. One word per line helps clarity and comprehension and also enables better recall.
So will your audience thank you for introducing them to this new form of communication? Well the chances are that Mind Maps won’t be unfamiliar to everyone and all the research suggests that they do help to get the message across. But in the end the Mind Map won’t, of course, do all your work. All a Mind Map can do is help you plan and construct your presentation in a creative and memorable way.
So, finally, let me reflect on whether there is a downside to Mind Mapping.
Of course no system is foolproof and Mind Mapping may take a little getting used to. Some people always prefer the familiar – even when that familiarity isn’t very effective – and Mind Mapping can appear to be just too colourful and creative for some traditionalists. However it is worth knowing that millions of people now use Mind Maps – from the directors of multinational companies to five year old children, from parents to government leaders. Use it confidently and talk people through your ideas and there really should be very few problems.
Another possible objection relates to the generation of Mind Maps. What happens when you get ‘stupid’ or frivolous associative thoughts? The problem here is that we sometimes label ideas that are unfamiliar, or which somehow seem out of place, as ‘stupid’ when in fact all we are doing is censoring. Actually our stupid ideas once examined are often our most creative, intuitive and original thoughts. If we want to get innovative we need to include all of our associations before considering at a later date what editing, refinements or changes we might want to make.
So my invitation to you is to start Mind Mapping right now. Don’t get discouraged if it takes you one or two tries. Any new way of working takes a bit of getting used to. What I can guarantee, however, is that if you persist with Mind Mapping you will quickly find it becomes an essential way of recording and storing information and will certainly improve your effectiveness at work.
Illumine also offers a number of courses and workshops to help you with Mind Mapping, Planning and Presentation techniques:
Illumine Business Mapping (Mind Mapping for Business Advantage)
Our 1 day comprehensive public workshop and in-house course, a ½ day public seminar or a ½ day in-house course:
- Find out more about the 1 day public workshop (London, Manchester, Atlanta and Dubai) and in-house course here…
- Find out more about the ½ day public seminar (London, Manchester and Birmingham) here…
- Find out more about the ½ day in-house course here…
Professional Presentations
Our compact 1 day or comprehensive 2 day in-house course that focuses on presentation techniques that help you to know your audience, prepare effectively and deliver with IMPACT. It’s not a course that focuses on presenting with PowerPoint®.
Mind Map® and Mind Maps® are trademarks of the Buzan Organisation.
MindManager® and Mindjet® are trademarks of Mindjet.
Tags: Mind Mapping, Personal effectiveness, Presentation techniques, Sept/Oct 2008 - The Presentation Dilemma
