

PUBLICATION INFORMATION

COPYRIGHT

2006 Norah Bolton

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN Agency/Agence ISBN

Library & Archives Canada/Bibliothèque & Archives Canada

See What You Think! How to Work Better and Faster with VisiMap/by Norah Bolton

Includes Bibliographical Reference and Index

ISBN 0-9782219-0-7

D YNAMIC THINKING

21 Shaftesbury Avenue, Suite 304

Toronto, Ontario Canada M4T 3B4
DEDICATION

To my granddaughter, Ariel and my grandson, Benjamin

who enthusiastically contribute to my continuing education

And with special thanks to all those who have preceded them in

helping me to learn and grow

Author's Note

This book was originally published in 1997. It has been updated and edited to apply more fully to the use of VisiMap. The last three chapters are new and did not appear in the previous version. Special thanks to Steve Moss of CoCo Systems for his helpful reading and advice in the preparation of this edition; and to my son Michael Bolton for his technical assistance.

Map illustrations throughout the book were created in VisiMap 4.0 Professional.

### SEE WHAT YOU THINK!
Contents

The Learning Journey 7

 Your Amazing Brain Understanding its function and power 12

Discovering Visual Mapping 19

Getting Acquainted with VisiMap 24

Know your Thinking Style 30

Be a Quick Study 38

Be a Fast Talker 45

Be on a Winning Team 51

Meeting of Minds 57

Try to Remember 61

Form a Brain Cell 67

 Don't Just Solve it – Create it 71

Tools of Choice 77

Thinking Through the Day 85

Your Most Important Sale 97

Your Whole Brained Computer 104

Visual Mapping at Work 113

VisiMap at Home 120

A Circle of Quietness 126

Appendix 131

Index 134

About the Author 136
CHAPTER 1

# The Learning Journey

_In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists._ -Eric Hoffer

## New Learning Tools for New Times

We have embarked upon one of the most interesting transformations in communication and learning in human history. A renaissance is underway that is changing the ways we work, the ways we communicate, the ways we interact and the ways we think.

The reach of the technology is astounding. In a 2006 survey of internet use, it is estimated that growth in internet use world wide has increased by 200% between 2000 and 2006. North Americans lead with 69% of the population now online, followed by Oceana/Australia with 54% and Europe with 38.2%. Asia's population of 3,660,000,000 has a smaller percentage of population penetration but it accounts for an astounding 38% of the world's users. And other parts of the world are showing outstanding growth. Use in Africa has increased 625% in the last five years; the Middle East has increased by 479%; and Latin America/Caribbean has increased by 361% in the same time frame. (source: internetworldstats.com; 2006)

We've graduated from talking about computing to talking about living, as MIT's Nicholas Negroponte predicted. Sending electronic mail, tapping into research resources on the other side of the world and chatting with people on other continents are perfectly normal activities - as routine as turning on the radio or picking up a newspaper were fifty years ago.

## The World is Online

_It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening._ -H. G. Wells

Middle aged adults and seniors have stopped ignoring the unfolding technological world, - seniors are the fastest growing segment of Internet users. They have even stopped relying on those old college text books still stored in the basement. Nobody has secretaries any more; these women are going to law school.

I've always had the unorthodox and child-like idea that work is play and have been lucky enough to find jobs that have challenged me to "learn" a living. I went into teaching because I thought I could share my love of learning with others. I was absolutely fascinated to find out how little some kids learned and how much others did – usually on their own with precious little help from me. My work in management and consulting has been a particular bonus because it allowed me to get paid for learning on behalf of other people. I no longer need copies of the feasibility and organizational studies and plans I have written, because I have the knowledge and experience those studies gave me instead.

There has also been an exciting opportunity to learn from my own children. They preceded my journey in navigating the information and knowledge highways once so foreign to me. Never mind simple issues like programming the VCR. The kids were absorbing foreign cultures, learning new ways to communicate, and finding obscure sources of information in totally new worlds. I wanted in and they helped me walk my first faltering steps.

Some years ago when I talked about such adventures to my middle aged friends, they rolled their eyes. They were proud to be ignorant of the whole scene and wanted no part of it. They hoped that paradigm shifts were one more "flavor of the month" which would pass into oblivion. But now my friends have caught up. They have become excited about many of the tools and techniques that I now want to share with you.

## New Tools

Some of the ideas and tools you will explore in the following chapters may be entirely new to you – some may seem irrelevant, some scary, and some silly. You will be invited to question the way you think, the way you learn, the way you communicate and record ideas, the way you make decisions and the way you take action. There are now viable alternatives which challenge the way you have traditionally done these things.

For some of you, any chance to learn something different will be stimulating and you will want to rush right out and try some new methods of exploring and communicating. Others may want to do more reading and research before experimenting. Still others will be disturbed and even threatened by some of the concepts and want more time to think about them.

All of these are valid initial responses. All of them will assist you in your journey toward greater personal productivity, effectiveness and creative fulfillment. You may want to scan the entire book and then re-read it. You may want to take it slowly and absorb the ideas one at a time. The exercises in each chapter may be done as you go, or you may want to return to them later. Ultimately though, you will have to do something if you want any real learning to take place.

## Visual Thinking with VisiMap®

You will be introduced to the concept of visual thinking with a particular focus on a wonderful tool called VisiMap. For those of us who have spent most of our lives buried in reports, memos and documents, the idea that there could be any other way of organizing, communicating or storing ideas than using words is foreign. Adding an artistic element or using images as a means of thinking seems something best left to the creative types or weekend hobbyists. The rabbit- warren offices that we inhabit don't lend themselves to visual playfulness, and the idea that we could actually have fun thinking and planning may take some adjustment.

You may also have to make some major shifts in traditional linear thinking. The world of the Web we have now come to know it is a no-holds-barred frontier where nobody will tell you what to do; you can go anywhere and do anything. But if you approach the Web as just another form of entertainment, you will miss its chief value. If you get involved in technical arguments about the best browser or service provider, you might miss the fact that the chief strength and potential of online communication is as a medium to foster human interaction. Unlike most books for "Dummies" or Complete Idiots", this one starts from the perspective of a different way of structuring and organizing ideas called visual mapping. You will learn to use VisiMap as a bridge to non-linear thinking and become familiar with its application on the ground. It will greatly aid your excursions into the wider Web.

You will see drawings and illustrative "VisiMaps" throughout the book. They are there to demonstrate this new way to record your thoughts and feelings and inspire you to create your own.

The quotations scattered throughout the book are also food for thought that some may like and others find too long or too distracting. I am personally fond of quotes in my favorite books as a non-linear commentary on the main event and good for a daydream or two. At various stages in my own life, good quotes have decorated the insides of closet doors, bathroom mirrors and car dashboards to catch me unawares or give me something to think about when I'm stuck in traffic. But if you don't like quotes you are welcome to ignore them and you won't risk losing the main train of thought.

Some people enjoy reading and exploring new ideas together. Perhaps you and a colleague or significant other can embark on a mental workout in the same way that you undertake a physical exercise program with a buddy.

## You Can Learn

The most exciting people are those who continue to learn. They have an energy and enthusiasm that is totally infectious and engaging. You have the potentiality to be such a person – or if you already are, - to learn even more.

The school system may have convinced you that you were a slow learner or an ineffective learner, but it was wrong. You can learn,  and with new learning tools, you can equip yourself for the new emerging world. Change is moving at a faster pace than ever before in human history. Values and paradigms used to last a lifetime and now they don't. Someone wisely observed recently that it is not change that is unsettling, but our resistance to it.

If we see our universe as a dynamic living organism, it gives us the opportunity to plant seeds of new ideas, to water and cultivate them with acquired wisdom and experience, to watch them burst into bloom, and grow to new heights. What you need are the right gardening tools for coping with the planting and cultivation so that you can participate in the harvesting. This book will introduce you to some of those tools and show you how to put them to use.

## Practice Practice Practice

As you will learn in more detail later, we have many preconceived ideas about learning new things. Many of them are wrong. One of the most distorted ideas is the notion that on a first try we can immediately improve. Nearly all of us expect to do better every time we try a new thing.

Check out the real facts as you watch a baby trying to stand. She'll fall down and gurgle and with a smile get on her feet again only to fall down again. Watch a youngster attempting to get his first notes out of a saxophone. There will be several terrible notes and suddenly a good one followed by many more terrible ones. If you have a vision of where you want to go, you can start where you are, and make lots of false starts and a few good ones. It's a spiraling process that moves gradually toward success.

You learn by asking a question, developing interest, envisioning a possible answer, planning, doing and reviewing. You don't create an attractive inviting home without learning some things about decor and hospitality. You don't create a business without a vision of where you want to go, trying a number of strategies, seeing some of them succeed and watching others fall flat on their face. Theory is easier to understand and assess when you have some direct experience of doing.

In a new situation though, you may find some coaching useful. Usually there is a rationale for understanding or doing things in a particular way that is based on the experience of those who know the ropes. When you have mastered the initial concept, you can build on it and improvise, using your own learning and solid grounding in the subject to bring your personal style and individuality to the thinking and communicating process.

## Think About It

Reflection is one of the most enjoyable aspects of adult learning. As children we absorb new information quickly but seldom stop to think what it means to us. One of the advantages you have as an adult is the ability to plant new learning in a larger garden of experience and knowledge. What you encounter has to make sense in the context of what you already know and understand. You need to know where the key ideas fit. Reflecting puts us on the path to wisdom.

## Review

Once you have absorbed new learning, you are ready to travel further. Your knowledge becomes a point of departure for a further journey. Learning will never end in the new knowledge economy. Thrive on the new adventure. You may often be frustrated and frequently be stretched beyond belief, but you never have to be bored. Each day, new information challenges us and causes us to question the mental models we took for granted yesterday. For those that feel threatened by constant change, it is helpful to see that new knowledge fits into a structure and has a foundation based on all that has gone before. While new knowledge often seems disconnected, there are always clues to what is coming next. Take time to put the new learning into context if it threatens you, but see it as a necessity that helps you to grow. Have faith that the journey will be a great adventure. You will develop resources that will make it easier to deal with a fast moving future and become much less anxious about coping with ever increasing quantities of information. You will encounter tools that work as software for your brain.

## The Joy of Learning

Human beings are learning animals. In a vast and diverse universe, they alone can explore and incorporate new knowledge, see patterns and build on a continuous foundation, soar to new heights of understanding and experience, create stories and share knowledge with others to build new ways of thinking and acting. The whistle is blowing. The warning bell is ringing. Let's embark on the journey.

Brain Waves

  * Set aside a specific time that will be reserved for learning activities. Mark it in your daily planner.

  * Develop a learning centre. It may be your office desk, a table beside your favorite chair, or your bedside table. Equip it with a notebook, some coloured pens and markers.

  * Treat yourself to a calendar diary with pictures you enjoy. Record quotes that you like or keep a running record of what you are learning and how you feel about it.

  * Deliberately add some distractions – things that have interesting shapes or colours – play dough, a slinky, juggling balls. Serious learning needs time out.

CHAPTER 2

#  Your Amazing Brain Understanding its function and power

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

\- Virginia Woolf

The value of visual thinking is not new. Throughout history people have used drawing and diagrams to communicate. We gesture with our hands to describe shapes that are hard to put in words - try describing a spiral staircase without moving your hands. We know that lines and shapes on a page can help us understand relationships between components.

Artists have always used the power of image, colour, shape and dimension to stimulate our minds and create an emotional response. Advertisers depend heavily on images to induce us to buy. Electronic media have opened up the world of graphics and design to individual communicators who delight in providing us with mesmerizing moving images. The advances in the creation and transmission of visual images in this century have already surpassed those of the last one.

## Words Still Rule

The power of the word, however, is immensely strong and the kind of documentation words involve is the prevalent one in the world of work. Reports, plans, memos, Emails, minutes, agendas, books, - all these still exert a powerful influence in the current business environment where copying and transmission techniques make printed documents rise like bread dough on every desk.

## Ideas Matter

Whether you work in a large corporation or are a business of one, - whether you are a student trying to succeed or a retiree who has happily left the workplace – whether you are just trying to live meaningfully and well - you share some common tasks and challenges. Your successes and satisfaction have a direct relationship with thinking. How do you generate and capture ideas? How do you organize, develop and structure them? How do you frame them into actual projects and turn them into results? How do you retain them? How do you use the ideas that you have now without reinventing the wheel every time? How do you communicate them and share them with others?

## How We Do It Now

Chances are that you work in a traditional way when you deal with ideas, - make notes in small notebooks, cover book pages with yellow highlighter, place documents into folders, and file agendas and meeting minutes in fat binders. Some of these written materials end in actions and results that bring profit and satisfaction, but more often they get simply get buried. We can't cope with that much documentation.

We sometimes berate ourselves for a lack of discipline, or a lack of will power when our brainwaves don't create some usefulness or benefit to ourselves and others. We seldom question the system of how we capture and process information. This book is designed to make you rethink your notation and planning systems and to introduce you to alternative ones that may work better for you. It will also introduce you to a simple software program that expands upon and enhances the typical office software programs you use now.

Our first task is to review how the brain works. Even though you are thinking right now, chances are that you're not thinking about how you think. Let's step back from the process and look under your thinking cap to see what is actually going on.

Your brain is a jelly-like object weighing about three pounds and is approximately the size of your two fists. You can get a good three-dimensional model of how your brain looks if you put your two fists together with your thumbs facing up.

## An intricate network

_The Brain—is wider than the Sky_ -Emily Dickinson

If you have ever been in a computerized control center or a police headquarters with huge numbers of computers blinking and flashing, you'll have some sense of the complexity of the nervous system. The brain is operation central for many kinds of behavior,  the things we consciously choose to do like walking or thinking and the things that we do automatically, like breathing. For many years people thought that the heart was the seat of their emotions - the heart beat faster when they were angry or afraid. Scientists now know that these feelings and memories are stored with minute accuracy in our brains.

## How does the brain work?

Though the brain plays a central role, it hasn't always been centre stage. The idea of right brain and left brain is not a new one, and was the subject of theory and hypotheses dating as far back as 450 BCE in the writings of Hippocrates. What provided a major breakthrough in the 20th century was the ability to measure brain wave activity.

In the 1960's Dr. Roger Sperry investigated the brain's 'thinking cap' the cerebral cortex, and discovered that certain aspects of thinking were stored in two halves or hemispheres of the brain. Sperry, who received the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1981, established that each hemisphere controlled the opposite side of the body. Brain function can be monitored by electroencephalograph and scientists can see precisely what is going on.

Subsequent research has confirmed that the functions are more evenly distributed than Sperry first thought, but each side of the brain is dominant in some areas. His findings and the research of others popularized the notion of left and right cortical functions.

Rather than looking only left and right, it is possible to look at the brain in section as an architect would. From this vantage point it is possible to see three parts, which may relate to the pattern of the brain's evolution.

Neuroscientist Paul MacLean concluded that the lowest section closest to the spine links us to the reptile world. This section of the brain covers the automatic functions like breathing, heartbeat and the movements of our muscles. The next level adds the function of mammals which relate to the limbic system; it is hidden within the two hemispheres. If you could cut the brain straight down from the top, you would see the limbic system embedded in the centre of the two halves.

The limbic system is where feelings reside. People, like animals, purr and snarl depending on their circumstances and responses to the world around them. When things go well, we show affection; when they don't, we tend to become more like the reptiles.

The crowning development in humans is the third level of the brain or cerebral cortex. This quarter inch thick covering is what makes human beings the miracle that they are. The human cortex is a rich landscape of hills and valleys packed with grey matter, in contrast to other animals whose brains are smoother. The brain, like the rest of us, develops from a single cell and is thought to be the first organ to develop after the mass of cells implants itself on the uterine wall. The three sections of the brain are clearly visible about six weeks after gestation.

The cerebral cortex of the brain is composed of tiny centers called neurons, much smaller than the head of a pin. Each neuron has long thin tentacles or dendrites extending from the center. These are the receivers of incoming chemical signals.

Each neuron also has an axon, a long extension of the cell that transmits outgoing messages as electrical impulses. Picture a tiny octopus surrounded by thousands and thousands of other tiny cells with their own branches extending and connecting in a marvelous network.

Some dendrites are miniscule but others can be as long as four feet. The dendrites have tiny buttons attached to their entire length. These buttons are full of chemicals which become the transmitters of thoughts and sensations. When a sensation presses a button, an electrochemical charge jumps across a tiny gap between the buttons and starts a reaction that jumps from cell to cell.

Receiving and transmitting happens at lightning speed as impulses travel through the system. It's a brain storm in which as many as 10,000 brain cells can all connect at the same time. The first time a message transmits, it has to beat a new path, like an explorer bushwhacking through the vegetation of a jungle. After a time the road is well traveled and the journey is easy and fast. Sensual data and ideas eventually get split up into their various components and get stored in several areas like safety deposit boxes. There is a sight area, a sound area, a taste area and so on.

The following skills are traditionally assigned to the brain's left hemisphere:

  * Using words

  * Using numbers

  * Organizing things in lists

  * Putting items in order

  * Scheduling

  * Lining things up

  * Analyzing

The right brain hemisphere is thought to be dominant in these areas:

  * Experiencing colour

  * Experiencing patterns and rhythm

  * Daydreaming

  * Dimension

  * Music

  * Imagination

  * Seeing the big picture

A healthy brain organizes all these functions simultaneously. They happen at once in a symphony of complexity with each function making its own music. For a baby, signals come as sensations of touch, sound, sight, taste or smell. After many such experiences these signals get recognized and understood. Now we've entered the realm of perception.

## Your Memory is Sensational

_You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing._ \- Luis Bunel

We initially learn through our senses and our experiences, which are stored as memories. A certain perfume can remind you of a certain lady long after the lady herself has disappeared. A sunset in one part of the world can set off a memory of another a continent away.

As a small baby you learned to classify a wealth of sensations. Later you learned to put names to those sensations and communicate them in the form of words. You obviously draw on data from both hemispheres for this ability, but naming, analyzing and classifying are thought to be dominant on the left side of your brain. Feelings have many associations with the right hemisphere. We learn to read facial expressions and interpret the rhythm patterns of the voice. The right hemisphere appears to play the major role in our relationship to space, though the left plays a role as well.

## Creating Our Own Worlds

_Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life._ \--Joseph Conrad

From our earliest childhood, we have the capacity to create worlds in our imagination. We use the rich bank of data that we have already acquired to imagine new worlds and combine elements in exciting new ways. Brain scans indicate that there are different kinds of physical reaction going on when we create activities in our heads.

The imaginative experience involves all the centers of activity. If we imagine a scary scene, our emotions heat up, our picture making capability is stimulated and the brain cells start buzzing with electrochemical zaps. Imagination quite literally sets in motion the things we wish we could do.

## Left...right...left...right

_It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic._ -Edgar Allen Poe

Human beings were meant to march to both drums of their brains. But a funny thing happened on the way to becoming a grown up in the western world. The formal education system started to devalue the right brain cortical skills. One of the culprits was inadvertently the invention of the printing press, ironically one of the most influential developments in the promotion of human learning. Another was the view of the universe as a well tuned machine that started with Newton and Descartes and paved the way for the industrial age.

If the brain were an advertising agency, the left side would be the firm's accountant. She communicates in words and numbers, issues the bills and collects the time slips. Move over to the right and you'll see a completely different picture. This is the creative director —he sees the fully developed vision of the ad complete with colour and sound effects. This is the brain of daydreaming and imagination.

We need both people in the ad agency -- and in life. But we have valued the left side brain functions to a greater degree than the right side ones in western civilization. Babies and children educate themselves through exploration and use both sides of their brain in discovering their worlds. But as they move through the school system, they are educated to favor the left brain approach. We have undervalued the characteristics of the right cortex as a means of understanding and thinking. It's a half- brained approach.

The American thinking pioneer Ned Herrmann has added a valuable perspective to our understanding of the thinking process by positing a four quadrant metaphorical model that builds upon MacLean's three dimensional physiological model.

(© Herrmann International)

Dividing the left hemisphere in half, he sees the upper left half relating to the cerebral functions – the logical and analytical, and the lower left dealing with organization and getting things in the right order. The upper right deals with the more cerebral aspects of the right – the ability to see the big picture and to synthesize the parts to form a new whole. The lower right limbic functions relate more to the personal and emotional.

This further division into quadrants rather than simply left and right, makes the model extraordinarily rich and helps increase our understanding of the complexity of the brain and its relation to the variety of styles of human thinking.

What we need are tools and models for understanding our brains and making all the aspects of our brains work at the same time. We want a way to activate the logical and orderly left at the same time we access the personable, playful and creative right. Fortunately an excellent tool awaits us in VisiMap and we'll meet it and put to work on the next leg of our journey.

CHAPTER 3

#  Discovering Visual Mapping

_Once the human brain realizes that it can associate anything with anything else, it will almost instantaneously find associations, especially when given the trigger of an additional stimulus._ -Tony Buzan

Need to get ideas in order? VisiMap! Need to see how ideas connect? VisiMap! Need to get ideas into your head so that you can use them? VisiMap! Be a thinking artist and learn to see what you think.

## What's a Visual Map?

Visual mapping is a notational methodology popularized by Tony Buzan, Gabriele Lusser Rico, Joyce Wycoff and others in the latter part of the twentieth century The concept developed from a serious examination of how the brain works and organizes information, and is based on the brain research of Roger Sperry, Robert Ornstein and other leading brain scientists. The creators of visual mapping invented and refined simple ways of documenting and organizing ideas that bring both sides of the brain into play.

## Step by Step

Making a visual map graduated to the computer in the 1990's and has never looked back. I'm going to use VisiMap to demonstrate. I'll show you how to use it in more detail later: for now you can follow along with a pen or pencil in hand if you like.

We have to start by picking a topic. For our first map, our subject is one we know well – ourselves and our various roles in life. A good first step is to create a central picture or image. Visual mapping frequently combines words and images to activate both sides of the brain. You can produce a polished drawing if you're an accomplished artist, but you can simply draw a primitive cartoon or even a stick figure. Here is a topic with a central image:

I wish I actually looked like this but I don't. It doesn't have to be a mirror image.

Now it's your turn to try. Your image could be a face, a stick figure or even a symbol that represents you. Place your paper sideways as you start if you like, so that you have lots of space to branch out. Don't worry about your drawing ability. Just draw the way you did when you were five years old.

If pictures intimidate you too much – just start with words.

Now I am going to think of my roles in life. I am a business owner, a mother and widow, a grandmother, an amateur artist, and a volunteer. To show this I have created branches radiating from the central picture.

Now it is your turn to add branches to your central image. Put a word or two on each branch. Take your time and enjoy this stage. See if you can come up with at least four roles.

Now I'll look at further aspects of my roles. As a business owner, I have to plan for a meeting in a nearby city. As a grandmother, I have a two year old's birthday fast approaching. I also haven't talked lately to the son who is teaching in Hong Kong. I have enrolled in an art class, but I need to check on my supplies. My successor on a volunteer board wants to sit down and discuss the coming year.

The map states roles; but if anything useful is going to happen, I have to take action. Looking at each role in turn, I can immediately think of things I have to do.

It didn't take long for me to make connections and activate possible courses of action. Since a map visually represents how your own brain works and make associations, you may find that you can use visual mapping to plan more quickly and document the process as you go.

## Map an Agenda

If you have to chair a meeting at work or for a volunteer organization, quickly map the main points of the meeting. You can add the names of persons responsible for reporting, times for each item, desired action to be taken. Minutes follow naturally from the mapped agenda. As the items are dealt with, you can briefly note the result or follow up action and the person who will undertake the job. Try mapping some agenda items now using a map something like this one.

## Map a Decision

Perhaps you are considering a change of location or job. What are the options? What are the likely costs? What other aspects must be considered? Transportation? Accessibility? Security? Convenience? Try a map now.

## Map What Matters

What would you like to accomplish? At the end of your life, what would you like to look back on? What are the things that you consider to be most important? What are your highest priorities? Are your current activities, routines and habits accomplishing what matters? Try it!

## The Benefits of Visual Mapping

Now that you have tried mapping several different topics, you probably have a better understanding of the differences between a linear and a visual approach to creating and recording ideas. Visual mapping lets you see both the forest and the trees. Not only do you have an overview of the essential aspects of your topic, but you can also see the individual ones and how they overlap and connect. Visual mapping stimulates your imagination. Vision is not something we create through analysis. "What if" scenarios on spreadsheets show us implications of particular courses of action, but they don't necessarily produce the big picture. Vision is something we see. We form a vision by using the right side of the brain's rich imaginative capacity to create a picture of something as though it were already accomplished. We see the patterns, we hear the music, we feel the texture, we taste success. Doing something as simple as doodling in colour transports us to an image world. We travel to the "Imagy-nation".

Visual mapping is fast and fun. In future chapters you will learn how to apply it to other aspects of your business and personal life. People who use visual mapping on a regular basis report that they see things more clearly, work faster and generate more energy. They find themselves making innovative suggestions and getting to the essence of problems. They join the ranks of people who "get it" It's much more than putting some doodles on a page and making funny lines branching out in all directions. When you use visual mapping regularly, you jump start your brain and take advantage of the full range of cortical skills and use a whole brained approach to thinking. You have moved from an industrial linear model where ideas move in a straight line, to a non-linear model, where ideas radiate from a central point and build connections to other points in an enormous network of relationships.

When I first encountered visual mapping I thought it was a bit new age. The trainers teaching and using it had unlimited energy and enthusiasm and a sense of adventure that was contagious, but I was initially skeptical whether something that seemed so easy, but at the same time was so radically different, would be accepted. How could I lead brainstorming sessions by drawing doodles radiating from a stick figure which laid bare my poor drawing skills, and not be dismissed as totally off the wall?

But I was challenged to try. I bravely used visual mapping in a planning session without explaining what it was, and encouraged others to emulate it in their breakout sessions. The presentations the participants made using their visual maps were impressively focused and relevant, and instead of nodding off after lunch the audience paid attention and responded to the visual stimulus. Maybe this worked after all.

Shortly after, I attended a conference as a guest of the presenter. The conference participants, whose employers had paid the thousand dollar fee, were dozing off or focusing with fixed stare on the speaker. They probably weren't hearing anything. Meanwhile I was happily mapping away, getting all the main points and still having time to laugh at the speaker's jokes, make my own observations on his argument, observe the atmosphere of the room and take in the whole scene. At the end, others crowded around and praised my modest artistry. I was pleasantly surprised. I still have that map and several years later, the contents make sense and bring the whole day back to me.

My first big breakthrough as a visual mapping facilitator didn't start auspiciously. There was a change in the arrangements and the participants had arrived a day early with a difficult agenda and a good many differing opinions. They spent the day before I arrived without making significant progress and the group was clearly divided. The idea of sitting down with a bunch of coloured pens and drawing pictures wasn't the first thing that came to mind as a way to solve their problems. But the final results were remarkable. After spending half a day learning visual mapping, the participants started to apply it to the issues and they found it much easier to see what they thought when the issues were displayed in front of them on a composite map. Initially I had little understanding of the issues, because I was there as a trainer, but they suddenly started to make sense for me as well. The actual work got completed in half the anticipated time.

Your first challenge is to become personally comfortable with visual mapping as an introduction to non-linear thinking. I can almost guarantee that you will feel uncomfortable with the drawing part of the assignment. Don't give up on it. Simply draw. The value of this is to open you to new powers of observation and perception and to unlock the rich store of images imbedded in your memory. You can continue to draw like a child if you wish, but I suspect that your desire to improve your drawing will lead you to new adventures in seeing.

Many people wonder about the emphasis on single words rather than phrases. At an early stage they see no difference between a group of words and a single one. But there is a difference. Each single word you use can suggest a multitude of ideas. By allowing each word to serve as a trigger point, you will find that you can create more links and associations. So stick to single words as much as possible. There will be exceptions.

After you are comfortable with visual mapping on your own, the next adventure will be in using visual mapping in a group setting. Comparing your own maps with those of others is enlightening. What you will find is a wealth of ways of depicting personal experience. The youngest child and the wisest sage bring different insights. Visual maps are highly personal even when a group of individuals map the same subject. When we combine our individual thoughts on a group map, we create a master map which consolidates the thinking of all the participants.

Visual mapping is a better way to document group findings than brainstorming, because it is more inclusive and holistic. Each person starts with an individual map. Then people combine their ideas sequentially to form one big map. They build consensus by exploring individual scenarios and share ownership of the big picture they create. Unlike conventional notes, visual maps show graphically how ideas overlap and intertwine. They make ideas clearer and open up wonderful possibilities and collective insights that we didn't know we had.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves and running before we learn to walk. Ideally you will create several maps on paper to get the feel of outlining and structuring your ideas. Make a commitment to produce a map daily for the next month. You can start with the activities in this chapter, or use them to suggest other worthwhile activities that put your new skill to work.

Brain Wave

  * Follow a consecutive 30 day schedule of visual mapping to put you on the road to visual mapping. If you can make visual mapping a habit, it will be a resource for the rest of your life.

CHAPTER 4

#  Getting Acquainted with VisiMap

_There is nothing wrong with change if it is in the right direction_ – Winston Churchill

Now it's time to get you started on using VisiMap 4.0. Open the program and click on the new file icon or **new** on the file menu. You will see an ellipse in the centre labeled **untitled**.

This is known as the map centre, which you will remember when we created the image in Chapter 3. You can add a graphic element to it, but let's just concentrate on words for now.

## Name the Map

Double-click the centre ellipse and you will see a rectangular edit box appear. Type in your main subject topic here and press Enter: you will see the words you have just written inside the map centre shape. The shape has also adjusted to accommodate your text.

## Create Branches

You can now also notice a rectangle around the oval indicating that this is your point of departure. Just start typing your first topic name. Notice that you have immediately created a new branch. Do this again as many times as you like, to create a number of first level topics (called 'primary branches') and as long as you keep the map centre highlighted (indicated by the dotted highlight) you can add branches indefinitely just by typing and entering. What you have here is something like the chapters of a book: the main topics.

## Create Sub Branches

Go to the first branch (it is at the top right of your map) and click once on it. Note that this branch is now highlighted instead of the map centre. Just start typing again, pressing the Enter key after you enter each secondary topic name. Now you are creating a second level of headings, or 'secondary branches'. You have a series of sub-headings.

## Add Text

So far you are looking at a map outline, but that is just a starting point. You may now want to add some explanatory or extended text under one of the topics. Go to your first subheading New Level 1 and click on it. Note again that the rectangular dotted box indicates the position you are in. Below the ruler in the middle of the screen there is a blank space for you to start typing text. Try typing something. Now move to a level 2 branch. You will now see a small note image pinned to the level one branch to let you know that there is some text ('branch notes') attached.

## Convert a Map to an Outline

You can go on with this process until you have a more extensive map structure, with textual notes sections beneath it. Let's suppose you want to change the look of what you have written to a conventional text outline. Go to the **View** menu at the top of the main menu and choose **Text Outline Map**. This is a quick way to impress your more linear friends who don't like anything graphic. They won't know how you constructed this. Here's what it looks like.

## Change the Look of the Map

If you don't like the typeface you are seeing, you can change it effortlessly in the same way that you would for any Windows program. Just go to the second toolbar down and try it. The various levels of branches have pre-set styles but you can vary them if you want to and create your own. (I wouldn't recommend making a real map look like this! It's just demonstrating what is possible.)

## Add Colour

Colour creates attention. A map with coloured branches will be more pleasing to look at and also help to distinguish different sets of information visually. Try clicking on one of the branches at the first level to highlight it and then click on one of the colours in the colour palette positioned near the bottom. If you click with the primary mouse button (that's the left-most mouse button, unless you have configured your mouse for left handed use, in which case it's the right-most button) you will produce a different branch colour. If you click with the secondary mouse button (that's the other main mouse button, naturally) you will instead fill in the shape. If you colour your branches as you create them, sub-branches will be formatted in the same colour. That also applies to background colours.

## Enhance with Images

Want to add a picture for interest? Any branch will accept just about any sort of clip art or photograph you would like to use. Click on the tool bar button bearing the small icon with the letter **a** covering geometric shapes (this is towards the right of the second row of tool bars). This action will open a menu of several alternative sources of pictures that we can add. This time, choose **Select** from the menu in order to choose a clip art picture contained in a file somewhere on the hard disk drive of your computer. When you find a picture of interest, select it and press OK to close the picture selector and add the picture to your map.

If you don't like the picture displaying beneath the branch and prefer it to be on top, click on the picture with the secondary mouse button and change its placement. You could also have used the Placement button on the picture tool bar for this. In many cases you will want to adjust the image size using the percent button.

## Add Links to Other Sources

Now let's add a link to another document. Click on the branch you want to host the link with the secondary mouse button to pop-up a menu of all kinds of options. Locate and click on the **Add Link** item. This presents you with a form of several options. For now, press the button with an ellipsis to the right of the **Target file** box to browse for a document file. For illustration purposes, it doesn't matter what file you select here, but try looking for a word document file and select it. When you select a file and press OK, you will see that VisiMap has named it, and automatically shows you a small icon representing the file type. If you click the link, VisiMap opens the file for you. You could have also copied and pasted any website name into the space and it would add its link as well and allow VisiMap to open it.

## Reorder the Branches

It's easy to reorder the branches of your map if you decide that you would like to do so. To move a sub branch, just use your mouse to drag and drop it elsewhere in your map. As you drag the branch around, you will see a small cursor image indicating where it will be placed (relative to the branch under the cursor) if you drop it at that location. You can also use the **Reorder** option from the **Branch** drop-down menu to reorder primary branches.

## Export the Map

Finally you may wish to have VisiMap transfer your map to another application. Before you do so, you must first save your map. VisiMap will automatically give it the name of the central branch, but you can choose another name if you like. This will create a file of the name you specify, with an automatic extension of .mmp.

Now locate a familiar icon on the Quick Export Bar, (not all of the buttons shown in VisiMap will necessarily be available to you - it depends upon what other supported applications you have installed - and click it. A drop down menu in the tool bar on the left gives you another drop-down menu with several options. VisiMap will then go about converting your map into a different format and open it for you in the application you chose. For example if you choose **JPEG*.jpg** and press **Go** , a composite image of your map in that format will appear. You can now copy and paste it where you want it.

You will also notice familiar icons of office programs. If you click one of these, here are some examples of what your new file will look like.

## A Word File

For this example, I went back to one of the earlier versions to show how to move quickly to a traditional text format. You could continue to work on your map as a Word document. An index has automatically been added, saving you the chore of creating this later. If you do not wish to include the graphic, you can quickly delete it.

*****

My First Branch

New Level 1

This is a bit of sample text that I have included under branch 1

New Level 2

Now I am doing the same for branch 2

New Level 3

My Second Branch

My Third Branch

My Fourth Branch

*****

The program also automatically creates headers and footers in your word document. Make sure you view them to see whether you want to retain them.

## MS PowerPoint and MS Outlook

If you wish to export to PowerPoint you can turn a graphic into an instant slide - changing the view to an outline one if you wish - and adding presentation notes within PowerPoint itself. You can also export your map into your MS Outlook Tasks file. When you move to Outlook all the items will all be there – usually at the top of the list. In my own experience, not all the headings will be relevant as tasks, but it is easy to remove what you need to. Then you can go ahead and date activate them or delegate them right in the task list.

You have now familiarized yourself with some of the key features of _VisiMap Professional_ , but you have only scratched the surface of what it offers. There are a number of ways you can progress from here. Here are some suggestions:

  * Peruse the extensive menus and tool bars in _VisiMap Professional_ to familiarize yourself with what operations are available, and where to access them

  * Try clicking objects displayed in the application with the secondary mouse button - this will bring up a menu of actions tailored to the object clicked.

  * Keep one eye on the tips bar at the bottom of the _VisiMap Professional_ main screen - it will display useful hints and tips about features that you might otherwise miss.

  * Go back and read the Introduction in the **Help** section of the program - it contains a useful discussion of how to work with VisiMap in general.

This is just a brief introduction. There is a wealth of possibilities. Enjoy them all.
CHAPTER 5

# Know your Thinking Style

_What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you._ \- Jean Cocteau

## Understanding Your Unique Strengths

You now have a better understanding of the way your brain really works. Knowing you have resources that you are not using to capacity can be a tremendous catalyst to action. You have also been introduced to visual mapping and VisiMap which encourage you to harness the power of the full capabilities of your brain. Now it is time to look at the way you prefer to think. This aspect of yourself relates to brain dominance and is a product of both your genes and your upbringing, – probably with an emphasis on the latter.

When introduced to visual mapping for the first time, four different people might respond in very different ways. Let's watch them in action.

Mary decides with great enthusiasm that visual mapping is for her and calls one of her best friends to tell her about it. She discusses how she is going to apply it to her special education class at school and suggests to her friend that it would also be highly useful in counseling. She dashes home, places her shopping on the table, feeds the cat and rushes off to her meeting downtown, arriving just as the meeting has started. She sits down, starts to map the minutes of the meeting and is somewhat disturbed when she hears the chairman berate another volunteer for not doing a job according to the chairman's precise instructions. After all, the volunteer is giving her time and her effort. Mary stops visual mapping and feels somewhat upset.

Bill thinks that visual mapping is a good idea. He calls his teacher friend, Mary, but her answering machine says that she has gone shopping. He decides to go to the library and find more information. He searches under the subject, 'visual mapping', and finds several books. He also explores some audio tapes and selects two to take home. He notes from the index that other authors have also written books on the subject. He selects one that combines visual mapping and juggling. Scanning through the index of that book, he notes that the author is also an expert in the Alexander Technique. He goes back to the catalogue to see what is available on this subject. There are three books and a video. He now checks out the ten items that he has collected and goes home. The thought suddenly occurs to him that there must be information about visual mapping on the Internet. He moves to his laptop and clicks on his favorite search engine.

Teresa has been quite impressed with the idea of visual mapping. She decides that she might like to pursue it. She goes to her immaculate desk and takes out her errand list. She thinks about the equipment that she is going to need. Paper, coloured pens, highlighters are added to the shopping list she has already started. The other items can be obtained from a nearby shopping center. She decides that she will get the groceries first and then get the mapping supplies. She wonders whether it would be worthwhile to discuss using visual mapping with her supervisor as a means of making agenda planning more effective. On the other hand the current planning format is very effective and probably it is better to stick with it and see it through. She will try visual mapping on her own on one task each day for the next two weeks and decide whether it's worth it.

Bob has had enough of reading about visual mapping. He goes outside and mows the lawn. While doing so he notices his son's bike has a flat tire and removes the outer layer to replace the inner tube. He imagines how one could design the two layers in a more integrated way. After his son arrives on the scene and gratefully retrieves the bike, Bob encourages him to try driving with no hands. A few spills lead to success and the boy rides off to show his friends the new trick. Bob looks at the big tree in the backyard and visualizes a play house. After drawing a quick sketch, he tries visual mapping by making a quick map of the steps in the procedure. He decides to show Teresa the tree house sketch and returns to the house. He drops the map on her desk and waits for her reaction with some misgiving. She'll probably think that it's off the wall.

Can you identify with one or two of these people and see how you would probably act in similar circumstances? Do others remind you of people you know? We are examining a range of thinking preferences and looking at their effect on behaviour.

## Predictable ways of thinking

In meetings, daily routines and interchanges, we can often predict accurately how others are going to think or what they'll say. When we are chairing a meeting, we can almost guarantee that Bill will want further facts before reaching a decision. We can count on Mary being late because she was busy dealing with other people's problems, but know that she will have several good ideas to contribute – and always be concerned about the human dimension. Teresa will interrupt often to ask exactly how we are going to proceed, and Bob won't say a lot, but at some point he will get up and start doodling, producing a drawing that will help everyone see the big picture. Jack will somehow help us get our act together. He'll answer Bill's questions, support Mary's human resource concerns, reassure Teresa about the details and support Bob's creative effort to show us how to get beyond the current bottleneck. The man is a born facilitator.

The truth is that we are all born with distinctive ways of thinking. Management educator Ned Herrmann spent a major portion of his life documenting and verifying distinctive thinking styles. As a student he studied science and at the same time pursued an active singing career. He was struck by the differences in his two worlds and intrigued by their clear distinctions in dress, interests, and behaviour, but it was much later that these differences became an object of serious research. The challenge of educating managers at General Electric and a bout of personal illness challenged Herrmann to learn more about the brain. He was also interested in a comment by management guru, Henry Mintzberg, who wondered how some people could be so smart and dumb at the same time.

Herrmann went beyond the traditional right and left brain theory to a four quadrant model after a thorough examination of brain physiology. His modes of thinking can be identified in four distinct groupings.

What is especially important is the unique balance of these capabilities. The coalition of specific preferences produce interest and focus that lead to special competencies when people are free to follow their preferences – and can produce mismatches when people are forced into inappropriate modes. Most people have more than one strong preference. A person with a strong artistic talent (D quadrant) combined with a strong expressive nature (C quadrant) will probably be happy as an art teacher, but miserable if forced to pursue chartered accountancy. Such a person's exact opposite (strong A and B quadrant preferences) will be happy in a career that emphasizes numbers and details, but would dread facing an art class.

Herrmann's research resulted in the creation of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument™ – a way to measure thinking styles that gives an accurate picture of where your thinking preferences lie. The assessment has been thoroughly validated by more than 60 doctoral theses and is the subject of ongoing research. It provides a highly useful point of departure for understanding your current thinking preferences. Armed with a broader understanding, and new knowledge you can move to a more whole brained approach to learning with an application like visual mapping.

If we need to use our whole brain, we need to understand that our own thinking style is a combination of four distinct modes which are balanced in a particular recipe. By taking full advantage of our particular mix, we can improve our individual productivity and contribute more effectively to the new work environment, where teamwork and collaboration have become so vitally important. We can also develop a better understanding and awareness of the thinking of styles of others.

## A Quadrant Style: Facts and Finance

The first style (The A Quadrant) is the Analyst, and Bill, whom we met earlier, can serve as our example. The A Quadrant type loves facts, logic and numbers. A's tend to be authoritarian and bottom line oriented. They thrive on problem solving, facts and statistics and are most at home in the technical, scientific and financial communities. They are excellent researchers. They like taking things apart and breaking things down into their component elements. They are smart about money. Other groups see them as number crunchers who avoid feelings. While calculating is what they love to do, it is something they are criticized for being by less scientific types. A's want logical answers and are not likely to be comfortable with gut feelings or intuition. They want the facts – plain and simple.

## B Quadrant Style: Organization & Tradition

Teresa is our champion of Quadrant B. She brings order out of chaos and focuses on system and design. Her predictability and reliability contribute to sound programs and solid accomplishments. Ask Teresa to handle the records and you can be assured that bills will be paid on time and the agenda items are in proper sequence. Quadrant B people abound in administration and supervisory positions because their presence ensures effectiveness and order. Their concern for doing things in an orderly manner makes them highly conservative and this is the group that is likely to proclaim, "But we've always done it this way". In spite of their admirable self discipline and dedication to duty, their opposite numbers frequently perceive them as picky and unimaginative.

## C Quadrant Style: People and Feelings

Mary can serve as our C Quadrant example. She enjoys working with people and genuinely likes them. She also wants them to be treated fairly and is a champion of humanistic values. In her mind, people come first. She is far more interested in her students than some bureaucratic rules – and more interested in human relationships than following detailed procedures. She is sensitive and intuitive and good at figuring people out. Her strengths make her an effective teacher and people like her often succeed in nursing, other helping professions and human resource areas. People who don't think the same way she does sometimes find her overly emotional and touchy- feely, – and they wish she wouldn't talk so much.

## D Quadrant Style: Adventure and Risk Taking

Bob is a creator who has the capacity to dream and envision new things. He has the knack for seeing the big picture and can envision his tree house already completed. His hastily prepared sketch illustrates real ingenuity and innovation. Like other Quadrant D types, Bob loves to experiment and try new things. His ability to see into the future and focus on the big picture doesn't always gain approval from his colleagues, who think he is too dreamy and unrealistic. They think his head is in the clouds but that is exactly where Bob would prefer to be. He loves playing with ideas.

*****

The majority of people have at least two dominant thinking styles that they will habitually turn to. Even though all of us use all the thinking styles, we have ones that we prefer – especially if we are under stress. Bill will be upset if the library is closed and he can't read the latest science magazines. Mary's eyes will fill up with tears if she feels she is under personal attack. Teresa will be annoyed if Bob suggests making a visit to the lumberyard on her way to the supermarket. She has her day already planned. Bob will daydream about a new shape for a coffee filter while the others enjoy their latte. It also follows that we have thinking styles that we use less or even avoid.

You may already be able to guess your own dominant thinking style and you will probably be right. Where you're likely to be less accurate is the precise balance among the four styles and that is where the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument can be extremely valuable. You will probably be even less accurate in diagnosing the thinking styles of your friends, family and business associates. The HBDI is a useful tool for looking at a group and seeing its collective strengths. The concepts can also be applied to things like policies and reports as you grow in understanding of the model and its applications. The HBDI comes in the form of a short questionnaire that takes about a half an hour to complete. By following the instructions at the end of the book, you can obtain your personal profile and receive instructions how to use it your personal full advantage. You will also learn to understand and accept others better.

Ned Herrmann has much to offer in his books and you will find his model helpful in at least two areas of your own life. He stresses the importance of concentrating on your own particular strengths. It is better to focus on your areas of high potential rather than to make heroic efforts to compensate for your weaker areas. Most of us, Herrmann says, show preference for one or more particular thinking types. Jack, whose strengths were evenly balanced, is the exception, not the rule; he is a born facilitator and he will thrive in that role. His is a style that is typical of many CEO's and also of their executive secretaries. Translators also exhibit balanced styles because their multitasking role requires them to do several things simultaneously. Most of us will do better by taking advantage of the thinking styles that we prefer.

## HBDI at Work

Brain dominance, according to Herrmann, can play an extremely important role in finding the appropriate job. There are at least three thinking styles that come into play – the style you actually use,  the style that you think the job requires  and the style the selection team or your supervisor think the job requires. When all three are congruent, high performance is almost guaranteed. When there are differences, you can expect trouble. Many companies have used the HBDI to analyze these three areas and reach a fuller understanding of how the three perceptions relate.

In hiring situations, understanding the HBDI and its implications can help employers become more targeted in their job descriptions. The HBDI can also help both sides ensure that there is a good fit, though it should never be used as a job entry test. In small firms, many employers are tempted to hire clones of themselves, when what they frequently need is someone with complementary skills that will add balance to the total range of thinking styles within the company.

## HBDI for Teams

The other major area where we need to put the HBDI concepts to work is that of teamwork. A good team will draw on people's greatest strengths and use them in a collaborative and satisfying way. Every contribution is different, but all are necessary to accomplish results. When a project goes well, it is probable that all thinking styles were present even if the participants were not aware of them. Herrmann has found that homogenous teams of similar makeup can work very quickly, but their output is average. Heterogeneous teams, with a balance of strong differing styles, will take much longer to reach consensus, but the final results are highly superior to those of their homogeneous counterparts.

## A Great Team Effort

Most of us have been part of a great team. Some years ago, I served as a census commissioner and my experience provides a good illustration of the HBDI concepts in action, even though I was totally unfamiliar with them at the time.

Our first task was to learn the job of the people we would be supervising. The instructor was a strong Quadrant B Type and the instruction manual provided a procedure typical of those prepared by government bureaucrats. As a dominant D/C, I found myself acting as class clown and thinking up ways to improvise on the training methods. Others seemed quite happy with the linear sequential mode of instruction they were given and resented my not playing things by the book.

Next we recruited and trained our staffs. I was lucky to find an executive assistant who had worked on a previous Census and knew the ropes far better than I. Her strong Quadrant A analytical skills, combined with high dominance in Quadrant B organization, supported my own skills and we assembled a hardworking and diversified team. One of the members was a dreamy young student named Bob, who was looking forward to being outdoors and yawned a lot during the training sessions. His favorite response to any request was, "No problem".

At that time census taking in my area involved a door to door canvass of 17,000 households and we naturally found it hard to find everyone at home. After the initial work period, there was a further clean-up period to cover the homes we had missed. We found that "No-problem" Bob had covered very few of his homes, although he had clearly enjoyed walking around the neighbourhood and dreaming up new ways to conduct the Census. His job was far from finished. The procedures manual indicated that I could hire one person for thirty days. My improvisational style D style came into play. I wanted to complete the job as soon as possible because my family had already departed for a cottage at a nearby lake. I decided to hire fifteen people for two days.

The fifteen people blitzed the area with great success. Working in seven pairs, rather than individually as the manual directed, they quickly covered all the missing homes and kept each others' morale high as they moved from building to building. They used their different styles in innovative ways to ferret out the facts they needed and complete the records. The fifteenth person – a solid Quadrant B type – stayed at home base and kept track of progress, completed impeccable records and made sure that we covered the groundwork properly. We were all finished in two days. I submitted my final invoice so that I could pay my staff and headed for the cottage.

On my return from the holiday, I was greeted by a stern order to report to my census supervisor. She was outraged that I would hire 15 people for two days when the manual had clearly stated that I was to hire one person for 30 days. When I realized that there was no point in arguing with her, I asked for an appointment with the person to whom she reported. I recognized that I might have to forfeit all my own pay, but I didn't want the people that had worked for me to suffer because of my action.

When I saw the senior supervisor, I was in for a pleasant surprise. Her own strong people oriented Quadrant C style was more flexible and her good measure of spontaneous Quadrant D was able to see that my more offbeat solution met the requirements and got the job done in two days instead of thirty. We all got paid.

At our final staff party, I mentioned that the only remaining task was writing the final report with comments and recommendations. One of the more innovative members of the team suggested that we write a parody of the Census long form, which was identified as Form 2B. Somewhere, buried deep in a box among the millions of records of the Canadian Census Commission for 1981 is an unusual document in the form of a poem written in iambic pentameter parodying Hamlet's famous soliloquy. It's entitled _2B or not 2B_.

## Linking the HBDI and VisiMap

You can put visual mapping to work in any dominant thinking style.

## Quadrant A Mapping

If you are a strong Analyst, you can use visual mapping to organize the information that you can be counted on to collect in abundance, and let it help you see relationships and connections. You can then identify the priorities, numbering or reordering the branches to develop the best sequence for action. Using VisiMap will help you avoid the flip side of your strength – paralysis by analysis. Visual maps by their very nature encourage action. Eventually you will move toward what you have to do, instead of concentrating on what you would like to know. The ability of VisiMap to switch between outlines and maps will be an advantage for you. You can use either format to communicate with others.

## Quadrant B Mapping

Your love of order will thrive when you use VisiMap, because it allows you to deal with a multitude of details in an orderly way. You will be able to translate the ideas quickly into a simple format that allows you to see the components and reorder them if necessary. You will like the efficiency of the maps and their ability to depict the systems in a concise and understandable fashion. If you use colour and images in your maps, you can avoid the pitfall of your particular strength – rigidity. You can use visual maps effectively to serve your need for order and efficiency.

## Quadrant C Mapping

What you will enjoy most about VisiMap is its ability to display feeling. It will give a new dimension to your natural love of expressiveness, and its colour and imagery will bring a more human dimension to many tasks. Your understanding of symbol will allow you to express many of your feelings in quick doodles and drawings that will speak to others in your group. Your love of working with others will also stand you in good stead and the collaborative nature of team mapping will allow you to learn from and with others. You will find VisiMap particularly valuable in teaching and counseling.

## Quadrant D Mapping

As a person with entrepreneurial flair and with your instinctive ability to innovate and improvise, you will thrive on using VisiMap. Its use of colour and image will enhance your natural tendency to experiment and play your hunches. Quadrant D's like the speed and stimulation of visual mapping. It gives them a chance to add wit and excitement to ideas that would often seem too abstract or bland. You will particularly like to use the shorthand of images and benefit from the imaginative content that they convey. VisiMap will also provide some necessary grounding of your reluctance to focus on the details and to follow through. Visual mapping will help you stop improvising and get on with doing.

## Spring into Action

Visual mapping helps to integrate and round out the four thinking styles. In the following chapters, you will learn to apply visual mapping incorporating your personal thinking style to full advantage. You will be visiting familiar areas of your work and your life, responding to typical challenges and putting things down in a new way. Armed with a new perception of how you can process information by using your whole brain, you will find specific techniques to accomplish more in half the time.
CHAPTER 6

# Be a Quick Study

## Read Faster and Understand More

_As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease_ -Oliver Goldsmith

The average office worker has thirty six hours worth of reading on his desk. Later you're going to learn to keep your desk clean, but for the moment we'll deal with the reading load. How are you going to keep pace with the ever increasing pile of reports, memos, articles and books that you are expected to digest? Use visual mapping. A visual mapping approach to business and professional reading will make a huge difference in your understanding and structuring of the information that comes your way. A whole brained approach to reading material will help you speed up the process and focus on the crucial information.

## Ready - Set – Go

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. -Francis Bacon

Let's start with a book – the largest and most formidable of your reading assignments. Do you normally open it at page one and start plodding your way through? Try this alternative method. Put the book in front of you on the desk. Tear a piece of paper into several small strips that you will use as markers. Now open the book and quickly turn every page. Let your index finger form a large letter "V" from the left hand corner of the page moving down to the bottom of the center and up again to the right hand corner. Make no attempt to read the contents in detail but simply scan each page.

Turn every page in a steady rhythm. If you hit anything of particular interest, put a small strip of paper between the pages to mark it. Note illustrations and charts quickly as you pass through the book. Keep going. Don't stop. The name of the game is to get through the entire book in no more than ten minutes.

## VisiMap the Big Picture

_I read part of it all the way through._ -Samuel Goldwyn

Now set the book to one side and quickly map the structure of the book. This isn't a memory test. Use the table of contents to outline what is there. Use the chapter headings and concluding summaries to get the gist of the contents. Review any of the markers that you placed along the way to note highlights and key points.

What do you know about the book now? Are the contents important to you? Do you already know the subject matter? Will the book increase your knowledge? Are you familiar with only part of its contents? Did you check the index or bibliography for familiar or unfamiliar references? Do you really need to read it at all?

## Now you get the Picture

It would be wonderful to try out this process on every visit to a bookstore, because we could probably save ourselves a lot of money and time. Publishers spend a large portion of their book budget on the cover because they know we will buy for emotional reasons and rationalize our purchase later. But you get the picture. You're not coming to the book with a blank canvas for the writer to paint upon. You already know a good deal about the subject.

Your overview will allow you to be much more selective about the use of your remaining time. You can now set a personal limit on how much time to devote to this particular volume. Perhaps you need to read only a chapter or a section. Perhaps you need to read the parts of particular interest where you placed your markers. Perhaps a quick trip through the summaries at the conclusion of each chapter will do the trick.

## Learning New Material

_The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us._ -Eric Hoffer

You have to learn on the job on a regular basis. Your company or association provides seminars and training sessions to update you on new information and new technologies. You may have also signed up for formal courses to upgrade your skills and keep yourself marketable. Learning inevitably involves more reading and research. How can you accomplish these necessary tasks faster and more effectively?

Think of learning in two ways. In some cases you try to structure your materials and discover what you already know or what you want to explore in more depth. That's _making_ notes. In other cases, you are trying to get ideas from others into your own head and retain them. That's _taking_ notes. Visual mapping can help you enormously in both these areas.

## Make Notes

If you have been assigned a study or report, start with the big picture as you did with the book. The difference this time is that you are going to create the big picture. You're going to make a visual map of the entire report before you begin to write it. Put your Quadrant D creative mode to work and build your concept. Create a title in VisiMap. Try associating an image with the title using clip art or a photo. The one or two minutes you devote to your image making will give you enough time to activate your brain.

Now working as quickly as you can, draw the main branches. These will form the chapters of your report. Use your Quadrant A analyst mode to document the key sections. Try to reduce each to the one or two key words that convey it. Now deal with the subsets of each section. What are the headings? The branch will help trigger the key idea still buried beneath the surface. Add images to stimulate your brain further. Inject humor and imaginative touches and have fun.

At this point you may notice that some of your branches are in the wrong sequence. Your Quadrant B planning mode is clicking in and helping you see the relationships between the components. You can do one of two things. Move the sub branches to where they belong or use the re-order tool under **Branch** on the VisiMap menu to move them.

Now it's time to extend the branches with more ideas. Make sure that these extend from the trigger point at the end of the previous branch because this will help keep the structure clear. Keep working quickly. Use your Quadrant D exploratory mode to produce as many ideas as possible and include unusual and innovative ones. Add significant stories with human interest from your Quadrant C mode. Move from branch to branch as the ideas flow. Now you have the complete outline of your report. All you have to do is to break the assignment into manageable chunks and get to work.

You can repeat the process as you deal with individual chapters or sections of the report. Any main point on a visual map can become a new centre and the branches that were formerly sub branches are now main branches. You can now move into a more task oriented mode in dealing with the content. What do you know already? What areas are thin? What research do you need to undertake? What sources do you need to consult? What people do you need to interview? You are now in a position to establish a work plan that will take you where you want to go.

Now it's time to head for the library or the interview or the web – if it's the latter make sure you think about the reputability of the source. You have key words and concepts to do your searches on a subject basis. You'll be ready to take notes and put your Quadrant A love of facts to work.

## Colour and Image will Help

_Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways._ -Oscar Wilde

When you first start mapping, you may feel a bit foolish. It seems frivolous to download clip art. You feel a bit like a ten year without any confidence in her ability to draw. But don't quit before you have even started. Doodling and day dreaming are time honored ways of imaginative exploration. Einstein relates that daydreaming about riding on a sunbeam helped him discover the theory of relativity. Picturing ideas helps bring them to the surface where you can look at them. Multicoloured branches will help you differentiate between the different aspects of your subject and focus on them more clearly. Ideas will come to life. Inserting images will help uncover their patterns, dimension and relationships. Your map is the skeleton of your thoughts and the colour and illustrations give them flesh, contour and feeling.

## Take Notes

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring  
Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. -T. S, Eliot

You sometimes have to summarize what others have said on a particular subject. The task looks daunting, but it doesn't have to be. Start a new VisiMap. A great many researchers painstakingly copy every word an authority has said on a subject. I remember in my university days one of my professors saying to one of my classmates, "You always write down everything I say, don't you, Mary", and he then had to wait till she had finished recording the phrase before she looked up in surprise. If this is your note-taking style, when you actually sit down to write your report, you will be tempted to simply string endless quotes together and sometimes plagiarize without knowing it. You have not taken the important intermediate step of trying to get to the bare bones of your authority's idea. Try this new approach to your research. Summarize only the key points in VisiMap. If you find a particularly effective quote that you simply must have, put it in a note with the necessary bibliographical information. It's highly unlikely that you are going to want to quote more than a few passages of the contents you are researching.

Unless you understand the key points, it will be hard to pass them on to your reader or listener, and you won't be speaking with your own voice. Move to your next source. Repeat the process. If your references are books, try the ten minute browse that you used earlier. Focus on the key points that you need. Don't get buried in the text.

## Stay awake!

_No matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting._ _Ronald Reagan_

If you regularly fall asleep in libraries, you may have been blaming it on poor ventilation – or even the influence of other library patrons dosing off around you. The real reason may be the passive role that you routinely assign yourself as a researcher. Be active. Carry your computer or pens with you. Let your visual maps burst into colour before your eyes. Let your right brain cortical skills bring the words and numbers of your left cortex to life. Use your limbic skills to organize and add humanistic warmth and passion. Work quickly. If you feel yourself getting sleepy, speed up  don't slow down. Take regular short breaks. Go outside and get some fresh air. Stretch. Then return to stretching your mind.

## Interview an Expert

_An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field._ -Niels Bohr

Sometimes research for a report requires an interview with an authority rather than merely reading his or her work. Visual mapping will be a useful tool in this context as well. Prepare for the interview by mapping your questions. What do you want to know? What are the key points you need answers on? What particular insights can this person provide? What can the person tell you about the history, the politics, the past, the future of the topic? Spend a few moments zeroing in on what information can be gleaned from this particular person.

When you get to the interview, visual mapping can also be a wonderful tool. You can ask your questions in an organized way working around the map's circumference. If you are a speed typist, you could place the information into a map immediately, but you will probably find a live session easier to notate with a pen and pencil. As soon as the interview is completed, you can place the responses right on the map. You can add new and interesting observations in the notes. During a live session, visual mapping allows you to maintain eye contact, a key ingredient of any successful interview. Focus on the main points. Encourage the person you are interviewing to tell the stories that will colour your understanding of the real issues. Listen to the history. Ask for predictions about the future. You will gain a rich insight into the subject by encouraging input that extends beyond facts and figures.

When you have completed your research and interviews, you will have a whole library of visual maps. Spread them out and look at them. Now is a chance to create a master map combining the concepts, ideas and issues. You can now see how the ideas relate to one another. Suddenly the examples and stories fit. The structure solidifies. Now you are ready to write your report.

## A New Creation

_I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others._ -Moliere

The report you write will take on new life. Your Quadrant D innovative mode has given you several new ideas. It's highly unlikely that you will adhere strictly to your original plan. While your Quadrant B conservative mode may rebel at changing it, your Quadrant A analyzer mode will make the correct judgment and your Quadrant B organizer mode will get back to work. What you have learned through your research has been integrated and combined with the power of your own brain and you have absorbed it in a new way. It has developed a life of its own.

## Keep Going

_Patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness._ \- Thomas Henry Huxley

Repeat the process with each section of your report. Deliberately work quickly to bring the work to life, moving swiftly from section to section. Make sure that you document your sources as you go. You will need to pull them together in your bibliography and reference section.

## The First Draft

_Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it's fresh, we're on the ocean. Of course it's for sale, we're not giving it away. Of course it's here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH._ -Peggy Noonan

When you have completed your first draft, look at it from the Quadrant D big picture point of view again. VisiMap a summary. Switch to a Quadrant A left brain analysis and a Quadrant B organizational review. Do the parts make sense in terms of the whole? Is there balance between sections? Are the transitions clear? Will a novice have enough material and examples to understand the basic ideas you are trying to convey? Perhaps it needs a more human Quadrant C approach. Now move back to Quadrant D. Is the report colourful? Does it excite the imagination? Does it give examples that create interesting pictures? Can the reader visualize the concepts in a meaningful way? Does it present the big picture? Are there Quadrant C personal stories that will create empathy in the reader? Move back to the left. Have you used words accurately? Have you used simple vocabulary and avoided jargon? Are the numbers right? Are the arguments logical and do the points follow in proper sequence? Be a good critic.

While this process sounds awesomely complicated, it is not. Your brain makes these kinds of transitions all the time. You are focused on the final result, seeing how the components fit together, looking at both the forest _and_ the trees, trying to make the subject meaningful and interesting. You are drawing on the power of all four quadrants of your brain. Your readers will thank you for it and benefit greatly from your understanding of the ways that their own thinking styles work.

Brain Waves

  * Read a book in 10 minutes using the method outlined at the beginning of the chapter.

  * Try a study session where you deliberately limit your learning time and focus on the parts that you need to add to your current knowledge. Start by VisiMapping what you know first and then add the rest.

  * Map an outline of a topic you want to write about. Then write it.

  * Choose a book on a subject you know nothing about. Try VisiMapping one chapter and see if the subject starts to make sense.

  * Conduct an interview using visual mapping.

CHAPTER 7

# Be a Fast Talker

## Deliver Effective Presentations

_Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense._ -Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can use your visual mapping skills to prepare presentations that have power and effectiveness. Instead of dreading occasions when you have to speak, put some of your new thinking tools to work. Mapping will be a powerful aid to your thinking style. Your Quadrant A love of analysis and logic will respond to your natural ability to define and justify your points. Your Quadrant B organizing mode will like VisiMap's planning capability and its help in developing a clear structure. Your Quadrant C feeling mode will allow you to be expressive and appeal to the feelings of your audience. Visual mapping will support your big picture Quadrant D mode in making your presentation shine with new vision and exciting possibilities.

## Speaking is Brain to Brain

When we speak we are using our brain to paint concepts, pictures and stories that zap through the air and into the brains of others to recreate. It's like two modems talking. If you have to make a presentation soon, you are probably focused on what you are going to say – and that is important. But your success as a speaker is also going to depend on what your audience hears, sees and feels. So one of the first things you can do is to picture your presentation as a drama in which you are merely one of the players.

## What's the Scene?

_Drama is life with the dull bits cut out._ -Alfred Hitchcock

The presentation might be a major address to a large crowd in a lecture hall, but for most of us this is the exception rather than the rule. If you are a not-for-profit manager, you are more likely making a committee report to the board of directors. If you work for a large company, you may be reporting research findings to your project team. You may be introducing a guest speaker at your service club. You may be introducing yourself to two other people at a networking meeting. Each of these presentations has different requirements.

In each of them though, you will want to consider:

  * Your subject matter

  * Your preparation

  * Your objective

  * Your audience

  * Your means of contact

  * Your tone

  * Your volume

  * Your impact

  * Your body language

  * Your voice

## Your Subject Matter

In most cases, the topic will have been predetermined because of your role or your expertise. If you are the club's president, you will make a report to bring people up to date on recent activities. If you are the local gardening expert on native plants, that's what you will be talking about. Rather than focusing on yourself at the beginning, start from the point of view of the audience. Enlist the help of VisiMap and start by mapping what the audience already knows about the subject. If your meeting is the National Association of Hepatica Lovers, there is no need to tell them what a wildflower is. On the other hand if your group is composed of computer newbies, there is little point in starting with the benefits of WiFi. Establish the appropriate point of departure.

VisiMap will help you structure your presentation. Map the main points that you want to make. Start with a central topic. Take a moment to depict the topic imaginatively and be an excellent representational or abstract artist to get to the essence of your topic. Move on quickly to the main branches and their subsets and get them all down. Don't worry about the appropriate order. What do you wish the audience to know? What are the main points that they need to understand? Build the entire structure and see the big picture before you plunge into any of the text or think about the details.

Your first draft will probably have the points in random order and it will be obvious that you need to rearrange them. Quickly reorder them. Have a look at the main branches from the perspective of importance. Which points are simple to understand? Which points require more examples and illustration? Which points require a bridge to move the audience from what they know now to new learning? What comparisons can you make between things that they already know and the new ideas? What memorable stories can you tell to make the point? What pictures can you paint?

## Appeal to all Five Senses

_Nothing is more indisputable than the existence of our senses._ -Jean Le Rond d'Alembert

This doesn't mean that you have to give out gum drops - although in some audiences it might help people stop coughing. It means that the way you look, the sound of your voice, the verbal pictures that you paint, and your passion for your topic are going to be as important as the content. The stories that you tell are more likely to be remembered than the concepts you are trying to convey.

Under normal circumstances you would probably have taken a left side of the brain approach and worked on facts and statistics to impress your audience. But what you have in front of you is an assembly of living breathing human beings who are looking for patterns, admiring the colour of your dress or tie, trying to picture what you mean and wandering off on imaginative tangents of their own.

## Prepare for a brain to brain encounter

_The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience._ Lester Bangs

Put yourself in the crowd and become a member of the audience. Watch yourself confidently walk out on stage and step up to the podium. Watch as you pause and get a sense of where you are standing. Watch yourself take in the entire crowd and create a sense of expectation before you start. Now listen to what you are saying. Note that you start with an unforgettable story. Note that you now have everyone in the palm of your hand. Note how you make a bridge to the topic of the day. Note how you paint an overview of the topic and pinpoint how many points you intend to make. Note how you build the points, making the case with colourful examples that are easy to remember. Note how you make the connections between the points so that the topic is suddenly sensible and your audience can hardly believe how simple it really is. Note how you don't use slides in a boring conventional way. Note how your visuals are actually visual – they're not just lists of phrases in PowerPoint that are too small to read. Note how you sum up and remind your audience of every main point. Note how you bring everything together for an exciting finale, in exactly the same way a symphony does, building to the triumphant climax. What a great presentation! The whole audience is on its feet immediately giving you a standing ovation.

That's it. A successful presentation. Now all you have to do is sit down and flesh it out. You may want to produce a full printed text. If it's going to be reported, a newspaper might require it. But you may simply want to work from a map. The best speakers sound as though they are working spontaneously with no notes at all. In many cases, VisiMap is their secret weapon. You can't get buried in a visual map. You maintain that necessary eye contact with your audience and are always aware of what they are experiencing and feeling. You tend to look up and out instead of down. The illustrations on your map in full colour inspire you and their vividness infuses your words. VisiMap allows for spontaneity but keeps you on a steady path. It gives flexibility to speed up or slow down depending on the reaction of the audience and still acts as a guidepost for what is still ahead.

## What do you want the audience to hear

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected. Marquis de Luc Vauvenargues

Marketing gurus are fond of reminding that you have to say what you mean in 25 words or less. Try it. What is the essence of what the audience is going to take away? Try statements like:

  * At the end of my presentation I expect them to know . . .

  * What they'll take away is . . .

  * The exciting thing they learned today is . . .

Keep it very simple. It has probably taken you a lifetime to learn what you have to say in this presentation. Don't expect people to bite off more than they can chew in twenty or thirty minutes. You want to give people the benefit of what you know in the simplest possible way. That doesn't mean that you have to trivialize it. Even Albert Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible – but not simpler".

## What the audience really learns

_When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look. When a woman gets up, people look; then, if they like what they see, they listen._ -Pauline Frederick

In normal preparation for presentations you are probably focused on the main points. If you have done your homework, the audience will get the gist of your presentation. But what they are more likely to tell their partners at dinner is:

  * He mumbled. I couldn't hear a thing

  * She looked great – red is certainly her colour

  * The projector didn't work – again

  * He had the most boring voice I've ever heard

  * She's a real know-it-all

In other words, reaction involves the senses and feelings as much as the content. Whole brains are meeting other whole brains. Your energy, your tone of voice, your attitude, your sense of excitement, your solid competence – your whole being is there.

## Rehearse out loud

_God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest._ P. D. James

You didn't get the voice you have overnight. It is an amalgam of all the experiences you have had and all the places you have been. But you may not listen to it objectively. Is it a monotone? Does it have energy? Does its rhythm rise and fall appropriately or is everything delivered in a flat boring way? Dietrich Bonhoeffer had useful advice to people who had to read the scriptures in public. He suggested that they should read as though reading a love letter from someone the listeners cared about. Your presentation should come across that way.

Professional speaker and author Richard Israel has an excellent exercise that will help you explore the potential of your own voice. Count slowly to ten gradually increasing your volume as you go up the vocal scale. As you do so, thrust your hand forward with the palm upward as though you were reaching out to a person a few feet away. Imagine looking them in the eye with great interest as you do this. If you can round up a real person to look at, the value will be even higher. Thrust one hand forward and then other hand saying the numbers as you go up through the sequence. Thrust both hands at once. Now reverse the process. Go down the scale from very loud to a whisper. Once you hear the variation and catch a sense of drama in your own voice, you will be on the road to using it to full advantage.

Tape your presentation using an audio cassette or a camcorder. Don't be surprised if you don't sound or look the way you think you do. I hated the sound of my own voice the first time I heard it on tape, but later I discovered I could use my voice in ways that I even grew to like. Strengthen what is effective and work on what needs to be improved. The vowels are important. Professional singers always study Italian so that they will acquire the beautiful vowel sounds contained in the language. Consonants give energy and crispness. If you're working in a big auditorium you will have to increase the volume and slow the pace.

If you have to use a microphone in a large room, check it out in advance. Some set themselves automatically, but hotels and conference centers often have antiques which capture all the qualities of early radio. Forewarned is forearmed. Always arrive early enough to test the equipment. Check out how you have to speak if the amplification suddenly fails. It happens.

Remember that it's not just what the audience hears that is important. It is what they see. If you are a man, the audience will admire you most if you wear a navy blue suit. If you are a woman you may need to be reminded that small patterns will disappear or become muddy at a distance while a strong jewel colour will almost always work.

A smile will convince your audience that you love being there. Always picture every person absolutely delighted that you have come to speak and eager to hear your every word. Then bring every positive aspect of yourself into play – your love of your subject, your enthusiasm, your energy, your imagination, your sense of humor, your sparkle. As Michael Gelb reminds us, babies make great presenters largely because of their wholehearted involvement in what they do.

Use VisiMap to shape and structure your presentation so that the audience can capture it and relate to it. Use your whole brain to recognize that you're not just conveying facts and figures – you're creating a total whole brained environment that is filled with colour, dimension, imagination and a unique world view that is truly yours.

Brain Waves

  * Make your next presentation using VisiMap

  * Read _Present Yourself_ by Michael Gelb

CHAPTER 8

# Be on a Winning Team

## Strategies for Effective Teamwork

_Consensus is what many people say in chorus but do not believe as individuals._ -Abba Eban

Teamwork is fast becoming the norm in the workplace. We hear about multi-disciplinary teams, cross cultural teams, team learning. It sounds good until we try to put it into practice. What are the best tools to set us on the path to success with teams?

## The Trouble with Brainstorming

_A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers._ -Sebastian-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort

You have probably participated in several brainstorming sessions and at first enjoyed the excitement of a flood of ideas pouring out of your group. You may have found your enthusiasm waning as endless sub-groups present their findings, with flip chart pages quickly turning and covering the content of pages previously reviewed. Sometimes the findings are mounted on walls around the room so that all the points supposedly can be seen, even though the writing is much too small to read from a distance. Too often the process fizzles out right there. Ideas are born but they are abandoned at birth and never have a chance to grow up. One or two ideas may be brought forward and the rest are forgotten.

The other difficulty is that the process is often highly artificial. It suggests that ideas can emerge fully hatched from out of nowhere. Those who are quickest to join the game are usually extroverted Quadrant D's and while the process is supposed to be very democratic, the most vocal usually take center stage. The result of the brainstorming session is often a superficial list which doesn't really go anywhere. In a recent session I participated in, the findings of a brainstorming session were later presented in summary form to the board of directors of the organization as "objectives" and "strategies". The truth is that they were neither; they were random ideas with no structure, no relationships and no order of priority. They were much too vague to lead to action without further intensive work. Significantly the ideas disappeared from the agenda and the organization resumed its normal pattern of crisis management.

## Growing Ideas Together

Enter VisiMap. Visual mapping is a welcome departure from the usual team method of brainstorming and list making and it has several advantages. Team maps are more collaborative because they combine the inputs of the entire team from the beginning and good ideas have a chance to grow.

If the team members don't know anything about visual mapping, a learning session will have to precede the group process. This can be accomplished in a half day preliminary session, where participants learn how their brains work, learn the principles of visual mapping, and try it on some simple and familiar tasks such as those outlined in Chapter 3. One of the advantages of using visual mapping for a cross disciplinary team is that it creates a level playing field. It also cuts across the usual hierarchies when everyone learns it together. It gives the participants a common shorthand. It is also useful to introduce the concepts of thinking styles and brain dominance so that participants recognize that there are going to be a variety of styles present and that all of them have a valuable role to play.

In a visual mapping mode a facilitator isn't at the front of the room ordering all the participants to bark out their ideas. Instead, each participant maps his or her own interpretation of the subject. Think of a flower gradually unfolding and see the process as ideas in bloom. Depending on the complexity of the issues, participants can take from twenty minutes to a full hour to explore the subject quietly and individually. All good ideas start from one brain. Working individually will also give participants a chance to put their most effective action modes and thinking styles to work.

The next step is to combine maps in pairs. In this process, as in brainstorming, every point counts and gets documented. The difference in this case is that participants take time to explain their points to their partners. In some cases, both members of the pair will have similar points, and they need to be recorded only once on the combined map. In nearly every case, the combined versions will show many more points than the individual ones and provide a more comprehensive framework. The next step is for each pair to combine their maps with another group's output. In the same way, the participants need to note duplications and take time to explain what they mean.

## Words, words, words.. . .

_My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me._ -Benjamin Disraeli

We may have the same words on our maps, but they will frequently have highly different associations for us. In one of my training sessions, a woman in a group associated play dough with the word, "love". When asked why, she replied, "When I was little, I used to sculpt small gifts out of play dough and present them to my parents, because I loved them". The team immediately understood and commented, "How nice". But without her explanation, the association would seem strange and irrelevant. It would be the sort of point that would be lost in a typical brainstorming session.

Our use of words depends totally on our own associations and experience. Each of us is unique. One of author Tony Buzan's favorite exercises is to ask participants in a training session to write ten words that immediately come to mind when they hear the word, "water". They are invited to try the same exercise with the word, "love". He then asks the group to estimate how many words will be exactly the same in a group of five. Most people estimate that four to seven words will be common to all the participants. In hundreds of experiments, he has found that there are no common words.

This is good news and bad news. The good news is that we all have a unique contribution to make. The bad news is that we assume that other people have the same associations with words that we do, and this is hardly ever the case. This exercise makes a great party game and I can guarantee that you will get the same result. In one of my seminars I had a couple who had been married for twenty five years. When they tried the exercise, they didn't have one word in common. Neither did the newlyweds who thought they shared every perception and association.

We need to take time to let our ideas germinate, and we need to cultivate them. That's why it is best to start from an individual perception. Taking time to build team maps gradually may seem to take too much time at the beginning, but ultimately it means that tiny ideas have a chance to blossom and grow into big ideas.

## Looking at the Same Big Picture

_You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"_ -George Bernard Shaw

Most work teams are composed of eight or twelve persons, so that there may have to be more sessions of combining maps. Each stage of combining requires larger sheets if you're working on paper, as more and more ideas are incorporated, though you won't have a problem if you are recording with VisiMap. Finally the team is looking at one big visual map which incorporates every single idea contributed by the group. All ideas are on the same big page or screen. Ideas that are not immediately transparent can be explored, one branch at a time. The group is now looking at the same big picture, which is a new creation.

In _The Fifth Discipline_ , Peter Senge makes an important distinction between discussion and dialogue. Senge notes that frequently discussion sounds like percussion, with team players striking the points of others with particular ferocity. Dialogue, he says, is more exploratory. It asks more questions. It has fewer pat answers. It recognizes that we don't know everything and it encourages exploration instead of posturing.

When we view the master map, we are all looking in the direction we have traveled together. The visual map incorporates the combined knowledge and insights we have brought to the scene. Our own line of work, skills, qualifications, and thinking styles give us a particular perspective; they seldom tell the whole story. When we combine our points in one big picture, we are closer to the truth and can see where our points connect.

## The Move to Action

_It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it._ -Charlotte Bronte

The brain loves connections and associations. One thought always suggests another, which suggests still another. The process continues indefinitely until the ideas go right off the page. When teams look at the big picture, they nearly always see repetition of the same words and concepts on several branches. It is useful to highlight repeated words or use graphics to make them stand out. Now common themes are more evident.

The brain always moves us to action. Often the words on the first layers of branches are nouns. Eventually they cry out for verbs, which turn up on the sub branches. So what are we going to do to make this idea come to fruition? What are the alternatives? Our Quadrant B planning and organizing mode will come into play. There will be spirited input about the best ways to proceed.

A key idea on the periphery can sometimes become the center of a new visual map. Often an idea which seemed less important in the beginning is reinforced by other ideas and assumes a new role. If the group is unified and agrees on the key concepts, it may be able to proceed immediately to formulate a strategy. If it is not, it may be worthwhile taking the new central idea through another process, starting at the individual level and pairing and combining until the new map solidifies and focuses it.

You may get the impression that this process is endless, complicated and not worth the effort. Try it. Reflect on what is really happening. In traditional brainstorming, - one person is talking at a time and in a team of twelve, that means one twelfth of the available brain resources is actively engaged. In a team mapping session, twelve minds start by contributing individually to the process, share their understanding in pairs, build their understanding through further sharing and combine all their ideas on a final single map. Up to this point no idea has been abandoned. The less sturdy newborns have a chance to be nurtured into bloom. By the time they arrive on the final map, ideas that might have been dismissed earlier are now in full flower. They have been shared and developed throughout the process.

## What You See is What You Get

The combined visual map depicts the common knowledge in the room. Participants will naturally champion their own particular concerns and use their dominant thinking styles as one would expect, but they will see them as part of a larger frame work. The composite map has relevance to the participants because they all have a stake in it; good visual maps create an energy that moves the participants toward action. In one training session I conducted, the participants were so pleased with their ability to structure their thinking that they wanted to share their visual maps with others, saying, "Let's bring the staff in and have a look at this so we can actually show them what is happening".

## Vision needs the Big Picture

_I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it._ -Samuel Goldwyn

Vision isn't something you just talk about. It's something you see. The greatest leaders not only have the power to imagine and flesh out opportunities but they also have the power to communicate them with passion. Vision is more than words. To build a vision, we need to use all the capabilities of our brain and express them with passion. A visual portrayal full of colour and image is so inspiring that some companies like Merex Corp. have actually developed visual mission statements. One of the advantages of pictures over words is their ability to convey a whole new world and to show the difference between our present reality and where we want to be. It is this tension between the two points that creates the energy to get there, that moves us to take explore specific action, and to create the momentum to begin the journey.

Discussing the contents of a visual map explores many aspects of the issues at hand, but it shouldn't be confused with making decisions. One of the advantages of a map is that the combined data is in front of a group facing in the same direction and they have to agree on which direction to take next. When people are looking at the same big picture they have created themselves, there is a better chance that they will know where to go. The map is a creation that they have in common. It has taken them beyond the fixed positions they have brought to the table. If a particular word becomes a sticking point, the group can stop and quickly map their associations with it. For example, if a company is downsizing, _security_ is going to have a profoundly different meaning to the union representative who is trying to protect jobs and to the manager who has been told to reduce expenses by 25%. Exploring the associations will give a clearer perspective on where there is a common understanding and where there are differences.

## Get Moving

_Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure._ -Aldous Huxley

Suppose our team of has explored their combined visual map and agreed that three of the points are worthy of action now. Back to the individual drawing board. Each individual participant can chart his or her strategy for action. The process will move faster than the original one, because the participants are now fully engaged and focused. Pens or keyboards fly rapidly and branches flow. Pairs discover each other's points more quickly than in the first round, are happy about common paths, surprised by unusual turns and mystified by leaps in odd directions. Explanations quickly clarify the points.

Pairs now combine their maps, incorporating all the individual items and clarifying points that are less transparent. Finally the groups create their master map and now have several strategies for action. They have to set timelines and priorities, which requires further dialogue. The final result is a unified and structured plan.

Under normal circumstances, you will attend many meetings in the course of a development project. Let's move on to the meeting process itself to see how it can be improved.

Brain Waves

  * Assemble your team and present the question, "What are the key issues facing our organization now?" Ask each participant to create a visual map responding to this question.

  * After 20 minutes ask the participants to form pairs and combine the points on their maps

  * Form quartets and have the participants create a new map combining their points.

  * Continue the process until you have one big Master Map.

  * Look at the big picture together. Talk about it. See if you can reach consensus on the most important issue. Then go back to the drawing board and map all possible solutions to the issue.

  * Go through the process again to build the Master Map. Try to reach consensus on the most important solution. Put it into action and just do it!

CHAPTER 9

# Meeting of Minds

## How to make Meetings Work

_Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. . . . However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything._ -John Kenneth Galbraith

If Romeo thought that parting was such sweet sorrow, he could have made the same comment about meeting. Meetings can occupy as much as 60% of the working day and most of the proceedings are a waste of time. What can we do to make meetings shorter, more productive and more to the point? Use visual mapping. There are a great many aspects of that process that will help you to get where you want to be.

## Why Hold the Meeting?

Start with a planning map. The first branch to place on your map is the reason for holding the meeting in the first place. Imagine the meeting as a finished entity. What happened? What results were accomplished? What are the next steps? If you don't find immediate answers to these questions, consider why you are holding the meeting at all. There may be better ways to deal with the issue at hand. Perhaps you need to speak to one person, not an entire group. Perhaps the meeting could be better accomplished by a telephone conference call or an online conference, particularly if the participants live in different cities. If your main purpose is to convey information, it might be better to simply send a memo. If you are making an important announcement, why not throw a party? Before you call the meeting, decide the appropriateness of holding it at all.

## Set the Stage

If you are going to proceed, compare a meeting to a theatrical presentation. There is action in three parts of the theater, -- backstage, main stage and in the lobby following the show. The backstage effort, -- the gathering of the props, the rehearsal of the scene, the preparation of the program are going to determine the overall success of the performance. Start your visual map with a branch that includes the participants. Follow by mapping the agenda items. Put them down as fast as they come to you in random order and get them all down on the page. Look at which items are simple and straightforward, which are controversial, and which involve the whole group. Look at who should report on the various issues and who might present the topics.

Now it is time to order this raw material and put it into a clearer order and time frame. Decide on the duration of the meeting. Confirm who needs to attend. Decide on the order of the items on the agenda. It is well to warm up on non-controversial items and place the most contentious issue in the middle. It is also a good idea to follow the controversial issue with a neutral one, or deliberately delay decisions on the items following the controversial issues, so that opponents won't use the remainder of the meeting to seek revenge for past action and kill each other off.

Decide on the resources that you will need for the meeting. Do you need a projector or flip chart? Do you need background papers or other references? Insofar as possible, send the agenda and its attached documents to the participants well in advance of the date. Encourage participants to read all reference materials in advance. Otherwise you are going to convene a meeting of readers, whose faces will never rise during the meeting because they are buried in reference documents. How can there possibly be any useful contribution on any issue if the meeting is the first time people know anything about it? It will encourage the Quadrant D idea people at the expense of the Quadrant A analysts and their need for information, the Quadrant B planners and their need to set the issue in context, and the Quadrant C's with their concern for human resource issues.

Now it is time to move to center stage. Choose your meeting room carefully. If possible, get a room with good natural light. Pay attention to ventilation and temperature because these are vital to the energy of the people attending the meeting. It is important to bar interruptions. Deactivate the phone in the room. Place a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door.

Provide the proper materials. Make sure that any additional printouts and reference materials are available for each participant. Have a flip chart with markers of the appropriate size at the ready. If you really want to stimulate the participants, provide them with bright markers and highlighters. If money is no object, equip the room with an electronic white board so that all proceedings can be recorded in VisiMap as you go. In some situations, audio tape recorders and videotape machines are useful as well.

## On With the Show

_I've been on a calendar, but never on time._ -Marilyn Monroe

Start the meeting promptly. Don't penalize those who arrived on time by waiting for the latecomers. Don't interrupt the proceedings to acknowledge the latecomers and bring them up to date. You're simply reinforcing their tardy behaviour and making it acceptable.

If you are the chairman, it is your responsibility to control the process. Your meeting agenda prepared in VisiMap is a constant reminder of the material that you have to cover. You will need to worry less about the talkative participant who will have always plenty to say when you have the big picture in front of you. If you are smart, you may have already asked the most garrulous or the most bothersome member of the group to take notes. Balance participation by inviting the quieter ones to comment. Often their contributions will be more worthwhile than those of the chatty types. Summarize the proceedings as you go. Emphasize the positive and show appreciation for all contributions.

## Map the Minutes

Good meetings result in action and it is what happens between meetings that determines their success. Minutes can also be taken and distributed in VisiMap format. One of the advantages of this technique is that it limits the content and focuses on action. What is to be done? Who will do it? When will it be done? If the answers are complex, you can use the notes section of VisiMap to flesh out the points in text form and use your main visual map as an outline. In most regular meetings, however, the actual points can be short and simple. Don't provide any more content than necessary. You want participants to spend their time on the necessary follow-up, not on reading. If possible, distribute the minutes in graphic format or in converted outline format right on the spot.

## Be Your Own Best Critic

Evaluate each meeting. What went right? What went wrong? Who participated? Who was silent throughout? What feedback did you receive? Be prepared to spend time following up with participants who have concerns arising from the meeting. Be prepared to hear from those who said little during the meeting because something was probably upsetting them.

Last, but not least, keep good records. Visual maps provide excellent recall of what happened and can be reviewed quickly. If you have a number of memos and minutes for an organization, a committee or a department, consider keeping the documents in a three ring binder rather than in flat files. That way it will be easier to retrieve the documents you need.

## The Show Must Go On

The last meeting's minutes always provide the starting point for the next. Start the cycle by reviewing your previous visual map agenda and minutes and see where you stand on the issues which were addressed. Some matters may have been delayed and need to get back on the agenda. Some need review. Some persons need to be commended for their achievements. Others need to be reminded of reports that should be made. Using VisiMap as your planning tool will really get your show on the road.

Brain Waves

  * Plan a future meeting using visual mapping from beginning to end.

  * Create an agenda in VisiMap and distribute it.

  * Take the minutes in VisiMap and distribute them either in graphic or outline format.

  * Use the previous minutes written in visual map format to set the next agenda.

CHAPTER 10

# Try to Remember

## Developing Your Memory

_The true art of memory is the art of attention._ -Samuel Johnson

Have you had trouble remembering something lately? Have you heard yourself saying that you must be losing your mind because you can't recall someone's name or remember a piece of information you need? Do you believe that your limited number of brain cells are wearing out and you'll soon find yourself in a state of permanent amnesia? Have you decided to limit your intake of information because you might use up all the available space? You're not alone. Most people share similar misconceptions about their ability to use their memories. You are placing an undue emphasis on what you have forgotten rather than concentrating on the hundreds of thousands of things you recall with absolute clarity.

Scientists now believe that the brain has an incredible capability to store all the tracings of your experience. It also has a huge capacity to retrieve information so that one of your challenges is changing your misconception that it is natural to forget things. Memory is a whole range of processes which range from retaining simple facts to storing complex structures like languages or multi-sensual personal experiences. Events that happened years earlier can often be recalled with highly specific recollections of the sounds, sights, tastes and smells that accompanied them.

## Amazing Connections

_You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past—whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever._ -Bob Dylan

The brain works by links and associations. You may remember from the previous example that if you take a common word like "water" and ask 10 persons to write 10 words that come to mind when each hears the word "water", nearly all of the words will be totally different. A child might come up with "sand pail" and "shovel" because he had just had a visit to a nearby beach. His mother might come up with "dishes" because she had just washed up after a midday meal. His brother might choose "hydroelectricity" because of his science project. His father might choose "yacht" after a recent daydream. All of the connections are valid and all relate to particular experiences. Each time we use a word we bring our personal wealth of associations into being. Our use of words often causes confusion when others bring their own associations to the word because our personal associations are unique.

## Memory is Important

In an age when computers are such incredible storage and retrieval devices, you might be tempted to think that memory doesn't matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can actively improve your memory both in terms of your attitude and your actions. You have to believe that remembering is important. You can also make use of memory techniques that are practised by thousands of memory experts throughout the world.

First it is important to be aware of all the aspects of the particular object or event you are trying to remember. What does it look like? How does it sound? Are there particular fragrances associated with it? Perfume consultants and wine experts excel here. How does it taste? What does it feel like? What are your feelings? How do others feel? What other things or events does it remind you of? Be aware of the big picture as well as the details. Consciously take it all in. You do have to _try_ if you want to remember.

## A Lost Art

_The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject._ -Jon Wynne-Tyson

The Greeks and Romans didn't have computers and online reference services but they weren't dummies. They developed memory devices called mnemonics, named after the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosene. If they were going to take part in public life, orators had to memorize what they were going to say and they took full advantage of the brain's associative power. They used many of the features we still use, notably rhyme, acronyms and shape. It is easy to remember a fact or two in the short term if you can remember a rhyme that connects them. English speakers have learned that "Thirty Days hath September..." You can probably draw a map of Italy from memory because of its distinctive boot shape but have more trouble coming up with a map of France. You may be able to remember the notes in the spaces of the musical scale as FACE in the treble clef or the lines EGBDF as every good boy does fine. In high school, my history teacher taught us to remember the terms of confederation of the Canadian provinces by the acronym, LACE FUR. It worked long enough to get me through the history exam and my only problem now is that I have forgotten what these letters stand for. That's why mnemonic strategies are better for keeping facts in short term memory than the long one. I didn't know then how to make this information a permanent fixture in my brain.

Making up stories was something that we did instinctively as children and we can put our talents to work when we need to remember dissociated facts in order. The more impossible and entertaining the story is, the easier it will be to recall. To remember is to give flesh and blood to the elements of the story. This is one reason why great speakers use figures of speech like metaphors and similes, because they know that our minds need to capture the details imaginatively if they are going to hold them. A great speaker will nearly always include a story or two.

When it comes to remembering numbers, scientists who have studied memory tell us that we have the ability to hold seven or eight elements in short term memory. Seven digit telephone numbers are easy to remember. Some people find that they have trouble with the last four if the number is preceded by the area code, because that means holding 10 numbers in short term memory. If you have to remember a larger number of items, it helps to group them into seven item chunks so that you can hold each unit more firmly.

Sir Frederic Bartlett was critical of early research that ignored the role of meaning in what we remember. The item we want to recall has to fit into a larger context of what we consider to be important. That's why many school children rebel against being forced to learn things by heart, if they see no point in the learning. The notion of having a broader purpose and an emotional commitment to the material being committed to memory is a valid one.

Our brains seek order. We look for structures in what we are learning. If you were given the following list of words to memorize:

doctor wind dentist lake and then engineer lawyer two helicopter

the words naming occupations will probably jump out as a category. It is much easier to remember information over the long term if we can put it in an obvious context.

## Visual Maps Help Us Remember

Whether you are trying to come up with a new invention or trying to commit to memory what is already known on a subject – whether you are creating or trying to remember – you are using processes that are mirror images of one another. In both cases you are using links and associations to focus the idea and help your brain deal with it. When you deliberately group the items, you are helping yourself to store memories for future retrieval. You are also providing a research data base of material for creative associations in the future. So if you want to improve your imagination, work actively to improve your memory.

## First and Last

_Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen._ -Marcel Proust

When I am on a consulting team making a competitive bid on a proposal we always try to be interviewed either first or last – with good reason. People remember what they hear at the beginning and what they hear at the end. The middle gets fuzzy. Scientists call these phenomena the primacy and recency effect. You can put primacy and recency to work in your personal study sessions by taking action to reduce the size of the middle. In other words, you can work hard for a defined period of time and then take a break. If you VisiMap what you are learning for 50 minutes you can then get up and take a brief walk or try some calisthenics. When you come back, you can try to recreate the map of what you just learned. If there is still a marked "sag" in the middle of what you are trying to remember, you can shorten the study period to thirty minutes and do more frequent reviews. You will increase your retention rate over time.

## The Importance of Review

If you undertake periodic reviews of new material you need to remember, you will find that your long term recall improves dramatically. It is useful to do a quick review 24 hours after your first study session and simply redraw from memory the visual map you produced the previous day. You can then have a careful look at it and compare it to your original and see what you left out. Chances are that you have recalled about 80% of the material well and stumbled on the rest. It's then easy to quickly review the material that you omitted from your VisiMap. A week later, you can have another quick review of the material and repeat the process. Quick reviews after one month and after a three or four month interval should result in complete integration of the new material in your knowledge storehouse.

## Memory Systems based on Rhymes and Shapes

Simple memory systems can be useful for situations when you can't write things down. You may rightly think that such situations are rare, but they do occur. One of them is to create rhyming words that you associate with numbers. The reason to do this is that images are sometimes more memorable than abstract concepts. An example would be using shoe for two or heaven for seven. You can create your own number rhymes.

Some years ago I had a chance to use a memory system to advantage. I lived next to a walkway that provides a path to a main street nearby. Some kids mistook the walkway for a lane and when it narrowed, they had to move across to my freshly sodded lawn. Their wheels got stuck in the soft earth and were spinning deeper and deeper, when I suddenly appeared to check out what was going on. Even though they knew they had caused some damage, when they finally got themselves extricated, they simply drove off. But I had got the license plate. It was 762 FJT. I remembered it as Heaven Sticks Shoe – Effervescent Jay Tea

When nobody turned up to remedy the damage the next morning, I had a chat with the local police department, who checked the license plate and paid a friendly visit to a home a few blocks away. A red faced teenager came to the door a few minutes later and set to putting the sod back in place. We had a good talk about responsible driving and I also gave him a couple of tips about my memory systems. I can also remember the local taxi company's number when I'm visiting in Florida or the pin number for my new bank card. As well as solving simple problems, memory systems help flex your mental muscles and put your brain to work.

You can also use a shape association by seeing what picture shape you can associate it with. A candle could serve for the number, one, or a swan for the number, two, a sailboat for the number, four, and so on. You can use VisiMap to create a template that incorporates both a rhyme branch and a shape. Now you have a resource that you can apply to a group of numbers that you have to call frequently or have trouble remembering. If the visual story board that it creates is silly, so much the better. You will have much less difficulty in remembering it.

The example here is a model but one that you create yourself will be even more valuable.

## Letter Systems

In the alphabet system, you are using similar principles to those you used in the number systems. Another such system uses words that contain or start with the same sound as the letter itself. Because the picture created by the word is more vivid than the letter alone, you stand a better chance of retaining it. For example, you can associate the letter A with ale, the letter B with bee and so the letter C with the sea. If you had to remember an acronym for a society named BCA the visual story would be something like, "A bee sat by the sea drinking an ale".

## Try it out

If you need to retain numerical or acronym information on a short term basis, memory systems are a useful way to store and retrieve it. You can experiment to find the one that works best for you and practise it. It may become part of your repertory of thinking tools that you can use to delight and amaze your friends. When you feel comfortable with these simple systems, explore others in books.

## Remembering Names and Faces

Frequently people who try memory tests score high on numbers and low on names and faces or vice versa. That's because the first is a left brain cortical function and the other is a right one. It is possible to improve your recall of names and faces and it is an essential skill in a modern business environment.

If you are trying to capture all you can about a new acquaintance, you can use a mental visual map starting with a central image. Artist Connie Gordon imagined a man named Rod with a fishing rod coming out of the top of his head. Your sense of humor and your ability to make connections will help you remember. You can draw coloured branches in your head and fill them with information when you meet the person. Later you can draw a real map to capture the information and help you commit it to memory. When you first meet a person, it is useful the person's name and say it aloud several times. That will help imprint the name on your memory and your acquaintance will respond positively. Everyone likes to hear his or her own name.

## Take Memory Seriously

Your personal storehouse of information is unique. Because it relates to you and you alone, it is a resource that you can draw upon throughout your life. A scientist with British Telecom has predicted that in future years it will be possible for an implanted computer chip to store every sight, thought and sensation of each human being and copy it for posterity. While you may never participate in this scenario, you can share your experience, relive important events, gain insights upon reflection and bring pleasure to others because you take your memory seriously. More important, you are furnishing your imagination with a growing repository of data that can be retrieved and combined in new and exciting ways.

Brain Waves

  * Create your own set of number shapes. Make up a story incorporating the shapes to help you remember a new telephone number. Write it down. The next day see if you can recreate the story from memory.

  * Repeat the exercise with rhyming nouns and rhyming verbs.

  * Read Tony Buzan's _Use Your Memory_ and further explore the fascinating world of memory systems.

CHAPTER 11

# Form a Brain Cell

## The Power of Sharing Ideas

_There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to._ -Michel de Montaigne

Life in the 21st century presents a particular challenge. Many of us live in the new "edge cities" and commute long distances to work. We hardly know our neighbors' names, let alone take any time to talk to them. We spend most of our lives at work, carve out as much time as possible for our families and also try to accomplish the many chores necessary to make our lives run smoothly. We often have neighbors of different ethnic and faith backgrounds that we would like to get to know better but circumstances prevent it. We tend to move in very small circles.

Modern offices may be effective for some purposes, but they allow very little privacy or chance for reflection – except for the most senior members of the company. The cartoon world of _Dilbert_ with its cubicles, brainless routines and unerringly real business colleagues, was created by Scott Adams and came from his own experience in the workplace. It's often closer to the truth than those ubiquitous business books which give the impression that everyone is a CEO or senior manager. Even the people who start their ascent up the corporate ladder still have a nagging feeling that they are disconnected.

Diversions and toys may please for a short time but ultimately they don't solve this emptiness. We often gain a sense of identity through ethnic and social clubs, through religious affiliations, through athletic and cultural pursuits and hobbies or even by just hanging out. We don't get "out of the box" by spending eight hours a day inside a 150 square foot cubicle without windows no matter how good our salary is.

A new possibility for connectedness is the formation of a Brain Cell. Richard Israel, an American consultant and speaker, has used such a group to generate new ideas and support new business ventures. My personal Brain Cell concept shares some of his features but focuses more fully on sharing the learning journey with fellow travelers of diverse interests and backgrounds.

## What is a Brain Cell?

A Brain Cell is a group of seven or eight people who meet regularly to _think_ together. They could come from inside a large company or be composed of friends or acquaintances. They have no fixed agenda or group process. The ideal group is whole brained – at least collectively - with a variety of ages, occupations, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Some members may be working in diverse fields. Others may be embarking on the adventure of retirement. Some may spend their working days giving care to others. Others may be strategists or policy makers. What should unite them is a faith in the future, a willingness to share some of the things that are going on in their lives, and an openness to go where the group mind takes them.

In an information age, it is frightening how little wisdom is to be found. Extended families are scattered across the globe and the informal learning that passed from generation to generation has largely disappeared. Crafts and skills have disappeared in a decade. Gates and security guards are literal signs of the barriers that have been placed between members of the same community. A Brain Cell is an affordable small measure which can help create a new model for human interaction.

My own Brain Cell could serve as a prototype. There were three men and four women. We lived in diverse parts of a large metropolitan city. Some lived in apartments and condominiums, others in houses. Some were members of particular faith communities; others had no such affiliation. One was a business owner; others were freelancers; two were retired. There was a visual artist, a photographer, a white water canoeist, a sculptor, an organic gardener and a writer in the circle. Six were enthusiastic visual mappers. One preferred a journal writing process. None of us knew each other before the group was formed. What they had in common was participation in one of my training sessions. We made a commitment to meet for the four years preceding the millennium and for one year afterwards. There was no official structure and no assigned leader. We simply agreed to spend some time with one another over the next five years and see what happened.

Our meetings were held once a month in our homes on a rotating basis. The formats varied. Sometimes we attacked a common question such as predicting the future. Sometimes we shared events that were happening in our own lives, and asked for input and advice. Sometimes we allowed discussion to flow with no sense of where it might lead. Sometimes we asked questions for which there were no answers. At one point our concern about a cultural milieu that is increasingly addicted to gambling led us to make a visit to a newly opened casino to see who was actually there and how they were spending their time. We then spent some time talking about our real experience of and reaction to that world.

## Speaking and Listening

_It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak and another to hear._ -Henry David Thoreau

Most meetings started with twenty minutes of silence while we reflected on what had happened since the previous meeting. Some of us created visual maps of what we discovered in the silence. What often appeared on our maps was a mix of issues – work related problems, new subject matter, our allocation of time, problems of motivation. Each person was allocated about twenty minutes to share his or her map and ask for comment or feedback. Some used all the time to talk. Others used all the time to receive suggestions and comments. Gradually we came to see one another in clearer focus and get a sense of the person before us. The visual map summaries and the progress through the year gave us a very vivid sense of seven human journeys and a mutual sense of adventure as we watched our lives unfold. We saw what we thought.

## Strength in Diversity

Such sessions were a constant reminder that we are people in very different situations and different worlds. It was the exception rather than the rule for all of us to see one another between meetings. But there was strength in knowing that we were all on the same learning journey. Sometimes discussion was very loud and spirited. Loud laughter erupted when one idea bounced off another in witty exchange. When we published our maps, the tone of voice changed and there was deep listening. We were gaining the privilege of sharing what was happening at a deep level.

## A Common Journey

_We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual._ -Charles Horton Cooley

Our Brain Cell lasted for two and a half years. I know that there were some joint working ventures along the way. There was an easy and natural camaraderie and sharing of information as we grew together and built trust. One member moved to a new home and shared her research with others thinking about making a similar move. One who was overloaded with work and commitments closed one of his businesses so that he could concentrate on what really mattered to him. I started to write the subsequently published first version of this book, sustained by the faith that the others would read it and offer honest feedback and advice. One of us completed a major government study and shared how visual mapping with VisiMap had clarified and focused his thinking. The important and the commonplace blended in a lively exchange of events and ideas. Ultimately the group dispersed when some key members moved to another state. We tried meeting via Email, but it didn't have the same immediacy. We have drifted apart as a group, but some of its members still keep in touch and we value our friendship.

Participation in a Brain Cell is a constant reminder that we are not alone. The diversity of our individual journeys had a common thread. One common quality that marked this particular group was its excitement about the future, its interest in new technologies and organizational structures and a determination to seize opportunities. There was a sense of purpose and a clear feeling of riding a new wave. There was also a common desire to simplify and a concern for the earth. At the same time there was balance and a realization that we cannot know nor do everything.

While such groups cannot replace or substitute for families and other typical social, organizational or faith groupings, there is real value in setting aside some collective time to think out loud together and share ideas. A Brain Cell is a necessary antidote to the high-tech depersonalized environment in which we spend a major portion of our lives. Its simplicity need not make us dismiss it as a vital tool in building community awareness and thinking power.

Brain Waves

  * Form a Brain Cell. Ask six to eight friends or acquaintances to come to a meeting and share ideas.

  * Commit to meet regularly and share professional and personal issues.

CHAPTER 12

#  Don't Just Solve it – Create it

## Creating What You Want

_If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change._ -Robert Hewison

Today's working environment is a sea of problems. There are problems of communication, problems of interaction, problems of structure, financial problems, marketing problems, sales problems, conflict resolution problems, and problem problems. Problems are endlessly analyzed, often with the help of external consultants, and we've been through Business Process Reengineering, Total Quality Management, Becoming a Learning Organization and the new flavour of the month. Quadrant A analysts and Quadrant B organizers take over. People embark on changes that seem to provide the answers but often lose their enthusiasm along the way. Some problems just don't seem to get solved.

When we try to solve problems, we are trying to make something go away. We would like the mountain of paper on our desks to disappear, we would like our grumpy boss to change his negative outlook, we would like our inefficient colleague to submit the report on time, we would like the committee structure to work better, we would like to lose twenty pounds, we would like to have more hours to spend with the family, we would like - we would like \- we would like - .

## Another approach

_Reality leaves a lot to the imagination -_ -John Lennon.

When we solve problems we are often focused on the present with the hope of returning to some happier simpler past. It may be more productive to look in another direction. The answer that is frequently proposed is creativity. It is useful to make a distinction between the verb _to create_ and the noun _creativity_ because we commonly use them to mean two different things. To create is to cause to exist or to bring into being. _Create_ is a transitive verb. Creators create _something_. When we use the noun, _creativity_ , we tend to think of originality, imagination or innovation. The idea people in an advertising firm are even called Creatives.

Creativity is taken seriously these days. A study of Fortune 500 companies sponsored by Porter/Novelli, a national public agency with offices in several American cities, revealed that 59 out of 100 executives thought that creativity was more important than intelligence in ensuring success in business. Three quarters of them also thought that the school system was not doing a good job in fostering creativity.

The survey revealed typical stereotypes about creativity. Many think that creative people are eccentric. Most think that people are born with creativity or without it and can't be changed. The truth is that every human being has the capacity to create. Our education, training and general understanding of the creative process haven't helped us to develop our creative capability because it hasn't been properly identified as a mental process that involves all four quadrants of the brain.

## A model for Creating

_The business of a seer is to see._ -Aldous Huxley

American composer and author Robert Fritz has provided a useful path for creating and leads us away from many blind alleys that are current and confusing. In his book of the same name, he concentrates on _creating_ , -- bringing something into being. His basic question is, "What do you want to create?" The answer might be a symphony, a dynamic team, a novel, a garden, a profitable company, a slim body, a well functioning accounting department, -- but it will be a specific accomplished result.

Fritz reminds us that if you are going to create one thing, it will probably eliminate or at least postpone the possibility of creating other things. If you are going to write a symphony, you are not writing a folk song. If you are going to create a garden, you can not spend the same time redecorating the house. If you are concentrating on the accounting department, you may have to ignore marketing for the time being. Creating something involves focusing on a positive result. You have to want a specific outcome. You bring it into being because you love it and can visualize it fully.

## Map your Creation

_Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be._ -Andre Breton

Map your vision of your creation. What will it look like? How will it feel? If your vision is a successful department, visualize who will work there. What will be the physical layout? What will be the emotional tone? How will people spend their day? What will be the processes and procedures? What skills and qualifications will people have? What will be the organizational structure? What will be the criteria for success? Imagine your creation fully accomplished and functioning.

## Do a Reality Check

The next step is one that we often want to avoid. What is the reality now? What does the present situation look like? Who works here? What is the emotional tone now? How do people actually spend their day? What are current processes and procedures? Answers to these questions often produce an incredible tension that makes us want to give up, because the reality is so far away from what we want. Fritz contends that this tension is absolutely essential to the process. It is the difference between the desired result and the current reality that is the source of the energy and allows you to move forward.

## The Dangers in Planning

_In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable._ -Dwight D. Eisenhower

There are many blind alleys on the journey to your creation. One is planning. We either let the Quadrant B organizer in ourselves plan too much, or we succumb to the Quadrant D capability to generate multiple ideas without following through on any of them. Sometimes our Quadrant A analyzer takes over completely or absents itself from the scene entirely. Some companies and some individuals spend all their time developing and refining the most elaborate vision statement possible. The exercise is so comprehensive and so exhausting that they confuse Quadrant B activity with accomplishment. Others let the Quadrant D ability to come up with an innovative direction take over and ride off in all directions immediately without considering whether the direction they take will even come close to where they want to end up.

VisiMap a plan illustrating how you intend to get your desired result. If you are planning by yourself, consider as many alternatives as possible. This is a Quadrant D activity. Don't include Quadrant A analysis at this stage. If you are working as part of a team, allow all the members to develop their individual VisiMaps. Share your results and combine them in the form of a master map with all the ideas included.

Now submit your map to a Quadrant A analysis. In the process of examining your current reality and looking at what you need to do to reach your desired result, you may realize that you don't really want the result after all. If you want to be fluent in Spanish, know no Spanish now, recognize that you may have to go to classes twice a week, and spend an hour daily on lessons, are you still firm about your intended result? If you would rather spend your evenings watching television, now is the time to face the reality. You don't love the vision enough to bring it into being.

## Feelings, Affirmations and Paths

Fritz points up a number of delusions about the creative process that many people have. Some of us we may get stuck in Quadrant C and expect that all our feelings will be positive. He reminds us that you don't have to feel good at every point on the journey. Some days you may feel wonderful. Other times you may feel frustrated or depressed. Some days will be very matter of fact. You stay on the path because you want the result. Similarly you don't have to have high self esteem. Many new age thinkers have suggested affirmations like "I am a wonderful speaker of Spanish". "My Spanish speaking is fantastic" when the reality is totally different. The brain is a truth seeking organ and is not convinced by such pretense.

Another major delusion that Tony Buzan highlights is that people think the road to creating what they want is a straight one. Try filling in the blank in the statement, "Every time I practise something, I expect to ______________". Did you write, "improve" or "get better"? Think of a baseball player at batting practice. He hits a home run only occasionally. He strikes out more often than not. Think of the figure skater practising a triple lutz. Usually she falls. Think of the pianist practising scales. Often the fingers stumble.

## Know the Next Step

What we do need when we create is a sense of direction. This comes from our Quadrant B planning mode and depends on putting the necessary steps in sequence. Fritz counsels that you have to have a place to go. When you are trying to bring something into being, you must undertake some specific steps on the journey. You don't need to create deadlines to induce pressure, but you do need checkpoints mapped out in time to accomplish certain tasks. By breaking the assignment into chunks, you will use the momentum of one achievement to move you to the next one.

Visual mapping is an admirable aid to creation because it involves a whole brained approach that allows you to move freely among all four quadrants. You can add Quadrant B time frames to your Quadrant D dreams. You can write Quadrant A numbers and comment on the validity of your plans right on the map. Names of appropriate people can be included next to the tasks and emotional reactions can be included in symbols and graphics. Some tasks are going to have to precede others, because some tasks require specific information or more skills. Fritz stresses the need for good observation and good information and warns against speculation as a substitute for sound knowledge. Take the time to develop the skills and competencies you require. Broaden your powers of observation to see as many aspects and implications as you can.

## Time and Space

_I recommend to you to take care of the minutes; for hours will take care of themselves._ \- Lord Chesterfield

Creating takes time. This simple fact is often ignored. We have to devote many hours to what we want to accomplish. Tony Buzan has noted that one of the common characteristics of geniuses was a solid base of at least 50,000 hours devoted to their discipline. In most cases we have to practise and learn new skills. We have been conditioned to look for easy answers and to believe that we have to get it right the first time. We're not prepared to build the foundation and end up building castles in the air.

We also need time off. The tension to create is often so great that we lose all sense of perspective and run our creative engines constantly. The reason that people get their best ideas in the shower or the car is that these are places where they have turned the mind off for a minute or two and new ideas have the chance to make themselves heard. You have to let the mind rest so that the rich storehouse of unconscious ideas and those stored in memory have a chance to emerge.

I like Ned Herrmann's idea that you have to give yourself permission to create. Many people put off things they want to do by saying they will wait until the children are grown, or until they have a studio to work in or until they retire. Herrmann relates it to a deeply felt shyness, a "Creative – Who Me?" mentality that inhibits us from starting to accomplish what we want. He suggests that people create a "Permission to Create" certificate and hang it in a prominent place to remind themselves of the priority of fulfilling their creating goals. He calls this claiming your creative space, which also suggests moving beyond your normal capabilities and bringing disciplined commitment to creating what you want.

## Step Back

You have brought your creation into being. You have succeeded in creating it and have a sense of achievement from your accomplishment. Robert Fritz has another wise piece of advice for us when we embark upon the road to creation. We are separate from our creations. If we identify too strongly with the creations of our organizations or our individual selves, we may not be willing to let go of them. They become "mental models" through which we view the world and we may become blind to changing realities. We may not realize that we now must move and create new and better things more appropriate to current realities. We don't have to think that we have the capability of accomplishing just one single creation. We can create many things. We may have thought we were at the end of the journey, when we realize that we have to embark on a new one.

## Creativity revisited

_Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen._ -Robert Bresson

If you are going to be more creative in your work or personal life, you will have to be flexible, imaginative, curious and unwilling to accept quick answers. Such qualities are not always valued in the working environment. If you have the power to make changes in your current place of work, you will have to do what you can to make it conducive to new creations. If you don't, you may have to make compromises and find your creative outlets elsewhere or leave your current position. In an environment where knowledge and creativity are going to be key elements, there are few options. Focus on creation and your vision of what you want to create. Map your vision of the important components of your life and look at the ways that you hope to achieve it. Now it's time to pick up some more tools.

Brain Waves

  * Decide on a creative project. Map a vision of what it will look like when it is finished.

  * Map where you are now on the project.

  * Map a plan outlining how you will create your project.

  * Write yourself a certificate and claim your creative space. Book a time and place for creating.

  * Just do it!

CHAPTER 13

# Tools of Choice

## How visual tools can show the options

_People only see what they are prepared to see_ -  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Visual maps are wonderful for expressing and charting your ideas. There are additional thinking tools which you may also find useful. Some involve the use of very simple shapes to clarify and sort out aspects of your ideas. These are especially helpful when you are working in small groups. If you have to evaluate several options, there are also ways to weigh them that will help you see what you want to do.

## The Shape of Things to Come

In _The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit_ Terry Richey gives a wealth of ideas for the use of visual tools which can be applied to many decision-making tasks. After you have generated a number of ideas with VisiMap, you may need to simplify the resulting ideas even more. Richey reminds us that basic shapes can be used effectively in this way. Anyone can draw a triangle, circle and square and these simple shapes can really help you see what you think.

## The Triangle

Suppose you have a major decision and you need to break it into smaller chunks. Richey suggests that you try to see five aspects of the decision or problem. For example, suppose that sales on one of your best selling items are down. The problems that might be churning around in your mind cover a whole range of topics:

  * Are my prices too high?

  * Do I need a bigger logo on my store's plastic bags?

  * Should I spend more on advertising even though my revenue is really low?

  * Should I start advertising on the Internet?

  * Are more stores in the neighborhood selling the same product?

Putting these questions inside a triangle in descending order of importance will help put the questions in perspective.

If you have 500 unused plastic bags, the logo question can go to the bottom of the triangle for now. Price goes to the top, because it is the most important element from the customer's point of view. You need to know what the other stores are doing; this step may require some immediate investigation so it goes close to the top. Your advertising decisions will relate to what you learn about the competition. Whether to go the Internet route has to fit into the framework of the advertising budget as a whole. The resulting triangle would probably look something like this:

If you see the priorities differently, you can realign them in your own way. The point is that you are creating a framework to deal with the problem, not dashing off to order the Internet account as a quick fix. A triangle is a simple understandable shape to deal with priorities.

## The Circle

Circles help to remind us that there are many elements in any problem and they have to be identified and given boundaries. Imagine a small volunteer office where the staff lurches from crisis to crisis because no one has a clear understanding of who does what. Mary and Susan both see marketing as their prime responsibility and they are falling all over one another in this area while other tasks are avoided. Eventually their new manager asks them to draw circles containing their areas of responsibility.

Here's how Mary's picture looks:

And here is Susan's:

The manager has drawn her own map, which shows a slightly different perspective:

When the three of them sat down to talk they discovered some interesting things. Mary and Susan noticed that they were dealing with the same people, but they were keeping separate records in individual data bases. Both of them were heavily involved in trying to get new subscribers, but neither was serving the current ones, who became impatient with the current level of service and left. They had entered a no-win situation in which they had to keep looking for a constant stream of new subscribers and donors. They suddenly realized the importance of integrated records and serving their existing clientele. In the end, Mary undertook the recruitment programs and Susan maintained the records and kept in touch with existing members and donors on a regular basis. They farmed out promotional design, an area where costs later dropped significantly because they didn't need to advertise as widely as before.

Putting tasks in circles is an excellent way to see what is included and what is left out. When people feel their work is overlapping, they can show this dramatically by drawing overlapping circles with their names and their tasks. Separating the tasks and redrawing the circles can re-establish the boundaries and give each person a better sense of autonomy.

## Lines and Squares

One of the most common drawing tools is the matrix which allows one to place elements in four squares. It simplifies looking at complex issues by placing the elements in various positions on the grid in the same way as the triangle and it is particularly useful for comparing one's own organization to others. Price, quality, innovation and priority are good candidate for comparisons on a grid:

Putting your organization in the right spot in the matrix and placing your competitors in the appropriate positions can be a useful way of seeing how crowded your market really is. Older organizations fail to watch the growth of the new kid on the block and suddenly find that others are now successfully invading their turf. When this happens, it is time to take a look at the opportunities on the matrix. There may be a position that no one is filling and you can rejuvenate yourself and experience a new birth.

Triangles, circles, lines and squares are excellent tools for small groups who want to simplify issues for group discussion. In other situations though, you may be facing a number of personal choices that all seem worthwhile and you need to clear a path through an enormous jungle of exciting possibilities. There is no shortage of good ideas. You have several and you want a way to evaluate them and let the cream of the creative ideas to rise to the top.

## Decisions, Decisions . . .

Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. -Margaret Mead

Here is an innovative way to use the strengths of VisiMap and the Herrmann Model to full advantage. Ned Herrmann suggested that one of the best ways to reach a sound decision is to walk it around the quadrants. In other words, it is wise to look at an issue before any final decision is made from an analytic, a procedural, a humanistic and a visionary perspective.

These are the four perspectives. You can use these titles as a first level branch for your map:

Now let's open each branch in turn and see how the issue looks when viewed from that perspective. Not every question will be relevant to every issue but some elements on each branch will apply.

Here are the A Quadrant elements to examine:

Now let's look at the issue from the B Quadrant perspective

Here are the issues from the C Quadrant Perspective

And last but not least, here are the D Quadrant Perspectives:

All the quadrants need to be examined in making the decision. If you find yourself skipping over one that you deem to be less important, it may indicate an avoidance in dealing with that particular kind of thinking. Again, that is why it is valuable to have a variety of thinking preferences in any decision making group.

## Problem Identification

_I must keep on trying, just to keep the experiment going until I get tired of it all. Even if the last result is not necessarily the best, I stop when my interest in the problem wanes._ Pablo Picasso

Sometimes before you can reach a decision you have to define a problem more precisely. You can develop a template suitable to your needs on a model something like this one and use it consistently, putting the responses right on the map and using it to clarify what the problem really is.

Templates are useful for ongoing research. In moving into a new geographical area, or embarking on a new facility, census data has special relevance. A model like the following one can be used to record the related data in note format.

When there are a number of options in a decision it can be useful to put advantages and disadvantages of each option right on the map. This will narrow the choices and provide a sounder basis for a final decision.

Visuals and map templates are really valuable when they become working tools in regular use. The visuals and templates that you put to work are limited only by your imagination.

Brain Wave

  * Try each of the models over a period of a few weeks in a relevant situation

CHAPTER 14

#  Thinking Through the Day

## Using Your Time to Full Advantage

_Here's a new day. O Pendulum move slowly!_ -Harold Munro

You're on your way. You understand how your brain works, you have learned visual mapping and are now at home with VisiMap. You have put it to work and developed specific strategies for research, presentations, writing and meetings. You have done your homework in assessing what you want to create, lining up your goals and intended actions with your values and you are eager to get started. You have even refined those choices and looked at the best courses of action. So why is it so hard to accomplish anything?

## A Real Day at the Office

It is eight thirty and you have been up for hours. You showered, made breakfast, made school lunches, drove your youngest child to day care, survived a traffic jam on the freeway, and still managed to hit the office early for a fresh start. You're up and running and ready to go. The first thing to tackle is your desk. The in basket is full to overflowing and you haven't seen the bottom of it in over a week. The out basket is piled high. There are several stacks of documents and files beside you that you have been meaning to deal with for several days. Do they need to be read or filed? You turn the computer on to warm up and find that you have 20 Email messages. Your Outlook calendar informs you that a special emergency meeting has been called today at 9:00 AM. Its purpose is to discuss problems with the new marketing plan and you have input for the meeting buried somewhere under one of those paper piles.

You look for a post-it note to stick to the computer screen to remind you that you have to find the report for the meeting. It must be on the desk somewhere. Your phone's blinking indicator shows that you have voice mail. There are six new messages and four saved ones. It's now 8:45. Your computer screen flashes and a beep accompanies a message that your presence will be required at another meeting called for 2:00 PM to discuss this year's United Way Campaign. Your phone rings. It's your supervisor looking for the report that you promised him three days ago. You promise that you'll get it to him before you leave for the meeting. It's now 8:50 and you realize that you were also asked to pick up the coffee for the meeting. You start frantically looking through the files for your copy of the marketing policy. You decide that it would be easier to reprint it. You look up the file on your computer and issue the print command. You get a message that the printer is out of paper. You ask your assistant, who has just arrived to deal with the paper problem. She starts to cry and blurts out the news that her husband has just left her.

The phone rings again. It's the day care announcing that your child has funny looking spots and is running a fever. It's 8:55 and your meeting is in the next office tower.

It would be nice to think that this scenario is a total exaggeration, but it is closer to real life in the modern office that we would prefer. The speed of the information flow, the multitude of demands, the variety of communication systems, the many tools, the human beings who juggle multiple lives and multiple responsibilities, - it's all there every day and getting more complicated by the minute.

## You Need the Right Tools

_Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities._ -Graham Greene

We'll revisit this crazy start to your day later, but the first thing to observe is that one has to have the right tools for any job. Many of us have a huge collection of them – daily calendars, post it notes, telephone message pads, electronic calculators, pagers, Internet, Outlook, phone pads, fax machines, scratch pads, cork boards, to-do lists, file folders, index cards, steno pads, call waiting, call answering, - and the digital versions – Outlook, PDA. Blackberry - sometimes being used in tandem with the other tools. If you're going to keep track of what you are doing, you are going to have to simplify. Quadrant B types may be able to skip this chapter entirely – though most of you will anxiously hang in to be assured that you are doing it right. Quadrant D people will find it absolutely essential. Quadrant A types will have probably tried every electronic gizmo under the sun, but are still searching for the perfect system. Quadrant C people will wonder what this has to do with the most important thing – people.

## Clean Up Your Desk

_Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement._ -William Morris

Don't laugh. Stop now and take every memo pad, every telephone message pad, every sticky note, every in-basket, every pile of documents, every other item except your computer and your telephone. Place the computer monitor or laptop to one side for now so that you have some empty space immediately in front of you. Get the mouse and the keyboard out of the way. Put all your other paraphernalia in your desk drawer. This includes your tape, your pocket recorder, your calculator, your magnifying glass, your bank stamp, your stapler, your staples and all the other office supplies that you think you use all the time. You actually don't.

Put books in a book case. Group them by subject or file them alphabetically. Put files in filing cabinets. If you have a great deal of current material relating to one or more projects, open a three ring binder on the project, put in divider tabs and file all memos, minutes and other material under appropriate headings. Get every single piece of paper filed somewhere so it will not distract you. Don't panic that you will never find these things again. You're going to create an information-central that will bring everything back together.

Your desk will now hold only the following items, - your desktop or laptop computer and its peripherals, a container with pens, a coffee mug, your telephone if you can't keep it on a nearby table, and your daily planner if you are not using a computer based program. It's also permissible to have one small pad of paper.

Read the next section thoroughly if your planning tools are paper based. If you do your planning on computer, look for the important concepts. Additional suggestions follow later if you use Outlook or a similar system.

## If your planning system is paper based

Every piece of printed paper that you use on a daily basis can actually be in one place. Then you just have to look in the sub-section of the one place to deal with routine matters. That place needs to be like the central image of your visual map. Everything follows from that central focus, creating links to other parts of your office and parts of your life.

The Priority Manager is an integrated planning system which brings everything together under one cover. Its parent company, Priority Management wisely provides training in the use of its system, recognizing that personal organization is not a quick fix but a process. It's one of the best systems I know. Let's look inside their book and see what we find. The first surprise is that the book is big. You were probably hoping for a compact one instead of a nine by twelve binder that looks like a briefcase. Relax. The book has just replaced your briefcase. It will be much lighter when you're finished organizing, than the twenty pounds of file folders you are carrying now. You will have a choice of every single page that you put in the planner. In fact, your book can have a handle or shoulder strap built in if you like, so that it can double as your briefcase. You want your most needed documents where you can find them quickly when you need them. So settle for a big book in which you can file relevant documents. Inside you will find a series of tabs and section dividers. You need a multi-year calendar with major holidays included so that when you are looking ahead, you will avoid planning a major conference on Yom Kippur or Thanksgiving Day. You will note a calendar with months at a glance, daily pages for appointments and activities, and special pages to record long range goals and monthly plans. There are also other sections in the back that seem to make the planning process more complicated rather than more simple. You shudder slightly.

Relax again. What you need to do is find a balance between recording nothing at al, as Quadrant D types are likely to do, and recording everything, no matter how trivial, in Quadrant B mode. Learning personal organization is a process and the following concepts will help you strike the right balance for your particular thinking style.

## The Month is a Unit

You can start with a monthly calendar by recording all your appointments so that you have an overview of your entire month at a glance. It is wise to include both business and personal commitments. You may have multiple roles, but you have only one life and it takes place in real time. If you record the beginning and ending times of meetings and appointments, you become more realistic about the amount of time you really have. It's helpful to carry monthly pages for several months ahead. A yearly summary can note the few engagements planned several months in advance or in the year that follows.

## The Week is a Unit

If you keep track of your tasks in a daybook with removable pages, you don't have to carry a book with daily activity pages for a whole year or several months in advance. About two weeks ahead is generally sufficient. You may think that you are making to-do lists for months ahead, but you aren't. There is an opportunity to look at the longer term in a few minutes. At the end of each week, you can take the old pages out and put them in a holding file so that you can refer to them if you need them. Then you can put a new week of pages in your book.

## The Day is a Unit

At the end of your day, it is good to list your appointments for the following day on the daily calendar, transferring the appropriate information from the monthly page. Don't balk at the small amount of rewriting. It will help you focus and remind you of your meetings and their subject matter. Travel times to and from a meeting need to be included because they take time. Your to-do list can now be written in a conventional list or even in the form of a visual map. You can create one with some appropriate main branches – calls, reports, reading, agenda preparation, mail - and you may find that the tasks relate to one another better and seem less daunting. You can put the names and phone numbers right on the branches. It is helpful to have a branch for incoming messages as well. You will only need to put a word or two on the branch, because you will record the details in another section of the planner.

Now you can see natural groupings of tasks on your list or map that will be completed more effectively if you group comparable activities together. Spend a block of time on memos and letters. Group the phone calls and make them in sequence. You have probably entered the tasks in random order. You can number them in the actual order that you intend to accomplish them.

## Your Time is Finite

_But at my back I always hear Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near._ Andrew Marvell

You may now see that you have five hours of scheduled meetings and five hours of scheduled tasks. You have also made no allowances for incoming phone calls, Emails, faxes, or interruptions from people seeking your help or advice. Relax again. You are clearly not going to accomplish all of this in one day. The big picture simply presents a cornucopia of opportunities that you might accomplish today. You now have some choices to make. For today, do the things that you feel are absolutely necessary to your job or your well being. Postpone the rest, delegate some if you can, or forget them.

## Look at the Big Picture

_We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over._ Aneurin Bevan

When you can take a couple of hours off, it's good to develop some strategies for the longer term, using appropriate planning pages. The Priority Manager includes pages for three years of annual goals and monthly goal pagers. There is merit in carrying strategy pages with you, because you will look at them regularly. The strategy pages suggest that you need a balanced set of goals and suggest that you might group these under headings such as Work, Learning, Physical Exercise, Social Life, Family and Spirituality. In making your decisions as to what you want to create, you may have neglected goals for a vital area such as your health. You need to achieve a balance. What are three major goals for your work? What are some of the things that you want to learn? What is your plan for keeping yourself in physical shape? In a modern workplace where knowledge work often has a negative effect on the body, you are going to have to complement your work day with some physical activity. You are also a social being. What are your dreams for interacting with your community and doing some of the things that you love? What are your specific goals for your family? Finally you are a spiritual being. What actions will you take to develop your own spiritual depth?

You can write these goals quickly and use a pencil with an eraser. The strategy pages suggest that you start with the longer term – at least three years away. You are using a visual mapping perspective by creating a positive big-picture vision on the future. Dare to dream impossible things. Imagine those things successfully completed and see yourself bursting with pleasure at your achievement. You are successfully living the life you want.

Working backwards, you can ask what you have to do in the second year to make the third year happen. If you were dreaming of playing the piano well, for example, you would have spent year two taking lessons and practising. Now move back to year one, -- the year starting right now. What do you have to do in the current year to get you to Year Two?

Now you can move to your planning page for the current month. When you first see a monthly planning page, your impulse is to look ahead for the next thirty one days, -- and you must do so. If a major report is due this month, that is a reality. If it is tax time, you will have to file your return. But as you articulate some business and personal goals, you can try to include at least one step that will bring your long term vision closer to reality. If you haven't started taking piano lessons yet, for instance, make a note to find out where they are offered and what they will cost.

Write all these items in pencil. They are not laws imposed by your employers, your parents, your partner or your children. The items may change. In the same way that you learn how to create individual creations, -- by undertaking specific actions, getting feedback, checking the results against reality and moving on, you are going to undertake the same process with events in your life. In the process of considering what you want to do, you may discover new priorities along the journey. Things that seem to have mattered a great deal now may matter less in the future. Other things will matter more.

## Revisit Your Day

_Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up._ -Walter Benjamin

In the light of your newly discovered priorities and the reality of ten hours of work facing you for today, you have to cut the activity down to size. You have to postpone some of the items; eliminate some entirely, and delegate the tasks to someone else if you're lucky enough to have anyone available. It's worth asking to be excused from the meeting on the grounds that you have more pressing things to do. You need to leave some time for incoming interruptions and do what you can to deal with them quickly when they come.

Use a visual map to chunk similar activities together, and return several phone calls in a string. Read all incoming mail, faxes and Email at set times – the beginning of the morning, the end of the morning or the end of the day. Try to link your most important activities with the period of the day when your energy is highest. Guard this block of time, -- whether it is 15 minutes or several hours – by letting others know that you will not be available to them at this time. Many will stop bothering you and solve their own problems if you safeguard a block of your own time consistently.

## Divide and Conquer

_To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence._ –Joseph Conrad

Other sections of your organizing system will help you find and file what you need. A key feature of the Priority Manager System is a combination directory and filing index from A to Z. You can write the names and addresses of people you need to contact on the directory page under the appropriate letter of the alphabet. The key strength of the system is that the directory pages also serve as an index file for all the other information you need to keep track of.

You will talk regularly with a number of people on an ongoing basis. Such people include persons you report to and persons you supervise. You can set up a page for each one and file it under the appropriate letter of the alphabet. The next time the supervisor calls or enters your office to chat, turn to her page. Write all the notes you make in this one specific place and record the date. You will now have a running record of all the issues and you will be able to see big- picture patterns emerging as to what is important and how things are going.

You may be monitoring ongoing issues and subjects. Set up a page for each. When thoughts occur to you, when information comes via articles or messages, or when memos hit your desk, record the information on the subject page. Write down the ideas and information. Get them out of your head and onto the page where you can deal with them. Write them down so you don't forget them or become distracted by them when you are doing something else. Write things down when you are angry, frustrated or losing focus. That way you can siphon off your destructive energy and reflect on the issues at a calmer time.

There is a section for blank pages in the system, which you refurbish once a week so that you always have some clean pages available for taking notes when you are offsite. There is also an envelope to keep your expenses and receipts. When there is a place for everything and everything is in its place - close to you – you will eliminate all the time you formerly spent looking for things. That can add up to as much as an hour each day.

## Special Projects

_The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress._ –Philip Roth

Nearly all of us have one or two special projects that top our list in priority and take a large amount of our time. The Priority Manager takes this into consideration by providing generic files for all the documents and memos relating to a subject. If you are working on a major project, you will undoubtedly have a number of related files, but it will really speed up things if you keep the most current documents in one section of your daily planner.

Begin your projects by mapping them in VisiMap. Doing so recognizes that you need to use the linking and associative power of your brain to explore the possibilities before you begin. When you have developed a number of alternatives and developed the best possible ideas, you can break the tasks into manageable chunks and list them in logical order. Then you can start to put estimated time frames beside the items and schedule them in the real time that is available.

The Priority Manager™ also has specific sections for meetings, and financial matters, including valuable guidelines so that you can speed up planning and record keeping in these vital areas. Their presence has two functions. They allow you to record information on a timely basis. Their presence in the big book also encourages you to take action when you need to.

## Stop and Go

_For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role._ -Marshall McLuhan

There are three parts to your daily routine - planning, doing and reflecting. At the end of the day, just before it is time to leave, jot a few notes about what you actually accomplished. Have a quick look at the appointments for the following day, so that you won't arrive at the office only to find that you had a meeting somewhere else. Leave the office. Close down the work part of your life and move on to other activities.

There are also three parts to your weekly routine, - tidying up, reflecting and planning. On Friday afternoon, or even on Saturday, take some time to clean out your planning system. Remove the pages of the week just past, carrying forward any items that weren't accomplished during the week. Put a new week of pages into your planner. Record any appointments for the first day of the following week on the daily page. Record any activities that you will undertake on the day you return.

You can flip quickly through the entire book removing the pages that are no longer necessary. Place those in a retention binder or throw them out. The pages relating to people and projects can trigger actions to take in the following week. You can also include phone calls to make and activities that you will undertake. Memos and agendas for upcoming meetings can be moved into the book. That way, when the meeting time arrives, you won't have to worry whether you have the appropriate materials with you. Record your accomplishments for the past week. Now you have a running record of the things that you did. Go home. Enjoy your weekend. You have finished working.

## If your planning system is computer based

While a paper based system still has many advantages for storing information, most of us have gravitated to tools in computer office software such as MS Outlook. It has tremendous strengths – as well as clear pitfalls. Here are some ways to make it work for you.

## The Calendar

One of the beauties of Outlook is the ease in which appointments can be recorded quickly and viewed from a monthly, weekly or daily perspective. There are many options in setting the view. For most people the most effective view is that of the Calendar combined with the task view. In 99 cases out of 100, people set the default view to the Inbox. There are excellent reasons not to do so, which will be covered shortly.

The Calendar should be reviewed from the monthly perspective at least once a month and the weekly perspective at least once a week. Outlook is weak in encouraging reflection and long term planning. You can use VisiMap instead to develop long term goals comparable to those included in the paper planning system. One of the advantages is charting the dreams and then using additional branches to chart how to bring them into reality.

A few people still like to keep appointments in a portable book or PDA. The important issue is consistency. There has to be a default place to schedule appointments. If that place is the Calendar you can print out the information or download it when you are away from your desktop or laptop; but be consistent.

Don't confuse tasks and appointments. Appointments usually involve others and have meetings with beginnings and endings. But if you need to block a specific period of time to work on important projects of your own, one of the strongest actions is to make an appointment with yourself. Make it at a time when it is unlikely to be bumped by another meeting. On a network, you will be shown as busy at the assigned time and you are less likely to be interrupted.

Don't forget to include travel time to and from appointments. If you are driving, this is time not available for other purposes.

## Tasks

Tasks are things that you have to do. Some of them take a minute and some of them may take days, weeks or months to complete. Some are immensely important and some don't matter at all. Some are urgent and some aren't. The two key elements are priority and time.

It's really easy to enter tasks in Outlook. It's far better to have them in the system than in your head. Part of the entering process is to think about how long they will take to complete and when they need to be completed.

The other issue is urgency and importance. If a task is urgent and high priority, it has to be started on today. So the start date is today. Even though Outlook tasks screen starts with the due date, it's the start date that matters. You probably have to make an immediate estimate of how long it will take to complete the task. If it is several hours you have to decide how you will spread those hours over the days of the immediate future.

It would be wonderful if we had only one task of high priority in our lives, - but this is hardly ever the case. So it is likely that you have to spread several high-priority and urgent tasks over several days. But I can almost guarantee that you will accomplish more that you think you can in the allocated time, if you will schedule that time and stick to it. If you do this and there are still too many high priority and urgent tasks on your plate, you can ask your supervisor for assistance in assigning the priority and urgency. Sharing the problem takes some of the anger and panic out of it, and places the responsibility where it should be.

Urgency and importance are not the same thing. Important tasks arise from your long term goals. If you never assign any time to work on important tasks, they will never happen. Keep them on the task list. Do something to accomplish them. At a certain stage they will develop a momentum and life of their own.

Delegate any tasks you can. That is often easier said than done. But there is a tendency to keep a task that we like on our own lists, even though someone else could do it just as successfully. Tasks that hang around for awhile sometimes resolve themselves. At a certain point you either have to do them or forget them. Set the program to show only the tasks for the specific day in the calendar view. That way you know that they are in the system but you don't have to focus on them that day.

If you follow my advice, you will have the same experience that I have nearly every day – ten or fifteen tasks will turn up on my task list in the calendar view. It's clear that I'll never do them all today. Rather than give up, I take a hard look. I often put an estimate of the number of minutes beside the task. You can tweak Outlook to sort the tasks in the order that you decide to do them. (See instructions in the Appendix). Realistically I can accomplish about five to seven hours of tasks on most days, so I normally number that many. You will accomplish fewer on days when you have meetings. You also want to allow some time to deal with incoming tasks and information, - that's essential unless you work for yourself, as I do. That's why you have to review the task list daily to schedule appropriately. What doesn't get done has to be rescheduled.

## Contacts

The contact list is a valuable place to make notes relating to people. If you need to cross- reference people and projects, the category option on the bottom of each record is a handy way to do this.

## The Inbox

Why should you have the default view as the Calendar instead of the Email Inbox when the latter runs your life? For that very reason! If Email runs your life, you are being primarily responsive rather than responsible. Customer service reps frequently tell me that they are there to serve the customer so that's why Email is so important. But which customer? Yesterday's who hasn't been served yet, or the one whose request is just coming in? Email is addictive and overwhelming. It needs discipline to control it. So look at your calendar first. Then check your Email.

There are five things to do with any incoming mail item – answer it, turn it into a task with a date activated, delegate a response to someone else by forwarding it, file it, or delete it.

If you work from a home office, go online and look at your mail on the server. Don't let any junk mail download under any circumstances whether you have good junk mail filters or not. Small businesses are sitting ducks for spam and viruses and you need to be ruthless about eliminating it before you start. Large businesses are saved from this step on the whole, but are still subject to global announcements about holidays and events in other cities or even other countries. Delete as much as possible right away.

If you can answer an Email in three minutes or less, do it. If it takes more than that, turn it into a task and schedule the time that you will deal with it. If you can delegate a response to someone else, do so. Create subdirectories of your inbox with titles that mirror paper files. Unless you need to act on an Email, file it if you think you must keep it. Delete anything remaining. Don't use your Inbox as a task list. If you follow this procedure on a daily basis, your Inbox will be empty – at least once a day. There are few things I can think of that will better reduce stress. Of course more Emails will arrive tomorrow – but would you rather plough through 100 or 50?

De-activate that sound that rings when you have a new Email. As Andy Sherwood, a superb Priority Management™ trainer observes. "I had one of the best secretaries on the planet, but she never came by ringing a little bell whenever a piece of mail arrived at the office." We have been bamboozled by some of these programs to think that we have to respond to new information at the speed of light. We don't – and we can't.

Looking for old messages is greatly enhanced by changing the view. Holding files can be sorted in various ways including by date and by sender. While sorting by date is good for incoming messages, sorting by sender is helpful in searching archival files. You usually know who sent the item you are looking for.

Resist the temptation to read all those interesting newsletters that come your way by scheduling a reading time on a periodic basis – Friday afternoon is good. That way you control the time it takes to read articles, but don't miss out on valuable new information.

In short, - remember that the Inbox is meant to be controlled by you – not to control your every move.

## Time Traps for Thinking Styles

Every thinking style has its strengths and limitations when it comes to managing time. Quadrant A analysts will like all the specific functions of any planning system. It's a logical and systematic way to process information. They will benefit by using their organizer's capability to set time frames so that their fact finding ability will integrate their contribution with the deadlines created by others. They will enjoy the archival nature of the system and be the first to find the precedent in the past project that proves the point they wish to make.

Quadrant B organizers will like the assurance of being able to have all the details close at hand and will be natural users of organizing systems. Their records will be incredibly neat and orderly. The linear sequence that a paper based planner or digital system encourage will help keep them on track and they will be less flustered when they are interrupted. They will also benefit by having visual reminders of the big picture so that they will respond better to the demands of others who are less precise.

Quadrant C types will like the people oriented sections where they can thrive on their ability to build ongoing relationships with people they interact with. An indexed retrieval system will be full of specific references to people and their needs. They will also like the ability to record accomplishments and the ability to integrate their working and personal lives.

Quadrant D people have no difficulty starting things, but will often have trouble finishing them. They will frequently double-book themselves because they love multiple projects and will have many irons in the fire. They will benefit from a daily planner by making sure that they write down the details they are likely to forget. They will enjoy having a system that is simple and easy to manage because they will be the first to adopt the planner with great enthusiasm but also the first to abandon it completely.

## The Crazy Day Revisited

Let's revisit the crazy day that started this chapter. You arrive at your desk. Your planner, your computer and a container for your pens and markers are the only items on your desktop. Your "in and out" baskets are somewhere else and you will review their contents at the end of the day. Documents are put away in their appropriate files – both cabinet based and digital. You turn on your computer and go through the 20 Email messages, immediately deleting those which can be classified as junk mail, and responding to the one urgent message. You file the rest for follow up later in the day, writing a one line reminder to do the follow up in your task list. You note the marketing meeting and check that the report is filed under "M". It is there. You call the coffee shop and ask them to deliver the coffee to the appropriate room.

You move on to your voice mail. You note the messages in your planner. You return one by leaving a quick voice mail message. When you see the reminder re the United Way Meeting, you check your calendar and realize that other things must take priority. You send an Email to the chairman sending your regrets. Your phone rings. It's your supervisor looking for the report that is due. You use the notes in your system to verify that you mutually agreed to a postponement until next week. He checks his own planner and agrees.

Your assistant arrives and you note that she is distressed. She starts to cry and blurts out the news that her husband has just left her. You express sympathy and suggest that you both meet briefly after the marketing meeting to discuss what assistance and support that she will need over the next few days. She looks a bit relieved.

The phone rings. It's the day care announcing that your child has funny looking spots and is running a fever. You call your husband and agree that he will pick the child up because he has no meetings this morning. You call your back-up sitter to alert her that she will be needed and should head for your home. You head for the marketing meeting preoccupied with concern for your child. As you enter, you inform the chairman that you will stay only for the first hour because you have to check up on your child's illness. He looks annoyed.

It's still a bad day. You will remember it later as one of the worst days of the month. At very least, though, you have dealt with the matters at hand and left a paper trail to pick up the pieces when you can. As things improve, you can deal with the items in order of priority. And if you can survive a morning like this, think of how you will soar through the good days.

Brain Waves

  * Take a time management course and adopt an integrated system like the Priority Manager™.

  * Clean your desk.

  * Clean up your filing system.

  * Follow the planning suggestions for a month with precision and review the instructions regularly.

  * Focus on obtaining the results you want.

CHAPTER 15

#  Your Most Important Sale

## Sales Savvy at Work

_People are going to have to create their own lives, their own careers and their own successes. Some people may go kicking and screaming into the new world, but there is only one message. You are in business for yourself._ \- Robert Schaen

All of us spend part of our lives in sales. When you seek a job you have to sell yourself to prospective employers. When you write a proposal, you have to make the appropriate arguments to interest the buyer and stand out from the other proponents. If you reach the interview stage on either a job or a proposal you will have to make a presentation to a group of people looking for ways to distinguish one applicant from another. If you volunteer, you will have to sell others on programs and policies. In many cases you will also find yourself fundraising as a volunteer and that activity shares many qualities with sales. When you see injustice, you will try to stop it. All these activities will draw you into aspects of the selling and persuading process.

## Your First Sale

_Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Act as though it were impossible to fail._ Dorothea Brandt

The most important sale is selling yourself to yourself. Before you begin a course of action, you need to ask whether this is something that you really want. Actions involve choosing and making a deliberate commitment to the venture. Your choice has to respond to your own needs, not to the needs of others close to you. It also has to connect with your dominant thinking style so that you will not feel out of character when you pursue it. You will have to devote a considerable amount of time to the project, whether it is a job search or a capital campaign. Do you have the facts straight? Are you appropriately organized for action? Do you have the energy and patience to pursue the sale? Can you hold the vision of where you want to be in spite of roadblocks along the way? It is worth stepping back from the assignment before you begin to ask these simple but important questions. Use VisiMap to help you here.

The inner talk in our heads can work against us. Negative messages outnumber positive ones by a ratio of about ten to one. Usually they echo some criticism or negative comment we heard as a child from a parent, sibling, teacher or coach. Even emotionally healthy people have negative scripts running, so that your choice to pursue what you want will have to be a deliberate and conscious one. It is well to do a reality check on where you are now in terms of where you want to be, just as you do when you embark upon a new creative venture. That's what making any sale really is.

## You have the Tools

You have spent time learning new tools and understanding your thinking styles. Now you can put them to work in a sales context. You are going to use VisiMap, review the role that your instinctive action mode can play, use the decision matrix to narrow your choices, undertake solid research, prepare a great presentation and deliver it. You can also put your Brain Cell to work in advising you and helping you succeed.

## Getting Work

If my doctor told me I had only six months to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. Isaac Asimov

Looking for work is a job in its own right. Most of us will have several jobs and different careers in a changing workplace, so job seeking is an event in the work process that should be conceived as normal and routine. Of course that's not easy to do when you suddenly find yourself unemployed with a large number of bills on your table. It is easy to panic and become anxious. It's also natural to be angry and feel that life and others have treated you badly. Let these feelings come to the surface and accept them. Then it is time to get on with your job search.

## VisiMap Your Options

Create a VisiMap for your job search using the traditional questions that reporters ask – who, what where, when, why, how, and how much. Who is hiring? There is not a whole lot of sense in pursuing prospects who are not in the hiring mode. What can you bring to the job? Jobs require certain qualifications, skills and knowledge of processes. Experience counts. You need to know whether you bring strengths as a generalist or a specialist and you need to know whether on-the-job training and experience are equivalent to academic degrees. Sometimes they are. Where do you want to work in terms of geography? Your effectiveness will be affected by the length of your commuting time. Your transportation costs will affect your net income. Focusing on geography will help you target your search effectively. When will you be able to start? When are the deadlines for application? Why would a company find you a valuable employee? What do you know that would be useful to them? How will you undertake this job search? What methods will you use to find out what you need to know?

How much do you want or need to earn? You will have to do some hard thinking about your needs. Some people are willing to take a salary reduction to get their foot in the door of a new company. You need to be very honest. Sometimes people take a low entry salary and then blame the employer for not measuring up to their real salary requirements. Others have inflated notions as to what their qualifications should command.

When you have mapped an overview, you can VisiMap your plan of action. You can use the decision tools to check the effectiveness of various methods of attack and focus on those that will bring you success. Put your Brain Cell to work. This supportive group will have an objective view of your strengths and limitations and will also be a source of valuable contacts and suggestions. They can be a sounding board for your ideas and a testing ground for your interview techniques.

Go online and see what you can find out about the company or association you are targeting. Job opportunities are being posted here and you will also find information on growing fields and areas where employees are needed. You can keep abreast of new developments and respond quickly. You can also post your resume in online data banks so that prospective employers can find you more readily.

## VisiMap Your Resumé

No document is more important to your job search than your resumé – and you live in the best time in human history to prepare it effectively. Modern technology allows you to design it with ease, customize it to meet the specific requirements of the job, and transmit it instantly at no cost. All these capabilities come with your computer.

You will have to prepare a boilerplate resume but resist the urge to broadcast it to hundreds of prospects. Use it as a template that you will customize for each potential employer. Develop a resume one page in length. Even if you have a long track record of employment and a wealth of qualifications, it is important to remember what a resume is for  to get you an interview. Accordingly it has to present you as a person who sounds promising and interesting. Leave the details for the interview so that you have something to talk about when you get there.

It is easy to assume that employers know exactly what they are looking for, but often they don't. Most job descriptions seek absolute perfection, but the selection team is usually more realistic. Many employers try to clone themselves in looking for employees. Advertisements written by job search companies will use standard jargon that is hard to mine for actual requirements. Nevertheless, you can bring two sets of skills into play in your response to job announcements – your knowledge of the importance of key words and knowledge of thinking styles and how they relate to actual job requirements.

If a job interests you, make a quick VisiMap of the advertisement and compare it your resume. Are the same key words already present? If the words are different in the advertisement, can you recast your resumé to respond to the job requirements? Be honest but be creative. Mirror the job's description as closely as you can. Limit your revised customized version to two pages at most. Look for clues as to the required thinking modes? Is this a Quadrant A job or a Quadrant C opportunity? Can your Quadrant D skills come into play for this position? If you have a clear image of the person the employer seeks, you will be able to use it to your advantage.

You may want to consider the design of your resumé in terms of font size and typeface. Test your copy by sending it to a friend or colleague and have a look at the result. It goes without saying that spelling and grammar have to be impeccable.

## Preparing for the Interview

_Failure to prepare is preparing to fail._ -Benjamin Franklin

When you receive the call that a company wishes to see you, it is time to spring into action. Call their public relations department and ask for their annual report. Go to the public library and find out all you can about the organization or company. VisiMap what you find and commit it to memory. Imagine yourself as part of the organization and anticipate how you could contribute to it. Ask others what they know. Visit the company's Website. Become an expert on the organization and become excited about the opportunities it provides.

Interview teams are your partners in your job search. Those present are there because of their experience, their knowledge of the job requirements and their ability to judge people. They are taking time off from their regular work to fulfill this assignment and they have to choose from many well qualified applicants. Their own future success may well be influenced by the choices they make. It becomes your job to interview them as much as it is their task to interview you. The team usually has some people on it with whom you will be working in the future. You have a responsibility as well as they do to determine whether there is a good fit.

## Anticipate their questions

Try VisiMapping the questions you anticipate before you go to the interview. By dealing with typical questions in advance, you will respond more intelligently and with more energy because you have already rehearsed these questions in your own mind. Expect to be asked

  * What qualities and skills you will bring to the job

  * Why you are interested in working there

  * To summarize past successes

  * To describe problems you have dealt with

  * What your career goals are

  * To outline your management style

  * Whether you can work long hours

  * Whether you have hired or fired anyone

  * Your anticipated salary

Do your homework on the last point by consulting professional journals or recent surveys. Ask others in your professional network what is reasonable. You may want to name a range that would be acceptable to you or turn the question back to the interviewer.

## Ask Questions Too

One area where many job applicants fall down is in developing questions to ask. Interviewing is a two way street. Even if you are desperate to find a job, it has to be one that will suit and fulfill you. Asking intelligent questions gives you a chance to obtain information as well as a chance to display your skills. Avoid the obvious questions about overtime and salary which will merely make you seem anxious. VisiMap key areas in advance so that you will be equipped to inquire about:

  * Key issues facing the organization

  * Reporting structures

  * The reason for the vacancy

  * On-the-job training

  * Performance reviews

  * Growth and opportunities

  * Current technology

The replies to these questions will give you something to build upon and it will also give you a chance to size up the people you will be working with. You may even be able to guess at their thinking styles from their replies. If you are dominant in Quadrant C, you will want to know whether this group is overbalanced in Quadrant A or in any other mode. If your future boss is a Quadrant B, you may have a problem working for this person if your dominant style is in Quadrant D. You will have only intimations of the realities of the thinking styles, but they may be strong enough to let you know if there would be good fit. Sometimes the purpose of an interview is to learn that you would not be a suitable person to fill this position. It is far better to learn this at the interview stage than to be totally unhappy in a job some months later.

## Following up

Immediately following an interview, get to the nearest coffee shop and make a quick visual map of everything you remember from the interview. Use the contents to write a brief thank you letter and send it to the contact person within 24 hours. Send other communications too. Usually interviews take several days and you want to keep your name in the running. You can use your interview summary visual map to focus on other pieces of information that might support your case. You may know of articles that relate to topics you have discussed. You may have other evidence of qualifications and credentials that it would be useful for the employer to know. You will have to balance being overly eager with being persistent, but employers will normally view your later mailings as expressions of interest and view them positively.

## Proposal Writing

_Writing is nothing more than a guided dream._ \- Jorge Luis Borges

VisiMap can be an invaluable tool when you are writing contract proposals. You can map the Request for Proposal and quickly discover how the client wants to structure the submission. Frequently you can provide a superior structure to that of the client because of your knowledge and experience, but it will be very important to see the connections between your proposal structure and theirs. Usually Requests for Proposals have gone through a long stage of development and the client has a large stake in doing the job in a certain way. Understanding the key words and using them effectively will take you a long way in writing your response. You can use the original VisiMap as a checklist to ensure that you have responded to every element of the original proposal. You can also remember that the world is a composite whole brain. Even though the selection committee may be over-balanced in a particular quadrant, they will still have all the characteristics present in some degree in every member of the group. Plan to relate to them all.

## Making a Presentation

VisiMap can also help you focus the presentation you need to make if you have been short listed and been granted an interview. Nearly any consultant could tell stories of being asked to make a 20 minute oral presentation and entering the room only to be told that things are running late and the available time is now 10 minutes. If you have made a VisiMap of your presentation, you can cover it in 10 minutes or 30 minutes. A VisiMap will be a welcome contrast to the PowerPoint presentations that are so boring for selection teams because they all look exactly the same. You can bring a VisiMap prepared in advance and open it branch by branch in the course of the presentation.

## Volunteer VisiMapping

If you are active in a volunteer organization, use VisiMap for planning and presentations. You don't even need to explain what it is. Just do it. Most people will instinctively understand that it is a structuring tool and will thank you for it. Anything that helps focus on issues and key points will speed the process of planning and presenting. If you have to explain new programs or deal with several important matters, a visual map will help people see what is at issue and deal with it.

Volunteering usually involves raising money and raising money involves strategy. The simple 5-W pattern of Who What Where When and Why can be used time and again to look at potential leadership, to organize structures, to segment markets and to record plans as they develop. Use VisiMap as well to take the endless minutes that volunteer groups generate. VisiMap a summary of the important points and those that require action. File the rest.

## Do What's Right

Volunteer organizations get involved in various causes and political issues. These are also arenas where visual mapping can play a valuable role. You can use VisiMap to illustrate key aspects of an issue. You can use visual mapping or simple shape diagrams to record feedback and input quickly so that people can see that they are being heard. Visual maps can record feelings as well as facts. When feelings run high, the maps can show that issues are complex and multi-faceted. They encourage the generation of multiple scenarios rather than the first available one. They provide an ongoing record of where people are and where they are going. They have particular advantages in multicultural settings where symbols may speak more clearly than words. Selling what is important to you is another important use of visual mapping in an increasingly complex world that cries for simplicity and understanding.

Brain Waves

  * VisiMap your ideal job.

  * VisiMap the key aspects of your thinking style

  * Keep these VisiMaps as reference tools for the next time you look for work.

  * VisiMap an actual job advertisement for a position that has some appeal. Try writing an application and resumé based on it even if you are not looking for a job now.

CHAPTER 16

#  Your Whole Brained Computer

## How your Personal Computer can Help You Think

_To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer._ -Anonymous

Computers are continually getting smarter. They can correct your spelling, make complicated mathematical calculations at lightning speed, design your newsletter, beat you at chess, balance your bank statement and complete a thousand other tasks that in the past were accomplished slowly and painstakingly by hard working people. But it is important to remember that everything computers can do has been carefully concocted by an individual human brain. Your own brain is infinitely more complex than the most powerful computer in existence.

## A New Language for Thinking

_Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably._ -Bertold Brecht

In _The Fifth Language_ _, Learning a Living in the Computer Age_ , Robert Logan explored the relationship between learning tools and the way we think and process information. He compares the use of computers to a new language which incorporates other kinds of languages we have used throughout history, -- the language of speech, the language of writing, the language of mathematics, and the language of science. Computing is the fifth language.

Like other languages, computing has its own vocabulary and grammatical rules. If you entered the PC world early in the eighties, you would have learned some odd commands to perform simple tasks. Learning a software application was exactly like learning a foreign language with few comparisons to other languages you knew. People didn't generally say things like "Ctrl -G" on a regular basis. But eventually you got it. You suddenly exploded into new realms of competence and could perform all sorts of tasks with amazing speed.

## Visual Mapping is a Language

Margaret Boden has some useful observations that can help us understand the importance of the relationship between our ideas and the method that we use to record them. In her thought provoking book, _The Creative Mind_ , she notes:

In general, problem solving is critically affected by the representation used by the problem solver. . . . Some of the most important human creations have been new representational systems. These include Arabic numerals, chemical formula, or the staves, minims and crochets used by musicians. . . . As well as recording new ideas for posterity, such languages may make them possible in the first place. For a written language can help us explore the implications of the ideas it represents.

It may be presumptuous to call visual mapping a sixth language, but its use will take you beyond mere knowledge and point you in the direction of a new kind of wisdom. In a world where information is increasing at unprecedented speeds, - Kevin Kelly notes that two Berkeley economists estimated that the increase was 66% per year for the years 2000-2003, - you are going to have to become highly selective in choosing what you really want to know.

## Learning Never Ends

_A man should ever . . . be ready booted to take his journey._ -Michel de Montaigne

One of the side benefits of learning any software program is the discovery that you really _can_ learn something new. For some adults it feels like learning to ride a bicycle with many false starts and scraped knees. It's disconcerting to read messages that tell you that you have just made a fatal error. Your previous education isn't totally irrelevant, but it has to be seen from a new perspective. The necessity to enter the world of computers has broken the paradigm that education ends when you leave school. Now, as Robert Logan says, we are learning a living. The learning style of the computer is exploratory and collaborative in contrast to the authoritarian style of the classroom. Unlike your inflexible math teacher or the English teacher hung up on grammar exercises, the computer world provides a superb learning environment.

## Visual Mapping on Your Computer

When you make a visual map by hand, you start with a subject, create a central image, put down an initial level of branches and add more branches. If you are using visual mapping to full advantage, you are also working in colour and adding symbols and illustrations as you go. The result is a creation that is entirely personal and individual. If it's a good hand drawn visual map, you will probably save it in a notebook along with others on related subjects. From time to time, you may even take it out and review it, or combine several maps to consolidate what you know.

When you VisiMap, you go through the identical process. What the computer can do is enhance several elements of the process because of its speed and capacity. It can store maps quickly and retrieve them at lightning speed. You gain in the ability to manipulate the information, transmit it and share it easily to others.

## Move your ideas around

_Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better._ -Richard Hooker

Do you wish you had presented the points on a map in a different order? Ask the computer to rearrange the order of the branches. It can do so with ease. When the main branches move, all the related branches move automatically. Would the map look better if it filled the whole page? Ask the computer to resize it for you. You can print it landscape or portrait orientation.

## Be an Instant Leonardo

_Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist._ -José Ortega de Gassett

One of the benefits of visual mapping is its emphasis on precision. When you try to draw something and discover your drawing isn't accurate, you start to look more closely at how things really look. Drawing is great for this and you can scan your own drawing into a computer image and use it. Photos are great too. You can also turn to computer clip art, as I have done in the maps throughout this book. You can use existing libraries of images to enhance your map with a few quick clicks. Use your imagination and sense of humor to make good choices. Colour your branches with a click on the palette. Add a contrasting background colour to the branch with a right click to give it additional interest and dimension.

## Share the Wealth

Want to distribute your VisiMap to other members of your team? Print it or convert it to an easily transmittable format like JPG, GIF or HTML. Team members can leave a planning session with their own individual copies of a map to serve as a record to trigger the subjects which were discussed. The VisiMap becomes the minutes of the meeting.

## Show it Off

Want to display a VisiMap so that a team can view it with ease? Project it so that everyone can see it. Modify the map as the discussion proceeds. Distribute the amended version.

## Become an Exporter

If you want to use your VisiMap as an illustration in a report or a book, you can quickly copy it from its own program to another application, including the Web. By turning it into a graphic, its size and shape can be adjusted to fit the new format, because the computer treats map as a single entity or object. With HTML export you have an usable interface with links to the branches in an instant.

## Send it into space

Want to communicate with someone in another office or another country? Send your VisiMap via Email. Maps can be transmitted over the Internet and you can discuss their contents with someone across the room or across the world. You can also save them in HTML format and post them as Web pages without having to learn programming language.

## Create Links and Highlights

You can show the importance of some of the ideas by changing the typeface of certain words. You can also use colour to highlight a particular section of a map when you want to emphasize it. You can turn levels or branches on and off. This feature is especially useful in making reports or presentations where you want the participants or readers to focus on a particular section. It helps everyone know where you are at a given time. A computer map permits you to display or hide levels of the map. If you are trying to present the big picture, you may wish to show only the first level branches. As understanding of the main issues becomes clearer, you can show more of the detail. You can also create links to new maps or to other documents because the computer allows any point on the map to become a new centre. You can then follow the links back to the point from which you started.

## Flesh it Out

Your VisiMap is an outline of your ideas but you may now need to turn them into a conventional report, complete with all those sub headings so dearly loved by the Quadrant A and B people. You have already created a hierarchical structure when you drew your branches and expanded them to several levels. The computer has been quietly noting this fact behind the scene. If you want to start writing a full report, you can turn on an editing screen and a blank space appears. Now you can write the appropriate text to expand upon your heading.

## It's All Organized

So far we have been treating your VisiMap primarily as a graphic entity. But it has been two entities all along – both a graphic picture of your ideas and an old fashioned outline in the usual hierarchical and linear mode so beloved by those in Quadrant A and B. If you want to see a traditional version, you can print the outline either on the screen or on paper. Here's a sample map displayed graphically. I have written some text under the main headings and included a couple of sub branch headings without added text just to demonstrate how this works.

Here's how it will look as an outline exported to Word or Rich Text formats in one keystroke. (The exported version for Word includes both the graphic and an index which I have removed after export; the RTF version includes the map, which was also deleted.) Note what happens to the sub-branches; the numerical hierarchy of the outline is created automatically for you. Your report has all the sections in proper order and you are spared the task of creating the appropriate headings and subheadings. The software has done it for you. The text version follows.

*****

Why Use VisiMap?

Here is a chance to see VisiMap 4 at work. You are using it right now as you navigate this page and looking at a map produced to explain its benefits in less than five minutes. Each branch is live and will tell you more.

1. Boost Creativity

Your brain works to link ideas. Time tested work by Nobel Prize winners has proven that one idea quickly suggests another one. So getting them down as fast as possible is the best way to work. When you start from the big idea or problem, you can put them on the page immediately.

1.1 Work of Sperry and Ornstein

(Example shows the subtext numbering system created automatically)

1.2 A Testimonial from a Dedicated User

2. Get Ideas Down Fast

It's easy for you to get ideas down as soon as they come to you - or record ideas coming from a group at a rapid pace. A word or a phrase will summarize the point you are making and you can move on to the next one.

3. See the Big Picture

VisiMap 4 is a great way to see the big picture all on one page. You can see how the ideas relate and how they affect each other. You also start to see which are the main points and which are sub-sets.

4. Organize Faster

It will become clear when you see a bunch of ideas that some are more important than others. You can rearrange or reorder them quickly, - and add additional points or notes as you go.

5. Add the Details

Once you see the main points, you can expand them - either graphically by starting new branches, or in note form under each heading. And you can enhance the graphic map with any other form you like.

6. Export with Ease

Let's face it. You and others work in a number of programs. You can export to Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and a number of others with the click of a button - and share your ideas seamlessly. And if you want to share the map, you can also provide others with a free viewer to look at it.

7. Save Time

Time is of the essence when you have great ideas - the faster you get them down, the more of them you can create. And have even more time to refine and organize them.

8. Save Money

The right tool for the job needs to be a quality one. If you want to pay up to $349 US for this kind of program, that's fine. But if you prefer a quality program for as little as $35.00 US including all the help and support you need, you've come to the right place.

*****

You can also use an HTML export to advantage. It comes with live links already built in to the centre and the branches. You can also use the drop down menu that has automatically been created. For an example of how this works you can see a map created by this method in the next chapter.

## Be subversive

VisiMap allows you to communicate with the graphically hip and the graphically challenged. If you are strong in Quadrant D and like to plan in graphic mode to show things – or if you like to use VisiMap because the ideas come more quickly, you can do so and still present the traditional hierarchical report that those in Quadrants A and B will want. They'll be surprised at how orderly and well organized you have become.

Computer generated visual maps look more professional to those who find hand drawn maps childish in appearance. While you might be tempted to argue that more playfulness is exactly what such people need, you may lose the argument. Rather than give up all the benefits of visual mapping, you can gain some of them through the use of VisiMap and gradually educate such nay-sayers as to the advantages of a more graphic approach. But they can also use the outline format from the beginning if that is what they prefer; they can also communicate with their more graphic-friendly colleagues. It's a win-win approach.

I regard VisiMap indispensable as a thinking and planning tool. I find that it most fully approximates traditional visual mapping precepts because of its comprehensive branching capability and its incorporation of colour and illustration. I can develop highly complicated maps with several levels of branches and create several pages of text under each heading. As I work, the program allows me to see each trigger point, fill in the necessary documentation, and then move to the next level. The ability to export in both text and graphic format is a real advantage and the HTML capability is wonderful.

## A Visual Mapping Perspective

If our tools change the way we think, visual mapping is an entry into the much larger framework of thought that has unfolded before our very eyes. In the same way that learning to print was a step on the way to learning to write, visual mapping can be a way to understand what is going on in the new knowledge based world and the way that information is structured and connected. We are no longer passively accepting the information others provide us with, but are proactively seeking it on our own. The Net is quickly becoming the chief tool for the dissemination of and search for information. There are two key elements of the Internet that relate to a visual mapping perspective.

The first is the role of hypertext, which most people who use computers first encountered as the underlined words of the Help Screens in many software applications. It is also the mainstay of the Web which allows us to move seamlessly from computer server to computer server, and to make immediate connections. We can now make and document instant links right on our maps between information located in different places and created by different persons. Journeys can start with a central focus, but the individual explorer ultimately determines the path when she comes to hypertext forks in the road. Exploring knowledge will become a much more individual pursuit in which the learner proactively directs the course of the learning.

The result will be a more involved learner. You won't explore information via computer because you have to. You do so because you want to. There will be more choices to make, more adventures to take, more questions to ask, more mysteries to explore. Like Tennyson's Ulysses you will

Follow knowledge like a sinking star

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought

The new capability for individual learning has profound implications for education and training. Teachers become coaches and mentors rather than fountains of knowledge. Learners accommodate their own thinking preferences and personal styles. As a former teacher, I hope that the current educational infrastructure will undergo significant change in the next decade as improved hardware and software move into the learning environment and a new computer literate generation of educators takes the reins. But it won't happen overnight. Too many learners continue to be trapped in a learning environment that responds to the thinking styles of their teachers instead of the styles that relate to their own preferences.

The second key point is a realization that learning never ends. Two generations ago, dedicated study in a particular discipline resulted in an academic degree or a trade certificate that provided enough knowledge for an entire working life. The assumption was that one could spend the next thirty or forty years reaping the rewards of a single learning investment. Some loved their work, while others endured it, but the two groups had one thing in common, job security.

We will never experience that situation again. Over the past three decades teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers and managers have discovered that they are not needed or wanted. Young people discover that the jobs they thought they were preparing for no longer exist. We are adjusting to the reality now that the old certainties are gone. At the same time, new opportunities are emerging. A visual mapping perspective reminds us that our ability to make links and connections, to explore and to make connections is infinite. Learning will not be confined to the beginning of our lives but will be a part of the whole.

Learning can't be segregated from working, but is a part of the ongoing working process. Learning can't be based on a common curriculum, because there is no curriculum big enough to contain all that we need to know. Learning can no longer depend on encounters with a few experts in one physical location, but depends on many persons linked by networks of learning that defy boundaries of space and time.

There are costs to living in such a world. Those who have gained a sense of identity chiefly through their jobs and positions are in for a rough ride. Those who liked the security of being told what to think find themselves adrift. Those who think they know it all are in for a big surprise. But those who approach the new world with a thirst for knowledge, a spirit of adventure, and a sense of opportunity will have a marvelous time. Learning can be ongoing, expansive, broadening, enriching, building,  not just a storehouse of facts but a growing understanding and deepening of the full range of human experience. Visual mapping, a metaphor for the unlimited power of the brain, reminds us of the explorer Ulysses whose goal was "to search, to seek, to find and not to yield" and like the poet Tennyson speaking for him, to realize that there are

So many worlds, so much to do,

So little done, such things to be.

Brain Waves:

  * Start using your computer as a thinking tool. Expand your knowledge beyond word processing, data bases, and spreadsheets

  * Use VisiMap for a specific learning project in an area unfamiliar to you.

  * Create a report in graphic form first. Then write the underlying text.

  * Present your report in both formats. See how people react.

CHAPTER 17

# Visual Mapping at Work

In this chapter, I'd like to share some of my personal work experiences as a consultant and trainer in using VisiMap. The purpose is not to urge you to adopt or mimic my own practice, but to stimulate you in learning to develop or adapt similar ideas and make them your own.

## Writing

_Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease._ –Peter Abelard

A writing project like this book is the first example. I started the first edition several years ago with an outline of its chapters, outlining learning concepts and processes that I wished to share with clients and customers. It was easy to get the chapter headings down in random order and to see the total structure on one page. It was immediately evident from the first look that the chapters didn't flow properly, and I reordered the items to create a more logical framework. I followed the same pattern in writing the content of the individual chapters. Because I knew the specifics of where I wanted to go in some cases better than in others, I was able to work on the easier chapters quickly and gained momentum as I went. The first and last chapters were written after the others were completed when the experience of writing gave me the knowledge of how I wanted to start and finish.

As a footnote, the first maps were created in an earlier version of VisiMap. In this updated and revised version, I have enjoyed toggling between MS Office Clip Art, copying appropriate images and quickly pasting them into the branches. I chose clip art for consistency but I could also have used a wide range of photos from personal or web based sources.

## Issue Identification

_Every moment in planning saves three or four in execution._ -Crawford Greenwalt

My motivation for moving to visual mapping in the first place came from working with a client that was developing plans for a major arts facility in a large Canadian city. Like many groups of local citizens who give their time to such projects, the volunteer board was very focused on the building design and had not dealt in any depth with the proposed facility's governance, operations, programming or operating revenues and costs. As consultants we were trying to make the case that if they proceeded with the proposed design, certain realities would follow.

I remember thinking, "If only there were a way to demonstrate that if you change one thing, it is going to have an impact on every other element; that information should be readily visible on one page." My obsession with the issue must have hit home, because one of my sons came up with a Christmas gift of a book on visual mapping. The rest was history. In subsequent consultations with other clients we were able to come up with this kind of map to remind the planning group of multiple implications of design changes. The map shows some key options on the sub-branches; choices have to be made in each case. The main branches serve as a reminder of the inter-relatedness of the various components. Every element affects every other one and such impacts can be positive or negative.

For example, the original design included a concert hall, but no backstage facilities were on the drawings. This fact would have excluded the presentation of opera, for example, but the assumption was that the local opera company would be a major participant and one volunteer thought that was the reason she should be on the Board. If the facility used all its space to be a presenter of entertainment there would be no possibility of rentals. If rentals were allowed, different types of renters would require different rental rates. Programming changes would have considerable impact on both revenue and expense budgets. In the end the project was vastly reconceived at considerable expense. Had some issues been identified from the beginning, there would have been huge savings of both time and money.

## Sourcing Information

_Searching is half the fun: Life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party._ –Jimmy Buffett

In research studies, I frequently have to obtain research from a number of neighbouring communities. I find it helpful to add web links and contact information to a working map as I research a topic. By colour coding the map as I go I can indicate persons to be contacted, persons interviewed and reports for the municipality written up. The following model illustrates such a use. For the first branch I dragged the site name to the map; for the second one, I pasted the information. In both cases the links are live and I can go to them instantly after looking them up only once. The green branches represent interviews completed and written up. The blue branch contacts have not yet been made and I am starting on one of them. The red branch represents an urgency based on the availability of the interviewee.

## Monitoring information sources

Quick links to regularly used sources of information also save time. These can be used for newspapers, trade journals and newsgroups. If I am researching a particular subject, I can cut and paste copy in the notes section of VisiMap and also create additional hyperlinks to relevant information.

## Project Planning Versus Project Management

VisiMap is very helpful in project planning and strategy formation. These tasks depend on seeing the Quadrant B big picture and a visual mapping program helps one define it. The following map reminds me of the differences between conceiving a project and implementing the plan.

Once a strategy is formed or a project is planned, the implementation may benefit from the use of dedicated project management software such as MS Project or Project KickStart. These programs remind one of the detailed Quadrant B tasks that are necessary to complete the project including resources and timing. The quick export capability of VisiMap to project management software makes this transition simple and effective.

## Comparative Analysis

As a child my family's menu consisted of two choices: take it, or leave it. Buddy Hackett

In many cases we have to choose between two alternative courses of action. Several different factors come into play. Putting the factors on the map and giving each a numerical weighting is a quick way of seeing where the balance lies. Not all factors are equally important. In such cases it is possible to assign a higher numerical weight to one branch than another, and divide the total between the two branches. In the following example, the launch of a new product with different marketing strategies, it would appear that Option A is the preferable one but the score is so close that one might want to go back over the options carefully.

Such an approach could also be used in negotiations. Much of the time is spent in assigning the various weighting of the priorities, but at least both parties are working from the same page.

## Re-alignment

Many organizations develop sub committees that often assume lives of their own; these often bear little relationship to current needs or realities. A committee structure in organization X illustrated below had grown unwieldy over the years. It had very few volunteers and they were going to too many meetings. In spite of a good deal of overlap in meeting personnel there were many cases where the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. Events were randomly scheduled and crisis management was common. The existing committee structure looked something like this:

VisiMap was used in a strategic planning session to identify key priorities. These are illustrated as first level branches on the following map. Committee structures were subsequently aligned to support the new priorities. From then on there was a clearer distinction in how the committee structure related to the priorities. The primary branches became the new committees. The sub branches were regrouped. In some cases these groups became sub-committees reporting to a more senior committee. In other cases they operated more like projects or task forces because their responsibilities were time limited.

## Website Creation

Because a website is a hierarchical branching structure emanating from a centre, VisiMap is a great help in creating a sound pathway. It can be used to advantage as a planning tool to build the site in a logical pattern that makes sense to the end user. A map itself can be an interface that sends the user in the direction she wishes to go. The following map is part of my own company Dynamic Thinking website, www.dynamicthinking.com, and its links sends visitors off in directions of their choice. In each case I have the option of using the automatic link to text on the same page or to link the individual branches to other pages in the website. This is the example of website creation referred to in Chapter 16.

## Event Planning

Planning of several major conferences and workshops has been greatly aided by the use of visual mapping. As well as a big picture, there are always a myriad of details to address and it is easy to lose sight of them, as planning proceeds. All of the requirements can be placed on the map. If the base map becomes too cluttered, separate maps can be linked to the main one and it is easy to move among the network of maps created. I also have found colour coding tasks helpful – using different colour schemes to indicate complete and incomplete tasks and highlight urgent ones.

This model shows something of the complexity and inter-relationships among the components of a three day conference. Such templates are constant reminders of the details that have to be managed, often over a year or more. If an organization has an annual conference, one may have two or three such maps in play at the same time.

## Promoting VisiMap at Work

A survey of 500 users of visual map users was recently published by Chuck Frey on his website, _Innovation Tools_. (You can find out more on his blog at http:// mindmapping.typepad.com.) Among the responses were several issues relating to why respondents perceived that visual mapping is a hard sell at work. The majority cited lack of knowledge of the technique of visual mapping and lack of acceptance by those other than the visually oriented.

If you would like to see visual mapping increase in your own workplace, you need to remember that the software is a tool rather than an end in itself. It is useful to remind others that the concept is based on a solid understanding of how the brain itself uses and processes information. It is not a solution to every task by any means, but is particularly useful in developing and organizing ideas and can be adapted to several of the functions outlined in this book.

While originally distribution of maps was a challenge because of the necessity of providing the respondent with viewer software, the ease of export in commonly used formats like JPG, GIF or HTML has largely eliminated this problem. Those who prefer text based outlines can also receive results in that format and the ability to move from graphics to text is a key advantage. It also needs to be said that any means of stimulating right brain quadrant D thinking is important in a business world where education has largely focused on the more left brain A and B quadrants.

There is no doubt that change in ways of working nearly always provokes lack of acceptance and even hostility. But those who are willing to devote a small amount of time to learning such ways benefit in the end. VisiMap is the secret weapon of many individuals and teams in the work environment.
CHAPTER 18

# VisiMap at Home

By now, perhaps only the most obsessive of the B Quadrant types are still looking for more ways to use VisiMap. There are others among you who probably recognize that you will never gain commitment from others to use it at work. You might even be in the pleasant situation of not having to work for others any longer, but still interested in using a program that makes thinking and organizing more enjoyable. In this chapter we will move from the more mundane to the more serious.

## Shopping

_The busier you are the more you can accomplish._ -B. J. Adams

Everyone has to do shopping and errands and most of us make lists. The trouble with doing so is the disconnect between what we need and where it is located in the store. If you make a grocery list as you run out of items you will do so at random. If you are consulting recipes, you can list the ingredients in order, but you can be sure that chicken legs and curry powder will not be in the same section of the supermarket. Errands can also take you all over town if you don't have a mechanism to plan where you are going.

This kind of shopping list will direct you to the appropriate section and save you time when you get to the store. The first level of branch can be retained as a template.

The trick here is to order the branches to fit the pattern of your local market. If you do this and print out the map consistently, you will be able to navigate the store much more quickly and be focused on buying only the items on the map. Organizing errands in a similar fashion will also save you time and money.

## Trip Planning

_Make voyages! Attempt them... there's nothing else._ –Tennesee Williams

Vacation and other travel require organizing a number of necessary steps. So does moving house. If you plan well in advance you will find it much easier to enjoy the trip. There are several things to consider. Here is a very elementary template that could be used for both personal and business travel.

## Gift Options

_In the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness._ –Erick Fromm

Holidays bring the added responsibility of buying gifts for family and friends. Good ideas come to mind randomly but most of us don't actually do our shopping much in advance. A map like this one could record suggestions as they come to mind.

## The Kids

_Begin to make the kind of investment of personal time which will assure that those who come after us will live as well._ – Charles W. Bray III

If you have several children, keeping track of their activities and schedules can be complicated. You can use VisiMap to remind you of ongoing commitments, materials, and chores connected with each one. Usually they seem random and individual until you put them down and notice some common elements. In the following example you might be able to combine some of the shopping tasks or get on the phone while Amy is in the dentist's chair. You can even export the task list in MS Outlook if they need to be scheduled more precisely.

Visual mapping is also something that you can teach your children to do. I have been hired by a couple of families to teach their children how to make notes and focus their attention in school. I have also taught their teachers on occasion. In at least one case where a young boy was having serious concentration problems, the use of visual mapping calmed his hyperactivity and allowed him to participate actively in his learning rather than sitting passively. His marks improved and his teacher was very supportive of his new method of working because it kept him from distracting other students as well as her.

VisiMap is a useful study tool for children as well as for adults. It is also highly beneficial in the development of school projects as an aid to organization and structure. The previous chapter, _Be a Quick Study_ can apply to older children and teens to good advantage.

## Locator maps

_Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it's not all mixed up._ -A. A. Milne

One of the valuable gifts my father gave to me at the time of his death was documentation that was incredibly well organized. We all have documents that may have to be quickly accessed both during our own lives and at the end of them. Such a map can link to actual documents on your computer, include information in the map notes, or reference other places where they are kept. We don't like to anticipate that we will require such information, but at some point many of us will have to handle it for someone else; and ultimately someone will have to handle it for us. Needless to say, some or all of the information portrayed here will be required.

## Investment Planning

_My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's._ –Oscar Wilde

Many financial advisors have used visual mapping templates to help their clients understand their own investment goals. There is no reason why individuals can't use them as well. If you work with a financial advisor, a review of your goals can save time before you go to the meeting. If you handle your own financial affairs, a template something like this one can also help you navigate the route.

## The Total Life To Do List

David Allen in his entertaining and helpful book, _Getting Things Done_ _,_ suggests that you are totally overwhelmed you need to sit down and write every single thing that you ever have to do in your entire life – to get it out of your head. If you want to try it, you can do so under categories like the ones on the next map or you can just start listing them at random. It's a relief to get them down. If you take this seriously your map will be huge, but you will see some relationships between the tasks and you can regroup them in categories.

VisiMap allows you to transfer map content into MS Outlook Tasks. If your whole life is in chaos and you don't have a single entry in the Task section, this might be a good thing to do. Outlook is useful in its ability to set time and importance of tasks as well as to record recurring ones. A small caveat is needed regarding doing this too often. When you export the tasks on a map all of them appear in Outlook. If some of them are already languishing there unfinished you will see them twice. So it might be wise to clean out your task list every month or two and start fresh. If a task has been there for months, you really do have to decide whether you are ever going to do it or not. You will also want to update your map before you run the export. Some Quadrant C and D types will find this way of documenting tasks helpful because of its ability to see a bigger picture and to keep the human element front and centre. It is also a way to group tasks by type, which usually speeds up their execution. A and B Quadrant Types will probably throw up their hands at such a suggestion, because their task lists are already in perfect order with everything accounted for and completed on time. Don't you wish!

## Personal goals

_You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement._ –Woodrow Wilson

While some of the above uses may seem obsessively compulsive, the goals we construct for our lives are not. Too many of us live from day to day, overwhelmed by our workloads and responsibilities. Often it is only after times of crisis that we reflect on what really matters. Our society does not encourage such reflection. But throughout history though, such stepping back from the immediate on occasion has always been seen as a necessary step to real maturity and wisdom, both for individuals and for organizations.

Mission statements for organizations are common, if superficial in too many instances. To be a leading provider of x or y hardly inspires either the employees or the investors. But good mission statements do have a positive effect. They are equally valuable for individuals. To create one involves both one's values and areas of one's life.

Priority Management™ suggests the following areas as worthy of consideration for long term goals. Keeping them in some kind of equilibrium means walking a tightrope. But they are worth coming back to if we are going to take some responsibility toward the direction of our personal path.

The order of importance of these six elements will vary for each individual and it may also change over time as circumstances and responsibilities themselves change. The balance we strike will be very much our own and will be a subject for further reflection in the final chapter.

CHAPTER 19

# A Circle of Quietness

## The Journey

_Every aspect of what happens to us must become part of a learning experience._ -Diane Mariechild

How our world has changed in this new millennium. As we approached it with both excitement and anxiety in the late nineties, it was hard to imagine the future that has now become the present. Recently I found it highly enlightening to review an article imagining future scenarios originally published in Wired Magazine in 1994. Twelve years later it is surprisingly prescient.

The first scenario highlights a world linked more by technology than geographic boundaries. The second posits the pre-eminence of consumers, with China on the ascendancy. The third notes the rise of environmental concerns and the rise of Islam. The last describes the development of city states and terrorist gangs. Welcome to our world. While none of the scenarios are completely accurate, all of them contain elements of the truth and omit others that not even the scenario planners could anticipate. How are we to proceed to live our own lives in such a world?

Many people are expressing great anxiety and fear as to what the future holds. They see enormous changes unfolding before their eyes – changes in lifestyles, changes in values, changes in traditions, changes in technologies. Education and politics fail to respond to current needs. Hunger, disease and poverty are too much with us. Materialism consumes us. The individual becomes lost in a maze of regulation, and the pervading influence of mass media and global businesses hungry for new markets. The effect of dislocation and change on individual human beings is increasingly evident. What will be the challenges of the next ten years? What can we learn from what we know now that will help us face the future with a sense of excitement and confidence?

## Reflection

_All revelation is the revelation of how to search, how to struggle. It is not the revelation of results._ –Jacob Needleman

One of the least valued practices in modern society is that of reflection. There are a number of causes that relate to our present culture, - individualism, the pressures of work, the consumer society, the distrust of institutions, the decline of mainstream religions, the rise of terrorism, - all these play their role in discouraging us from taking the time to reflect on the transitions and changes in our lives. At the same time there is a heartfelt search for meaning. The solution may relate to remembering that reflection has always been part of the journey toward wisdom in the great periods of history that have preceded our own.

Reflection takes time and space. It is hard to set aside time for yourself alone. For some the excuse is multiple responsibilities; for others reflection seems self indulgent. But it is a necessary part of maturing in whatever stage of life we happen to be in. Time for reflection will vary in length according to our personal situation. A young mother of three does not have the same options as a single retiree. Space will also vary according to circumstance. We can be alone in a solitary walk beside the sea; we can be alone in a crowded city on a park bench even when it is shared with a stranger; we can be alone in an armchair in our den in the quiet of an early morning. The challenge is to find that space and use it.

Reflection involves being quiet with yourself. Through the years many have found tools and techniques to aid the process. Some use devotional or inspirational materials to read slowly and ponder their meaning and application. Some find inner quiet through gentle exercise like yoga. Some find listening to quiet music calms the mind. Some find writing in a private journal helps bring things into focus. Others have found the traditional meditation and contemplation of many faith communities as ways of becoming more aware of their inner selves. Even focusing on the breathing that is the essence of our being alive is a reminder that we are right here right now.

## Our Personal Worlds

_You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star._ -Friedrich Nietzsche

In the previous chapter we were reminded that we have a number of elements in our lives that have to be kept in some kind of balance. These include our work, our family, our learning and growth, the care of our bodies, our communities and our spirituality. Our reflection will determine the choices and outcomes of our lives in these key areas. Visual mapping is one way to record our thoughts as we move through our journey.

For most of us, our work becomes an enormous part of how we define ourselves. The HBDI assessment helps us to understand the particular thinking skills we bring to the world of our work. It offers confirmation of our thinking preferences and those we avoid. While the overall shape of our profile is not likely to change in our lifetime, the balance of the four quadrants can adjust as we encounter new experience in our lives. Those who are happiest in their work generally have a good alignment between their preferences and the requirements of their particular work responsibilities.

Those who lose their employment for any reason usually have an identity crisis and gradually grow to understand that they are not their jobs. It is often a painful transition. Sometimes even a promotion creates the same kind of tension when new responsibilities destroy the previous good alignment. Many of us now have to face multiple careers rather than multiple jobs. That's why it is important to maintain reflection on our work roles, see new opportunities arising out of loss and maintain our sense of who we are through the transitions.

Family life is a constantly changing scene as all its members move through various life stages. Couples' time is restricted by work and home responsibilities. Children need different levels and kinds of attention as they grow up. Parents are living longer and can be both a blessing and a burden. Our hearts are usually in the right place. Our heads often suggest that we can accomplish more than is humanly possible. Sharing the journey means reflecting and honestly communicating both our needs and our limitations.

Continuous learning is necessary if we are to grow. Those who are full time students don't have a problem here, but the rest of us can fall into ruts where we collapse in front of TV sitcoms and are seldom stimulated to think seriously or learn new skills. Some jobs offer us little chance to grow; ideally we should change to something more interesting, but that is not always feasible. At any age we are capable of learning new things and it is the process not the product that matters. After years of saying that I wanted to learn to draw and paint, I finally signed up for classes and every day brings new insights when I mix colours and dab paint on a canvas. Any learning has to be allocated time and space though, and such a commitment will have an impact on all other areas of our lives.

Care of our physical selves includes rest, exercise and diet. In a knowledge economy the mind is so pre-eminent that we tend to forget that we are also part of the animal world. We can't expect restaurants and family cooks to automatically dish up the right food. We can't get proper exercise without scheduling time to fit it into our daily routines. We can't be at our best if we are constantly sleep deprived. Ask any new parent! We have to make choices and that requires reflection.

Our communities need our engagement. A civil society requires involvement in things that matter to us. These will change as we raise our families, change locations and have varying amounts of available time. Most of us cannot change the world in any major way. We can, however, make small contributions that collectively can have larger results. Friendships made in such contexts are among the bonds that unite us.

Spirituality matters. Whether it grows out of an established religious tradition or a more humanistic one, we all have to come to terms with our own identity and our own mortality. A rabbi once remarked that it doesn't matter what you believe; it matters what you practise. Taking time and space to experience human joy and human pain and reflect on its significance can unite us in understanding and celebrating what it means to be human.

## The Labyrinth

_There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler_ -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Labyrinth is a recent discovery for me personally, - I even helped in building one, - but they have been around for thousands of years in many places and many cultures. A labyrinth is a patterned pathway in circular format with either seven cycles or eleven.

The pattern immediately appealed to me because the shape resembles that of the HBDI graphic. Its focus on coming to the centre and back resonates with visual mapping. The labyrinth is also, of course, a metaphor for life's journey. Unlike a maze, which has choices of direction and dead ends, it provides a single pathway to a centre with one way in and one way out. Although our lives sometimes feel like mazes, they are really closer to labyrinths.

Labyrinth history stretches through Greek mythology, and from Egyptian and Roman history to the Gothic cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Among the most famous locations are the paved labyrinths of the cathedrals at Chartres and Amiens. There are similar ones in England. Secular ones abound in Scandinavia and other are found in locations as far flung as South America, India, Australia and Nepal. In the last century they have become popular throughout North America and linked to places of worship and public parks and squares.

In a modern context, a labyrinth is a method for meditation. By walking a single path, the mind is stilled of its normal pursuits. Sometimes people walk with a problem to address. Others seek healing from something that is painful to them. Still others seek a calm to let something new take root. It is a journey with three stages: going toward a centre: reaching that centre: and coming back again. As a short walk it is also mirrors our life journey and has the power to awaken the imagination and tap into the unconscious. When we are in a period of transition, sometimes we can't just get ready to do something different. The labyrinth encourages us to move forward.

It reminds us of some of the things that are important. We have been exploring ways of thinking that encourage us to be both structured and free flowing, both disciplined and non-hierarchical, to join in a cosmic dance on a personal path that is seldom straight and always narrow. We can sometimes walk that path quickly. At other times it is best to move slowly and thoughtfully. We may be able to go straight to the centre. Sometimes we may have to abandon the task, as I did when I once tried to navigate a labyrinth that was covered with ice. But I walked it at another time when the sun shone and the puddles had dried.

When we turn to visual mapping and circumnavigate clockwise in a circle, we move beyond the linear and go with the flow. By honoring our own thinking styles and accepting and affirming those of others, we move in a world better able to deal with complexity, paradox and ambiguity.

You have completed this stage of your learning journey. I hope it has been a meaningful and helpful one. Take a deep breath and enter the labyrinth of your life. You're on your way!

#  Appendix

## How to Buy VisiMap

### Order Online

VisiMap 4.0 Professional may be ordered online using these secure order sites:

www.visimap.com

www.coco.co.uk

Both sites accept orders by major credit card.

### Order via Email

Credit card may be placed by Email via the following addresses:

sales@visimap.com

sales@coco.co.uk

### Order by Mail

Dynamic Thinking  
21 Shaftesbury Avenue  
Suite 304  
Toronto, Ontario Canada M4T 3B4

CoCo Systems Ltd.  
6 Pine View  
Muxton  
Telford  
Shropshire TF2 8QX  
U.K.

### Order by Telephone

In United States and Canada: Dynamic Thinking: 1-800-884-0489 or 416-413-0916

_In the UK_ : Coco Systems: 07971 321586(from the UK), or +44 7971 321586 (international)

## How to Try the HBDI

To access the HBDI Assessment site, you need to have a password code and pay in advance. Please contact Dynamic Thinking via the mailing and telephone numbers above or send an Email to norahb@rogers.com for further information. You can also find further information on the assessment and order information at www.dynamicthinking.com.

## Configuring MS Outlook™ to Organize Your Tasks More Effectively

It is worth the time to do this configuration change though it may seem daunting. Simply follow it step by step when you have a few moments to spare. If it doesn't seem to work properly the first time, go through the steps again. Eventually it will work.

In Outlook™ open the **Tasks** folder. Click on **View,** then **Arrange By,** at the bottom of the menu **,** then **Customize Current View**. You should now see **Customize View: Simple List.** Open **Fields** at the top **.** From the list on the left, add the following to the list on the right, if they are not already there: **Status, Priority, Subject, Start Date, Due Date** and **Categories**. You can remove **Icon** and **Complete**. Reorder the list to show these headings from top to bottom: **Status, Priority, Subject** , **Start Date, Due Date, Categories**. Click **OK** to return to the **Simple List**.

Click on **Group By** and choose **Complete** and **Ascending**. Click **OK** to return to the **Simple List.** Now click on **Sort** and choose **Start Date** and **Ascending**. Click **OK twice** and you have returned to the **Task Folder** View.

You will also need to change the **Task Pad** view on the **Calendar** view. Open the **Calendar** Folder. Right click on the grey **Task Pad** at the top and choose **Customize Current View**. This will bring up the **Customize View** menu. Choose **Fields** and then **New Field**. Name it **Order** and in the **Type** box, choose **Number**. The next box will fill automatically. Click **OK** and you will now see your new field in the list on the right. In a manner similar to that above, place the items on the right hand list in this order: **Complete** , **Order, Status, Subject**. Add any missing item or remove any item not needed from the list. Click **OK** to return to the **Customize View** menu.

Open **Group By.** Choose Items by **Complete** and **Ascending** and then by field **Priority** , and **Descending**. Click OK to return to the **Customize View** Menu.

Open **Sort**. The item that you want is not in the **Frequently used fields** list that appears in the lower left hand box. It is in the **User Defined fields** list in the menu below. Scroll down to activate this item, and then choose **Order** and **Ascending**. Click **OK** twice and you are back at the tasks menu.

The last step is to go back to the **View** Menu. Choose **Task Pad View** and click on **Active Tasks for Selected Days**. When you return to your calendar view, you should now see two main categories of tasks: **Completed No** and **Completed Yes**. Priority Items will appear first in their own list, if you categorized them as such to spur you to get at them.

To make this work, of course, you do have to categorize, date, and number tasks. If all your tasks are rated as normal, you will still have to decide which one to do first. It is usually best to make this choice on a daily basis first thing in the morning. Task that are late will show up in red. Change the start date rather than beating yourself up. Focusing on what you have to do today while making sure that all your tasks are in the system will pay huge dividends.

## Reading and Resources

Artress, Lauren. _Walking a Sacred Path_. New York: Penguin, 2006

Boden, Margaret. _The Creative Mind_. London: Cardinal, 1992

Bridges, William. _Transitions:_ _Making Sense of Life's Changes_. Cambridge MA: DeCapo Press, 2004

Brookes, Mona. _Drawing with Children_. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1986

Buzan, Tony _Use your Memory_. London: BBC Books, 2003

Buzan, Tony, and Barry Buzan. _The Mind Map Book, Radiant Thinking_ , London: BBC Books, 1993

Buzan, Tony, _Speed Reading_. London: BBC Books, 2003.

Buzan, Tony. _Use Both Sides of Your Brain_. London: Penguin, 1993

Craig, Malcolm. _Thinking Visually_. London: Continuum, 2000

Edwards, Betty. The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. New York: Putnam, 1999

Edwards, Betty. _Drawing on the Artist Within._ New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988

Franck, Frederick. _The Zen of Seeing_. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

Franck, Frederick. _A Passion for Seeing_. New York, Codhill Press, 2003

Gelb, Michael. _Present Yourself_. Rolling Hills Estates, Jallmar Press, 1988

Gelb, Michael. _Discover Your Genius_. Harper Collins, 2003

Hall, Doug. _Jump Start your Business Brain_. Cincinnati: Eureka Institute, 2001

Herrmann, Ned. _The Creative Brain_. Lake Lure: Brainbooks, 1993

Herrmann, Ned. _The Whole Brain Business Book_. New York: McGraw Hill, 1996

Israel, Richard and Tony Buzan. _Brain Sell_. Brookfield: Gower, 1996

Logan, Robert. _The Fifth Language_. Toronto: Stoddart, 1995

Michalko, Michael. _Thinkertoys_. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2006.

Pinker, Steve. _How the Mind Works_. New York: Norton, 1999

Richey, Terry. _The Marketers's Visual Tool Kit_. New York, Amacon, 1994

Rose, Colin. _Accelerated Learning for the 21_ st _Century_. New York: Delacorte, 1997

Russell, Peter. _The Brain Book_. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1979

Schwartz, Peter. _The Art of the Long View_ , New York: Doubleday, 1996

Schwartz, Peter _. Inevitable Surprises_. New York: Gotham Books, 2004

Senge, Peter. _The Fifth Discipline._ New York: Doubleday, 1990

Stamp, Daniel. _The Priority Manager_. Vancouver, Priority Management Systems, 1993

Tharp, Twyla. _The Creative Habit_. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Wycoff, Joyce. _Mindmapping_. New York, Berkley Books, 1991

#  Index

#  About the Author

Norah Bolton is an organizational consultant and educator, with over 25 years of experience in helping companies, governments, universities, associations and individual clients improve their ability to develop and refine their ideas. She has comprehensive work experience including, teaching, management, management consulting, marketing and sales, fundraising, concert production, writing and speaking. She has conducted needs assessments and developed marketing plans for several Canadian municipalities, universities and arts organizations and not-for-profits. Much of this work has involved helping clients develop and structure their ideas and concepts.

She obtained certification in Mind Mapping™ from the Buzan Organization in 1994. In 1997 she became an affiliate and certified assessor of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument™ developed by Ned Herrmann of Herrmann International. She is the the founder and President of Dynamic Thinking, an independent company offering productivity tools, organizational development and creativity training to large corporations, organizations and individuals. The company is the North American distributor of VisiMap software and other business related productivity tools.

Speaking engagements have included presentations for The Ontario Society of Training and Development, Canada Forum, Speaker's Forum, The Canadian Professional Sales Association, Ontario Hospital Association, and the most exciting to date - the 33rd International Hotel and Restaurant Association Congress in Durban, South Africa.

Mrs. Bolton is a graduate of Trinity College, University of Toronto and holds post graduate specialist teaching certification from The University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario. She also has certification in strategic planning from Humber College, and in marketing for not-for-profit organizations from the University of Toronto.
