Creativity Unleashed

Here's what a leading firm had to say about VisiMap:

VisiMap implements a single creativity tool in great depth. The approach is based on mind mapping, developed by Tony Buzan. While conventional notes are written linearly, the mind works in a different way. Each new thought may be sparked off another; different links form – the result is an organic web rather than a simple list. A mind map is an attempt to represent this structure visually.
Like all mind maps, VisiMap starts with a central blob – the topic or key idea. From there, branches radiate out, carrying keywords that form the main subjects. Each of these can have smaller branches, and so on. The reason mind maps work so well is that you don’t need to build the branches in any order. As a new thought comes up you can slot it anywhere in the structure. This makes them great for making notes in a meeting or for generating new thinking. Structuring information in a mind map also makes it much easier to remember.
VisiMap does a lot to make your on-screen map effective. You can control the colour and fonts of the different branches, and add icons to give a more powerful image. Each branch can carry an associated note, shown in a split window at the bottom of the screen. To be effective, a tool for generating maps should make it extremely easy to pour information in, and then to restructure it. VisiMap has got this off to a fine art. Adding a new branch is simply a matter of clicking on the start point and typing. The style facility makes it is easy to define colours and fonts for a particular level.
Similarly, restructuring the map to look the way you want it can easily be achieved by drag and drop. Once you’ve generated your ideas or made your notes, VisiMap can switch between a map and an outline view, and can pump your text into a word processor ready to polish up. If you use Word or Ami Pro, you can even export the information as an outline that the word processor will recognise. There’s a good range of graphic formats supported, plus a surprisingly effective option to generate HTML.
There will always be a place for quick sketch maps on paper, but VisiMap does a great job of putting mind maps onto the screen, and keeps the process easy enough to be quick, an essential when dealing with ideas. This is an excellent program that in the new version 4 has excellent abilities to transfer information to Office products.

Feed the Brain

Today's Globe and Mail business section is filled with suggestions as to how to add good thinking to the workplace. One my own favorites is Robert Fritz who always provides hard nosed suggestions about creating. Here is a recent one:

"Here are a few ideas about feeding our mind so we can build our brain:

• Don't look for the answers to life.
• Don't buy other peoples' answers.
• Don't believe things just because all your friends do.
• Rid your mind of all concepts (we have stressed this idea for a long time now.)
• Rethink everything you think you know, and leave your past experience and past conclusions at the door.
• Create something more useful for the mind to do, so it has a better job than simply running around the same track.

This last point is essential. The mind will work to resolve any tension that it considers. By tension, we are not talking about stress, pressure, or anxiety. We are talking about discrepancy between and amongst competing thoughts.

For example, the mind is subjected to hundreds-of-thousands of data points every day. We are not conscious of most of the input, because if we were, we wouldn't be able to function. We have useful filters that sort what we want to pay attention to, and what we do not want to spend any time on. Nonetheless, all of that input goes into the mind. The mind, left to its own devices, will try to sort out all of the information into a type of unified field theory, making it all fit into a large comprehensive puzzle. But mostly the bits do not fit together. The mind creates dream states that help it get a little leg up in its job of trying to create equilibrium. Dreams sort out some of the discrepancies by generating fanciful fictional films that function, from a structural point of view, to bring a little peace and quiet. Even nightmares, awful as they might be, can make the dreamer feel better in the morning.

The best thing to do is this: give the mind a job that feeds the brain. That best job is to create. Assign your mind structural tension, which is formed by knowing the end result you want to create, and the current reality you have in relationship to this result. Of course, there are actions to take, strategies to employ, tactics to use, insights to learn on the road from here to there, but, because of structural tension, the mind becomes the best ally in this process, and the brain is thankful for the nourishment. "

Good advice as always.

Slow Leadership

It's rare that a blog entry can be excerpted to both my business and church related blogs - but this one seemed to hit the mark. It appears today on Daily Episcopalian in full.

Slow leadership is gaining popularity. It is part of the Slow movement which approaches life with balance. The Slow movement seeks to take control of time rather than allowing the busy-ness of life to control time. It encourages finding a balance between using timesaving technology and taking the time to enjoy a walk or a meal with others. Proponents believe “that while technology can speed up working, eating, dating, etc. the most important things in life should not be rushed.”

Slow leadership helps leaders reflect fully on what needs to be done. Then they commit to giving those things whatever time they deserve to do them properly. Instead of reacting to everything immediately, Slow leaders prioritize and schedule activities.

Slow leadership is not about always getting things right but recognizing the power of choice both to act and not to act. In one of the newsletters from Slow Leadership, Getting it wrong to get it right, the author says,

Getting it right, in work or life, nearly always involves a great deal of getting it wrong as well. Success depends critically on how you face up to failure, take the lesson it offers, and start again. Opportunities missed are usually gone forever. The road not taken never shows up on the map again. That’s why rushing through life, obsessed with conventional success and fixated purely on material gain, may produce riches and fame, but very often misses out on happiness and contentment.
The New Testament of Christians asks: “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet loses his soul?” You only have one trip around the sun. Use it well, or lose the chance of living and learning forever.

It is easy in this age of technology to be distracted by the amount of information available. Communications are instant and there is pressure to respond instantly. Multi-tasking is praised although it has been shown that those who multi-task have little retention of information. One of the discoveries of “Slow” is that people actually accomplish more when they schedule their work time and don’t allow interruptions when focusing on a task. There is little time for reflection unless we make space for it.

One of the ways that reflection can be enhanced is through the use of a daily visual map, - based on one that illustrates one's wider priorities. You won't hit every aspect of the wider map every day. But visiting it daily reminds one of the bigger picture and actually encourages slowing down.

Productivity Improvement

My own productivity in writing this blog REALLY needs improvement. The truth is that I am still occupied with other projects to a degree that have precluded balance. They are well organized and I am accomplishing good things in other places. But I am trying to work on continuing on something that I have started. I share that concern with another blogger whose comments reminded me of it today.

He is also familiar with the HBDI and his profile preferences are in the following order: DACB. That means that his preferences sound like this: Big picture thinking, Analysis, People orientation and Procedure/Process. My own are in a different order: DCBA.

The HBDI debriefing materials have some excellent suggestions for working on less preferred quadrants. While it is advantageous to work from strength, it is also good to note one's less preferred preferences and become somewhat more comfortable with them.

The writer has decided to improve his B Quadrant function by keeping a time log and writing what he is doing down every 15 minutes. He's on the right trackfor that one. I'll improve my quadrant A by balancing my accounts, - both personal and business.

A good C activity would be to play with your kids, - or listen to music that you love. A good D activity would be to take 500 digital pictures in one session.

Note that the common factor in all these is time. How we spend it really determines the quality - and the balance of our lives.

Free VisiMap Templates

Thanks to a good suggestion from customer George Ruggiero, I have now made many of the maps used as illustrations in my book See What You Think available in template format. This means you don't have to create them yourself and can personalize them to suit your own needs. You can find them here if you scroll down the middle of the page. There are 20 maps for a start, including several from the book and a few others. Evaluators of VisiMap (you can try it for 30 days at no cost or obligation by going here) might find it useful to look at complete maps.

You are free to use them or publish them in any way you wish. Giving me credit is nice, but not in any way obligatory. And now there is an avenue, kindly provided by VisiMap to share your own maps. You can submit yours for download here. It's a free way to make the world a little better and more productive - as well as being a creative publisher. So please add to our collection.And don't forget the power of conversion. I've had to do several presentations recently and the ability to do the quick export of an image (lots of conversion options in the drop down menu) or a Word or PowerPoint export gets you up and running in no time.

Phantom Competitors

I hear occasionally from Business Resource Software's Kylon Gustin, who sends articles to clients and colleagues and the latest one has some good points. He's summarizing Harvard's Michael Porter and I in turn am summarizing his article.

Porter claims that one of the mistakes of small business is that they don't think about strategy. But there is always competition, so they should. He cites five kinds of competition and Gustin calls them "Phantom" because most people are not even aware that they exist. The first task is understanding your position

The five types of competition are pictured on the map. Examining each in turn allows you to think constructively and develop strategies to meet the competitors. It is something we all should be doing from time to time.

Back on Board

I'm embarrassed at the gap in writing. Anyone would point a finger at the recent article which states that blogging is losing its charm when people discover that one is supposed to write on a disciplined basis. Mea culpa. It is simply that other tasks have assumed a higher priority. I have been involved in an interesting study of seven inner city churches, which is exploring the best way for them to chart their future. To help with that, I have been re-reading The Fifth Discipline and the Fieldbook which followed it. Even though these books are by no means new, they appear to stand the test of time well. Reading them also reminded me of the benefits offered in the work of Robert Fritz. His two books, The Path of Least Resistance and Creating are similarly relevant and helpful.

I summarized some of Robert Fritz's precepts in my own book. The client, I reference above has a number of problems - too many aging buildings, a lack of volunteers in some cases, faltering financial resources in others. There are short term solutions to problems like these, but as Peter Senge reminds us in The Fifth Discipline, today's short term solutions often result in tomorrow's problems. What such organizations need is a vision and a passion to create something new that will bring new growth from the deep roots that unite them.

And I have been pursuing drawing and painting with a new commitment and seriousness. The collection of art instruction books bought through the years in the hope that I would eventually find time to do something hasn't produced much in and of itself. Why should they? As the taxi driver responded to the passenger who asked him how to get to Carnegie Hall said, " Man, you gotta practice. What happens when I do this is instructive. I always have a vision of where I want to go. In the past year, I have produced a wealth of failures to achieve what I want. But suddenly, I can sometimes say, Yes, I've done it.

This isn't about becoming a successful commercial painter. It's about creating something that was not there before I started. It is wrestling occasional results from many drawings that meet my vision of what I am attempting from many that did not succeed.

Whatever we do, - from learning to play the piano to building a successful organization, the focus has to be on practice. Practice brings learning that all the courses in the world can support but cannot teach. It assumes that one will not get it right the first time. It assumes that talent matters little, but determination and patience matter a great deal.

The morning paper again stresses how much employers are looking for innovative employees. A modest proposal would be to let the ones they already have try stuff and fail a good deal of the time.