How to run creative brainstorms for successful projects
Mind Mapping is a visual technique systematized by the British psychologist Tony Buzan that won its space in the corporate world in the last decades. Educators verified its effectiveness in expanding imagination and removing creative barriers, with over 250 million people using it to power brain capacity worldwide.
Moreover, research at 3M Corporation concluded that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Further studies verified that the human brain reads images simultaneously, while letters are decoded in a linear way, taking much longer to process.
This technique helps thousands of teams to collaborate and create together daily all over the world.
Considering all this, GitScrum included Mind Mapping in its project management tool, as a strategic feature. In fact, it’s also because it has everything to do with planning your projects and ideas. Here you will learn how.
The ideal feature for brainstorming ideas with your team
No matter where you work, it’s a fact that everyone has ideas, and most team members love to make suggestions. However, if the team leader does not organize a process and occasions to collect them, the company might face some problems with future misunderstandings. That’s one more positive aspect of mind mapping: creating an opportunity for all the team to present their ideas.
You can do the process of brainstorming and draw mind maps physically on a whiteboard/paper, or directly into your GitScrum project management tool. The applications of mind maps are many: you can use it to plan a project scope, a website map, a company portfolio, and many other things.
It’s up to the leader to conduct the process of leading the team to an agreement about the final ideas. If the decision will be made by directors, then feedback on the reasons why the final strategies and ideas were set in a certain way would be fine. It’s important that team members feel part of the process and that they are evolving together.
Things you can create with Mind Maps for your Business
- The company portfolio/service list;
- Your brand’s History timeline;
- A department chart with job positions/functions (organizational structure);
- The map with your groups of target audiences;
- A map showing all your company working units or divisions;
- A product catalog tree planning;
- Plan an editorial calendar for a Blog or Social Media;
- An HR personal development program with courses per department;
- Educational sorted lists (nutritional, for instance).
Examples of Mind Maps
Mind Mapping Example 01 – Design Office:
Mind Mapping Example 02 – Translators & Interpreters Career Plan:
Advantages of Using GitScrum Mind Mapping
Why this technique won the world’s heart:
Idea organization
Don’t miss your best ideas! Create several mind maps for all your project ideas, even the ones you won’t start for now.
Team motivation
All team members have the opportunity to contribute, collaborate and improve each other’s ideas. That leads to a team cohesion and makes people feel valued as individuals.
Constant evolution
The Mind Map format is an invitation to improve the project ideas gradually and constantly, making it grow limitless. It works just like our brain and helps us create connections. So, it’s a natural process to associate new ideas to the topics you added.
Easy teaching
Communicate ideas and structural charts to your team and clients in a much simpler way. Now you can elaborate and share Mind Maps. Test for yourself and see they will understand information clearly and fast.
Effective learning
The visual approach facilitates the team’s understanding and learning of massive data. This is useful when they need to learn a lot of information. There is nothing more embarrassing for a company than team members who ignore the company’s information. Mind Mapping can help you avoid this, once they can use maps to understand and memorize important content.
Markets that Should Benefit from Mind Mapping
Mind Mapping can be very useful for all types of professionals. Here we present some examples of markets that should not miss the opportunity to use them:
Schools and Universities
Can you imagine the power of mind mapping for helping teachers and students? They can draw maps to support teaching most disciplines – History, geography, biology, languages, literature… they can even insert emojis and icons to make maps more friendly and didactic.
Marketing & Digital Agencies, and Press Offices
Mind Mapping is great for planning product scopes, distribution channels, broadcasting means, and editorial content. Moreover, these agencies have creative teams who enjoy brainstorming a lot, so that certainly will be a very useful feature to organize ideas.
Designers
They can list possible approaches for a product, list their target buyer persona(s), plan a production roadmap.
UX Designers
User Experience designers can start planning the interface of a product, device, software, or website with a mind map. They can design the basic scope and functions of a project and discuss it with a client.
Translators & Interpreters
These professionals can use mind mapping to plan their career and commercial activities, draw sales and partnership channels. This market is expanding and offering new kinds of working platforms and tools every day, so visual project management can help them keep up with the market news and organize their growth.
Software Developers and Agile Teams
They can use mind maps to plan new project scopes and discuss the project’s initial ideas with clients.
Web Developers
Mind mapping is an excellent tool to draw a sitemap and present it to clients, discuss it with them and make changes in real-time. This way, web developers can update the project demands exactly according to the client’s will.
Lean Consultants
Professionals who work as consultants and counselors can take advantage of mind maps, too. They are great to use for training and presentations for clients. Lean consultants can draw a mind map of the stages the contractor company will follow, to complete a training or certification.
Churches & Nonprofit
Mind maps are widely used by nonprofit organizations, to list project ideas by working area, plan projects, draw chapter charts and many other applications. They also use it to list and demonstrate their project goals publicly.
Dietitian & Nutritionists
These professionals can use mind maps for didactic purposes, rather than distributing simple lists and tables to their clients. Do you remember those lists that contain highly recommended food items, and items to avoid? They look very good in mind maps!
Fitness Workers
Personal trainers can draw maps to build training programs for their clients, with the core body areas and goals they must work on. However, they can elaborate something more complete, like a wellness program, including exercises and other activities, seeking their client’s integrated well-being, with the possibility of building partnerships with other specialists.
Digital Influencers & Youtubers
They can use mind mapping to plan their content, and also to draw some didactical content to post on their social media. Many audiences enjoy learning, so publishing useful information with mind maps helps build engagement.
Finance Professionals
Executives who work at financial institutions – banks and brokers, can use mind maps to teach and demonstrate types of investments to their clients. For most people, it’s confusing to look at a long list of options, so they can sort the types of fixed income, savings account, stocks, and private social security funds.
Housekeeper Agencies
These agencies can use mind maps to list their wide range of services, but there’s much more they can do. They can use mind maps to draw fast cleaning and maintenance scripts for different types of rooms, for example, to guide collaborators. That would help them establish standard procedures, elevate their service quality and customer loyalty.
Human Resources
HR agents can elaborate mind maps to update job positions’ required competencies, which will help both employers and potential employees. They can also map the market main relevant demands, and encourage companies to promote training in these areas.
Notice all these maps can be dynamic, which means team members can add and remove items any time. This allows the team to grow together, and your projects to evolve.