Adrian Trenholm

Great mind mapping trainer

Since Cliff , Jason and I all posted / commented on mind mapping , here’s a quick plug for my friend, client and fellow Toastmaster, Susan Percy. Susan is a Buzan qualified mind mapping instructor, and she can help you with your memory and speed reading too.

Now, you may be thinking “Mind mapping is a simple concept; I don’t need training” and that’s how I thought until I attended a workshop with Susan. Like a lot of people, I had been using mind maps simply to record information rather than as a thinking tool. Susan trains you how to break through that conventional thinking barrier. Now, when I am stuck on a project, I do a mind map and connections and new ideas just spring off the page. Interested? Visit Susan’s website (no blog yet, but I will persuade her).

Add comment August 16th, 2005

Further beyond mind mapped pyramids

Great comment from Cliff Atkinson on Beyond mind mapped bullet pyramids :

By stating the conclusion first, you also lighten the cognitive load on an audience, because they don’t have to struggle with holding many fragments of information in short-term memory before you explain what they all mean.

argues for the “conclusion first” approach for similar reasons.

A reader, no matter how intelligent, has only a limited amount of mental energy. Some of it will be used recognising and interpreting words, some seeing the relationship between ideas, and whatever is left comprehending their significance.

You can economise his need to spend time on the first two activities by presenting the ideas so that they can be comprehended with the least possible mental effort. To sequence ideas instead so that the mind has to go backward and forward to make connections is simply bad manners, and most readers react by refusing to do so.

Minto also makes the argument for the sake of clarity. Readers and listeners may misinterpret your message if you don’t make your point first:

The reader (or listener) will assume that ideas which appear together logically belong together. If you do not tell him in advance what the relationship is, but simply give the ideas one at a time, he will automatically look for similarities by which he can group the points being expressed…

Alas, people rarely put the same interpretation on groupings as you do…

Add comment August 16th, 2005

Beyond mind mapped pyramids

Jason Womack linked back to this June post from Cliff Atkinson of fame. Cliff argues that presenters should state their conclusion first. If the audience knows where they are going, they are more likely to pay attention. Great advice - and once again I am struck by the similarity between Beyond Bullet Points and by Barbara Minto and even by Tony Buzan .

Minto concentrates on business writing and gives the same advice: put the conclusion first and supporting information after. In fact Minto argues a conclusion at the end of the document may not even be needed. Buzan created mind maps to group information in a radiant hierarchy, with the most important point (effectively, the conclusion) in the centre.

This works because the human brain likes to group information. We cannot remember or process long lists of items, so our natural tendency is to look for linkage between separate items of new information. We group information items by drawing conclusions about the relationships between them. As we get more information, we start to make groups of groups. And to make sense of those new groups, we have to be able to group them with existing knowledge.

The conclusion gives your listeners or readers everything they need to group information, both with everything else you say or write and with what they already know. Why save it until last?

3 comments August 15th, 2005

Sudoku - like crack cocaine, only more addictive

Donna introduced me to these fiendish number puzzles yesterday and I am already addicted. I guess the advice for beating this addiction is, like all the others, “don’t start.”

If you do succumb to temptation - and giving yourself a mental workout is, of course, no bad thing - then the sudoku.org.uk site has some excellent solving sudoku instructions (pdf) .

As I type, my previously rational wife hovers, trembling, beside me, desparate for me to leave the computer so she can print off more puzzles…

4 comments August 13th, 2005

ID cards: bee’s knees or dog’s breakfast?

Gilbert and Sullivan are smiling down at this wonderful skit on the forthcoming national ID card fiasco . It covers all the bases - civil liberties, unproven biometrics, government’s appalling tech procurement record, commercial use of private data - and I especially like the way national identity changes to notional identity in the last chorus.

Still if Mr Clarke says it’s the bee’s knees, then it will be, eh?

Via James Governor at Monkchips . Well spotted, sir.

Add comment June 23rd, 2005