I discovered Mindmapping in 1994 by reading "Dessinez-moi l'Intelligence"(Mind Mapping) by Tony Buzan, the creator of the method. Using it ever since in so many way, I found it particularly "amasing" in intercultural situations. I remember the first time I met a group of Indian Entrepreneurs and I had to share with them World Business Trends that could affect their business in India. I felt unconfortable delivering just a message coming from outside...so I decided to start my conference by a short mindmapping session and asked all participants to draw a circle and write down "business trend" in the middle of the circle. I gave them one minute to concentrate and to ask themselves what were the Trends that, they thought, were going to impact their business in the next 18 months. After a few minutes I stopped the exercise and ask them to draw, by teams of 8, a Mindmap the size of a paperboard and to transfer the exact words that each one had noted on his or her individual mindmap. It was then easy for me to drebrief the findings of each group, to organise them in common grounds and differences but more so to link them to my conference. I must say I was once again amazed by the result: at the end of the conference the echo was that the conference had hit the right topics, that I had a clear understanding of their preoccupations, and that the ideas that had emerged were operational.
There are many books by Tony Buzan around mindmapping and its various impacts on enhancing your memorisation skills, on speed reading and of course creativity and decision making, and what I discovered and adopted spontaneously, are the mindmapping softwares (www.imindmap.com, www.mmdfrance.fr), that enable me today to generate ideas and export them directly into Word or Powerpoint files...
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