Visualizing Decisions and No Limits Brainstorming:
How to Ensure your Best Thinking is Leading the Way.
Today we are all under pressure to do more with less, and to do it quickly. This is why getting the big picture on projects and not losing sight of new ideas is challenging. Visualizing key decision points, company objectives and business processes can ensure that higher level goals are reached and that you are taking the best approaches now and for the future.
Visual Brainstorming
Critical business decisions and key drivers can be intelligently identified through free flowing brainstorming and visualization of key decision points. By seeing and exploring all possible outcomes, PersonalBrain can help you resolve issues faster and plan your success without overlooking anything.
Brainstorming can be done as a group with PersonalBrain projected on your conference room wall or individually on your desktop. To begin an idea generation Brain, create the key goal or objective of your session as your starting Thought. Under this Thought create child Thoughts below for all ideas that may lead to achieving this goal or support this objective. At this point anything goes so don’t be too analytic or discriminating. The idea here is to free your mind and capture all ideas. Then you can see where they lead.
Under these Thoughts, you can even create another level of child Thoughts that your initial ideas might lend themselves to. (To learn how to create Thoughts quickly watch our previous tip of the month)
Once you have a set of possibilities, it’s time to start reviewing them and fleshing them out further. Typically there will be some new ideas that may not have been considered in the past. Your next step is to decide which ideas make sense to expand on.
Visualizing Decisions
You can create “Pro” and “Con” Thoughts to help your analysis on important or far reaching decisions.
In the above example a clothing company is evaluating a new material for their winter line. An actual “Pro” and “Con” Thought is used to distinguish each side of the debate. When making these decisions you can use PersonalBrain’s expanded or outline view to see additional generations of Thoughts.
If you prefer more of a free flowing brainstorming session you can simply Brain dump all your thinking about an issue as child Thoughts below and then come back and move your Thoughts under “Pro” or “Con” areas.
An alternative method is specifying “Pros” and “Cons” with Thought Types as shown below.
In the above screenshot Thoughts are further defined using Thought Types. Green for Pro and Red for Con.
You can also use Thought types with colors and icons to highlight your best ideas. For more information on how to create Thought types watch our recorded Webinar.
Thought Tags can also add a level of priority, feasibility or timeframe for execution. This works especially well if you are not necessarily using a Pro/Con format.
Tagging Thoughts as a follow up to your brainstorming session helps clarify the practicalities of your ideas.
In the above screenshot once all ideas for the company’s “Market Expansion” were captured, Thought Types are used to signify a primary attribute of an idea. In this case, something that is a “Greenlighted project” or a “Hot topic” has generated much debate is identified with a Thought Type.
Often the ideas generated aren’t necessarily a clear “yeah or nay” so you can create tags that will highlight the feasibility of each idea. In the example above there are Thought Tags for “Cost” and “Timeframe” because these are key factors on executing these ideas.
By categorizing and further classifying ideas, unconscious reasons why something is a good or bad idea becomes more concrete, and an objective criterion for making decisions can be readily identified and implemented.
Creating Decision Trees with Thoughts and Links
Even if you know the right steps to solve an issue, crystallizing the process will ensure that key contingencies are accounted for and your desired outcome is achieved by all team members. PersonalBrain’s visual interface can act as a decision tree. Clicking on a Thought triggers other dependent issues or next steps as Thoughts so you know what to do.
Creating Link Types that depict preconditions can help you readily identify the best course of action.
You can use PersonalBrain’s “Link Types” to specify key contingencies that you don’t want to create other Thoughts for. In the above example, whether or not a drug is FDA approved is an important factor in prescription. However, if the client resides outside of the United States, and also has “Condition C”, “Medication Z” may be a better choice.
Visualizing all options and the applicability of products and services in PersonalBrain can help customer service and sales reps make better recommendations to clients, boosting company sales and customer satisfaction.
A special offer is connected as a Jump Thought to the company’s most commonly sold health product. The Link type “Valid if under 30” specifies eligibility, so the agent can make the best recommendation to customers depending on their age demographic.
Your SWOT Analysis Brain
Understanding and visualizing market strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats can be a very effective method to reach key decisions and spur new ideas for growth. You can create a SWOT Brain for your company or project to ensure that all aspects of your plan are iron clad and that you are moving in the right direction.
Furthermore because all Thoughts can be connected associatively you won’t have any problems of running out of space like you might with conventional 2D mind maps. Something that fits under one idea can be under as many other concepts as you need. For instance, in SWOT analysis you should try and look to see how you can turn threats or weaknesses into opportunities. To visualize this you need an associative interface like PersonalBrain.
For example an auto manufacturer might have “slowing economy” listed as a weakness. This could be linked to a corresponding opportunity: “new low cost models”. Something that if developed is an opportunity, but is related to and driven by the fact that people are more cost conscious because of a slowing economy. With PersonalBrain this idea can be connected under both Thoughts easily.
PersonalBrain’s flexible, associative interface enables ideas to be linked under many categories without limits.
One of the advantages of PersonalBrain is that there are no limits to the number of Thoughts or connections you can make. This means that your brainstorming results are not simply a throw away sheet of paper or static poster on your wall. You can now add documents, web pages and all necessary research to make your plan a success. Your Brain becomes your information portal for all the right data.
So when you go and access the files you need, you will not loose sight of the big picture and strategy, because your information now is stored and accessed in an intelligent and meaningful context.
Smarter Context = Better, Stress Free Results
Whether you are deciding on the best treatment for a patient or hammering out a new market strategy, thoroughly examining and capturing all possibilities will not only lead to smarter decisions and those “eureka” moments, but it will also enable you to execute on them in a stress free, productive manner. Capturing everything in your digital Brain helps eliminate anxiety so you can use that energy to focus on completing the task at hand.
With PersonalBrain you can execute in an intelligent manner because when you click on any idea it will trigger all the right information and you get a complete visual briefing on your strategy. Everything you need is right there. Your strategic Brain keeps you on course by showing you where to go next and why you are going there in the first place.
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:58 am
Although only a small to medium sized charity, we deal with some very complex projects. About 18 months ago I used a trial version of personal brain to brainstorm and analyse pros and cons for the reintroduction of the european beaver into Somerset (England)in much the same way as you have shown above. The great advantage was being able to attach references (source material) to thoughts.
However my problem at the time was that the brain worked too much like my brain (it would form associations and then loose them). The number of thoughts were very large. It was possible to pull an important series of associations onto a screen in order to demonstrate it to others, but it was not able to ’save’ and return to that association. Every time I clicked on another thought, the view would alter radically.
While I was able to print screen shots of important associations, I found it virtually impossible to get back exactly to that view – important if you then wish to later explore issues around that view with colleagues.
I raised the need to be able to ’save’ views with your company at the time and was told that a number of others had also raised this. I felt that without this facility personal brain was only of limited use and I could not justify asking the charity to buy me a copy.
I see from above that you are able to show some complex views of thought associations. Does the software yet enable you to save and return to a particular ‘visualisation’ or association of thoughts?
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:39 am
Yes you can save your expanded views in version 5. This is a great feature for Brainstorming. Go to “View” and select “Save Expanded View”
Another new view in Version 5, which is great for brainstorming is Outline view. You can right click on your Brain’s background and select outline view. This is a fixed overview which is less dynamic than expaneded view but gives you a broader view of your Brain structure.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Good, creative thinking Shelley! After reading the article I wondered if you could apply it to Six Thinking Hat brainstorming. See http://is.gd/r5RH
Put on your White Hat, start mapping the facts. Switch to another colour, and most importantly, hide the other coloured thoughts.
Two of my old requests would help this usage out:
- Have child thoughts inherit the thought type of the parent. (Optional attribute on the parent thought, only valid when the thought was first created). This way you could create a branch of “Con” thoughts and automatically create more “Con” thoughts below.
- Filter by thought type. “Just show me White Hat thoughts, for now”
Dr. Hancock’s comments above made me think of some sort of checkpointing mechanism. Would not only allow you to view your brain as it was at a particular point in time, but also could allow you to show the changes made between two checkpoints. You’re almost there by being able to filter by dates…
April 14th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
wow..great outside the box thinking I will definitely be trying this out very soon..thank you very much for your advice