Comments on: Visualizing Decisions and No Limits Brainstorming:

By: mikelinley

mikelinley — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:14:03 +0000

wow..great outside the box thinking I will definitely be trying this out very soon..thank you very much for your advice

By: Garry Robbins

Garry Robbins — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:59:37 +0000

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…

By: Shelley Hayduk

Shelley Hayduk — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:39:36 +0000

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.

By: Dr.Christopher Hancock

Dr.Christopher Hancock — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 08:58:59 +0000

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?