Chuck sums up the issues preventing wider take-up of this sort of software:

These responses seemed to be concentrated around a few specific issues: Lack of time to promote the use of mind mapping software to managers and coworkers, lack of awareness of the benefits that mind mapping software can provide, and restrictive corporate IT policies, which make it hard to implement a new piece of software.

One response I found particularly interesting was this, to the question “If you don’t share your maps with others, why not?”

If you are familiar with the Myers-Brigg Type Index (MBTI), this explanation is easy. The Myers-Briggs “sensors” have significant difficulty using abstract models (such as hierarchical mind maps) or reasoning using abstract models, making decisions about the future using abstract models. It is easy to identify these people by watching them trace a mind map using their index finger. The MBTI sensors start at the root and follow one branch all the way down to a leaf. Then they stop and argue about the leaf and its contents. They rarely ever get back up to the root or to other first level nodes. These people routinely request aMicrosoft Word document without all the confusing pictures. I comply by delivering them Word documents or PDF documents without any embedded maps. The abstract reasoners start at the root and begin tracing circles around the root, tracing first all the first level nodes, then tracing all the second level nodes, and so on outward in widening circles. These people not only love maps,they almost immediately begin suggesting corrections or additions to the maps. For these people I supply printed maps or Microsoft Word documents with embedded map fragments.

Interesting line of enquiry to pursue there – I wonder if it has any relationship to the perception issue I described here?

Technorati Tags: Mindmaps, Productivity

The tool itself seems relatively straightforward (I have used both cognitive mapping and mind map software before so this may not be a fair assessment of how a beginner would get on) – the trick I suspect is in learning a methodical approach to applying it to a specific task.

I experimented trying to map out the exchange of views in the recent “Hierarchy” exchange (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) [order may not be quite right] between Dave Rogers , Jon Husband and Euan Semple but ran out of steam partway through analysing the second post. I don’t think that is a comment about Compendium, more a facet of the difficulty of mapping this sort of writing especially when you are very rusty at that sort of thing.

This will be the problem with creating the semantic web, it’s completely conceivable to have nice well-formed RDF triples as a way of navigating information that is already structured but the vast majority of human knowledge is tied up in messy human-written text.

My gut feeling is that most of us, most of the time, don’t analyse information to the depth that is needed to make good use of a tool such as Compendium. Certainly my tendency is for a strong degree of pragmatism in my learning – I’d suggest that generally knowledge-workers dig just enough to get a sufficient gist of things for the immediate purpose – as long as I have good enough knowledge for the task in hand then why seek more precision?

The willingness to stop digging could be increased by the illusion of explanatory depth. This tendency for people to over-estimate their knowledge of a subject where there are attractive intuitive explanations was identified in 2002 by Frank Keil and Leonid Rozenblit. I’m probably doing it now of course!

The next area to try Compendium will be working the other way – assembling a set of facts or assumptions about the world and seeing if it helps extrapolate meaningful abstractions. The obvious application of this will be in strategy development.

Wiki page for evaluation notes: [wiki]Compendium[/wiki]

Technorati Tags: Knowledge_Management, Minds, Psychology

In the comments to Ming’s post there are a range of views expressed but two themes emerge:

* using the tools available today to _filter_ incoming information and tasks, allowing you to concentrate on the important things
* there is indeed a very sharp limit to the power of conscious processing to handle multiple tasks (Miller’s [bliki]SevenPlusOrMinusTwo[/bliki]) but the unconscious mind is capable of many many simultaneous activities.

From my own subjective experience I would suggest that one reason why having too many things to do “simultaneously” hits productivity is because it ignores the way the mind transfers things into unconscious processing.

The trick seems to be to concentrate on one thing sufficiently long that you build up a whole set of pathways relating to it, then “put it down” and move on to something else – the unconscious will still be working away. Do this and you will be surprised how often the answer “just appears” a few hours or days later.

Time-slicing too finely in the conscious domain seems to have the effect that no topic creates enough energy to engage the unconscious learning circuits, so I’m left relying on the distractable power of the conscious alone.

It would be interesting to explore the neuroscience of this a bit further…

From a [bliki]TheoryOfConstraints[/bliki] perspective it would appear that conscious attention is the constraint, so useful questions to consider might be:

* How do I get the most out of my conscious processing power?
* What else do I have to change to allow my conscious attention to work at its best?
* How can I find other ways of processing information (e.g. exploiting my unconscious mind)?

Technorati Tags: Constraints, Minds, Psychology