THE NONLINEAR PATH 08: Mind Mapping Your Way To What You Want
Digging Into Your Past To Map Out Your Future
The other day I went hunting for a crusty old relic in my basement. I found it… a long rolled-up poster sitting bent, crumpled and torn amongst other tubes of randomness. I unrolled it carefully …or rather unbent, uncrumpled, and then unrolled it. It was the first Mind Map I had ever made and the first thing I created with my team when I started working with The North Face in 2007.
I have been doing a lot of research recently into the benefit of digging into our past to help us focus our future. I think it is something many of us do at midlife as our lives, families, and careers go through transitions… to reflect on the past and look at the road ahead to decide what we really want to do with the time we still have.
I started thinking about my time in the corporate design world and how we used mind maps, Venn diagrams, collages and such to draw out thoughts, ideas, and concepts and then organized and connected them into stories. I thought about how these stories often connected a past with a future. Similarly, business leaders rely on past sales history to make future decisions and trend forecasters rely on past patterns to make future predictions.
I realized that these tools help us see the infinite line that runs from past to future and how we can leverage this lineage to learn about our own past and define the future we really want. Then I remembered that I still had my first mind map. So I dug it up to see what stories it had to tell today.
Mind Mapping My Way Through Chaos
I learned about mind mapping from my ex-husband, who has spent his entire career working in design. He had led a mind mapping brainstorm for our business team at the martial arts and fitness studio where I worked and where we both trained back in the nineties. Our goal was to get to the heart of what the growing studio was about in order to plot the next steps of its evolution.
It was brilliantly eye-opening and made an impression on me personally. Years later, I found myself in one of the most challenging situations I would ever experience in my career. I decided to employ this tool to help me through the chaos. It was the crusty old mind map from my basement.
Early cracks of an economic recession were beginning to surface. I had recently taken the leap from working in women's outerwear design at Columbia Sportswear to leading design for The North Face’s largest category of men’s and women’s outerwear.
I was tasked with taking a couple of hundred random, high-selling styles (including the iconic Denali fleece and Nuptse down jacket) and redesigning them into the first cohesive collection of TNF Exploration Outerwear. This meant realigning fabric stories, creating fit blocks, developing a distinct design language, creating all new trim and label packages, redefining the entire color palette, and introducing prints.
While growing (not just not losing) sales, not increasing manufacturing costs, and not abandoning any current customers.
With an inexperienced skeleton team and scarce resources.
At the beginning of the recession.
And I had to work on a PC-based system while I did it (Mac user from day one, yeah).
Oh, and I had to start while sitting in a different building from my entire team. For a few months.
Man, the memories this map unearthed. It also brought back memories of the energy, the hope, and the 'we can do this' feeling I carried with me. It was a great opportunity and terrifyingly exciting. To look back on something I had tackled and accomplished with a lot of pain (and partnership) and see how it laid the foundation for the company to successfully grow into itself is incredibly rewarding.
Few people were there to see what we all went through. It is now ancient history, a memory. Buried deep, like our childhoods, but with little gems hidden inside if we are willing to go back and dig. I had no real idea what I was in for when I signed up. One thing was clear, TNF was a big energy company with a mind of its own. It would take a lot of energy to harness and focus it in a new direction.
I had to wrap my mind around what I was dealing with.
I had to get to the heart of The North Face as it stood in 2007: an upstart technical outdoor company from the sixties and seventies turned hip-hop darling of the eighties and nineties, barely rebounded from the brink of bankruptcy in 2000, on a lightspeed trajectory to becoming to the biggest outdoor company in the world.
The mind map was the grounding factor that helped me to handle the overwhelm I was feeling and the key to finding the true gems. Before I could responsibly change anything about the product of this soon-to-be-billion-dollar company I had to understand where it came from, where it had been, and who it really was.
I had to wrap my mind around what I was dealing with. I had to get to the heart of The North Face as it stood in 2007: an upstart technical outdoor company from the sixties and seventies turned hip-hop darling of the eighties and nineties, barely rebounded from the brink of bankruptcy in 2000, on a lightspeed trajectory to becoming to the biggest outdoor company in the world. I landed at TNF during an inflection point during which I had to redesign most of its key products.
How does one tackle that? With a mind map.
So What Is Mind Mapping?
Mind mapping is a form of knowledge management and retrieval. Mind mapping mimics the thought process, storage, and organization of the brain to access the information later on. It is also used for finding connections and discovering or uncovering themes. Mind maps have been developed and used over centuries to document, organize, and make sense of thoughts, ideas, and information. It also helps us to understand how we think and how we remember.
Designers, professionals, and companies use mind mapping to define a process, project, or product line or get to the heart of what a brand is about. As a professional designer, I used mind mapping to do just that: to get to the heart of a rapidly-growing iconic brand to redefine and redesign it for the future.
While the process of mind mapping is ancient, the actual definition and popularization of the Mind Map come from psychologist and author Tony Buzan in the 1970s. Inspired by the techniques of Albert Einstein and Leonardo DaVinci, Buzan promoted mental literacy, mnemonic thinking, and radiant thinking which is the basis of the tree or spider-like form of mind mapping.
Concept Mapping, different from mind mapping, connects and maps out multiple concepts. Mind Mapping focuses on one central topic radiating in many directions and branches while always staying connected to that topic.
The flow of the mapping process creates connections, like neural pathways in the brain, through simple words and images that build strong associations and memory that can be easily accessed later on. For a visual learner like me, which roughly 65% of the population are, the tree form of a mind map is indispensable.
Mind maps are great for visual learners but also work well for auditory and kinetic learning. They are a faster way to take notes during lectures, which helps auditory learners (30% of us) quickly capture details around a concept or topic.
Kinetic learners (a complex 5%) benefit from creating the mind map, physically drawing the details, and making the map itself.
There is no rigorous right or wrong with mind maps, which rely on the arbitrariness of mnemonic associations to aid people's information organization and memory.-Wikipedia
Mind maps may seem confusing or complicated but are very simple. They can be done in as many different ways as there are ways to think. They have some key elements to start. And they can be used to map anything like the direction for your project, your company, your life, or your day. They can be done digitally, but I am a fan of doing it by hand.
To start:
Grab a piece of paper any size. A napkin works. I like a large piece of white butcher paper taped to a wall, especially when working with others. By yourself, a page in your notebook is fine.
Grab something to write with. If possible, grab three or more different colors. You can use these colors any way you wish to color code your ideas. Some people use them for different topic branches. I use them to define topics, to circle main ideas and connect them to others.
Choose your central topic, the thing you are focussed on. Anything works. Write it in the center, large, and circle it.
Define your first-level topics that flow from this central topic around the circle, everything that pops into your head. Let it rip here. No editing needed. The point here it to open up and see what comes out. Write it down. Take as long as you need.
Circle the first-level topics that rise to the top and seem the most relevant. Draw a line from these circles to the central topic.
Expand on each circled topic, doing the same thing you did for the central topic.
Finally connect ideas through color-coded lines. First-level topics that did not get circled often live under another first level topic that did so draw a connection line from one to the other. This final part of the process is very personal and intuitive. The main goal is not to make something look pretty but to map out a process of thinking while it is happening. Show your work. Madness IS the method.
Insights emerge seemingly magically from the process of mind mapping. The mind works in a flowing fashion, one idea leading to the next, to the next, to the next. Mind mapping allows you to follow this thought process. The longer you go, the deeper and richer the gems.
I created this TNF mind map with a handful of people over a couple of hours of flowing discussion. It then served as the springboard for new charts and planning. It became the anchor we all would reference to stay aligned. Nothing fancy, but it worked. The map got to the heart of what The North Face has always been about. And it still works to define the brand today.
Images can be added or used at any point in the process. Imagery is a huge part of mind mapping. Tony Buzan states in this TED talk that the human language is essentially Imagination and Association. We all have a personal language (English, Spanish, Finnish, etc.). As humans, we communicate through imagination and association. This is the basis of mind mapping. Designers do this regularly through collages and visual presentations, which are essentially visual mind maps.
The Past Is The Past, But It Holds The Key To The Future
As designers and artists, our greatest strength is developing our own unique style and stamp to put on our work. Our stamp is what makes us valuable and takes years to develop and hone. A mind map is a valuable tool and starting point for defining your style.
Simultaneously we have to learn to balance that unique perspective with the identity of the brand or company we are working with as if that brand is its own person with a past, present, and future. It becomes a partnership, a collaboration in which, if successful, both brand and designer aesthetics is apparent.
Brands are much more successful when partnered in a healthy relationship with a compatible creative leader. Mind maps are the starting point for designers and brands to develop personal understanding and to understand each other. From that understanding, they can then build a platform to springboard and grow from.
Mind maps are magical.
When we grow up, we can lose track of ourselves. We can forget or reject our childhood. We wall it off, sometimes to protect ourselves from painful memories, most often so that we can let go and grow up. Ultimately we find ourselves back there again, whether we choose to or not.
Our early years are full of gold and information to help us as adults once we have gained the time, distance, and tools to work with our past. Mind Maps can help us dig up that gold and find a connection to a part of ourselves we may have lost or forgotten.
Why does this matter?
Finding and doing the fulfilling work you are meant to do means being true to yourself first. Being true to yourself and authentic requires you to know yourself. Knowing yourself requires understanding your story from the beginning, warts, pain, and all. This requires you to look at it, move with it, write about it, and create from it. This is when you align with yourself. This is when the real magic begins to flow.
Mind maps are magical. They magically reveal the things we are searching for. And they also reveal the things we did not know we were searching for.