Frozen Topics

We had a problem come up in the Dallas class that again shows I have much to learn about the Mind Manager tool. After "brainstorming" the topics appeared to be frozen in place, you couldn't rearrange to positions on the map. And, that begs the question of unlocking them.

Brainstorming is a 3 step process. (1) ideas (2) groups and (3) ending the session. Near as I can tell, moving the groups to the central topic and “removing” the group topic, without closing the brainstorming session, freezes the topics. There seems to be something about brainstorming mode being active that sets a flag of some kind.

I found that saving the “frozen” map, and then reopening the map releases the topics. You can move them around.

I also found if I follow the three steps, as the tool suggests, that the topics will behave normally. So the key is to group your ideas but close out brainstorming mode before dragging the group to the map.

On The Road Again

Just returned from Dallas. Went up to teach a Fundamentals class. Had about 9 students in the group.

Most of the students were in the Quality Assurance group of the company. So, I used some examples of process audits that they had sent before the class.

We spent the last hour of the class talking about real world ways to use the Mind Manager tool. The class examples are fine from a teaching viewpoint but I think it helps to bring their everyday workplace concerns into the discussion. We demostrated brainstorming by looking at potential specific ways they could use Mind Manager, tomorrow, on a current project. It generated a large list of ideas.

For me that means the class gave them enough insight into the tool that they could see the applications.