Podcast #9 Is Now Available

The ninth of our podcast series is now up and available. The audio portion can be found here as Podcast #9. The student maps, a syllabus, and other materials have been stored here as Supplemental Material .

The series assumes you have access to a computer that has Version 7 or Version 8 of Mind Manager installed, either the product or the trial version.

In this ninth episode we look at structured Brainstorming.

We use maps for creativity techiques, such as Fishbone Diagram, SWOT Analysis, and a Morphological Box as examples.

I am interested in your opinions. I am also interested in what future topics would be of interest. We are at the half-way point of the series, give or take an episode. Write a comment to this blog post or drop us a note at Podcast =(at)= piqueroinc.com .

Progress On Next Episode

Got Podcast #8 written and the student maps built.

Only started recording tonight. I’ll probably finish on Thursday. Web work still needed but should have it up sometime on Friday.

The topic of the podcast is Brainstorming. It’s a topic I enjoy talking about. The trick will be to keep the podcasts short. At the moment I’m only thinking two episodes needed. We will see.

Another Class

Gearing up to teach another Mind Manager Fundamentals class next Friday. This one will be slightly different because of time pressures (for the client).

Instead of the normal 7+ hour Fundamentals, I’m going to be teaching two 4 hour classes back to back. The students are all pretty busy. So giving up 4 hours was doable, while 7 hours was not.

After the classes last Fall I went through the manuals with my technical editor eyeshades on. The new training director at Mindjet used my notes (which I sent him) to update the student manual. So, I now have 12 of the new student manuals for the class.

Adjusting the class wasn’t too hard. I dropped the Project Management and the Knowledge Management Modules. I’ll need to trim the thinking styles presentation.

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.