Mind mapping is a perfect way to expand complex ideas and organize your thoughts, and if you’re in need of some inspiration to get started, we’re going to run through some mind map examples. Mind maps can be used to increase efficiency and retention both personally and professionally, so this guide will cover both scenarios. Before we get started, let’s define mind maps give a brief outline on how to build them.
Mind maps are defined in our comprehensive guide as “A mind map is a simple visual tool that helps organize ideas in an easily understandable, sequential structure. It can be used to capture different ideas and display their relationship while organizing them in a way that doesn’t clutter and disorient the brain.”
This definition demonstrates the value that mind maps provide visually, allowing people to learn and retain information with much greater efficiency. Mind maps also create a dynamic structure that can be manipulated easily, allowing people to diagram their ideas with a unique understanding of how they relate.
Mind Map Examples
To create your own mind map, start by ideating a central element, usually representing a problem, concept, shared idea, or umbrella topic. Following this central idea will be multiple levels of associations that branch outward until they reach their final detail.
Because these branches all follow from direct relations to the central idea, you can ensure that the solutions you’re creating or the details you’re diagramming will have relevant importance to the main topic. Now that we have a solid understanding of how mind maps are structured, let’s run through the 9 best mind map examples.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is the most common application for mind maps and is a place that many people will feel comfortable applying this strategy. When brainstorming, you’re often encouraged to dive down a rabbit hole and pursue new ideas that have the chance to provide innovative value. This strategy can sometimes get you lost, however, and it can be hard to relate your new ideas to your overall goals.
Mind maps are a great way to get your creative juices flowing and create a diagram that pushes you to ideate in multiple different directions. This is a good way to create new ideas that might fall outside of your traditional scope, and the diagram ensures that they will be related to your overall concept.
Not only are mind maps good for brainstorming new ideas, but they ensure that your contributions won’t get lost along the way. Mind maps create a structured process of brainstorming that tracks your ideas from beginning to end, ensuring that you can retrace your steps and understand just how you got to a particular solution.
For these reasons, brainstorming is the perfect mind map example.
Problem-Solving
When analyzing a problem and determining what the best path forward is, it can be helpful to break down the issue using a mind map. Mind maps let you pursue multiple solutions without losing focus on how they each apply to the problem at hand.
Additionally, you can easily diagram how solutions will apply in real life, see how they would improve the problem, and quickly jump around to different tiers of the solution.
Being able to jump back and forth between levels of a solution is super helpful when problem-solving and is a reason mind maps are a great tool to use when breaking down a problem.
Additionally, the ability to explore multiple solutions at once makes problem-solving a great mind map example and allows you to explore multiple different routes to your solution.
Taking & Organizing Notes
Taking notes can get grueling when you cover many small variations within a large topic. There are so many relationships to cover it can be overwhelming to look at them all on paper.
Using a mind map is a great way to document these relationships in an easily digestible way. You can either create the mind map during your note-taking sessions or use it as a study technique to diagram your notes after you’ve documented all of the important information.
Mind maps can be used for class, attending a workshop, taking notes on a speaker, or even for a personal project. In all of these scenarios, they create a sequential structure that is built to help your brain learn and retain information. Whether you’re using them for school or work, mind maps are great for organizing your notes and making sure you remember important information.
Diagramming an Essay
Writing a good essay is all about having a good structure. Mind maps create an information model that allows you to digram your essay and displays how all of your evidence relates to the main topic you’re covering.
Additionally, you can use personal design touches to denote the different parts of the essay that each branch will highlight and even where they will go chronologically.
Not only are they good at planning the structure of an essay, but they also are great at brainstorming different topics to write about and creating subtopics within those branches. The ability to both brainstorm topics and plan your essay make organizing essays another perfect mind map example.
Event Planning
Event planning is a unique point on the list of mind map examples and shows how widely applicable the structure is. Planning an event on a mind map allows you to branch off into the various activities and preparation required without losing focus on how all the different parts relate to each other.
Events, especially large gatherings, are notoriously difficult to plan and always end up creating conflicting information. Using a mind map is a great way to avoid this headache and create a consistent plan that everyone can easily understand and follow.
Organizing Information
Organizing information is a strategy that, similar to note-taking, allows you to document information that might be confusing in a much more digestible way.
When analyzing a complex concept or breaking down a lengthy project it can be really helpful to use a mind map to organize all the information you’re trying to understand.
This can also be helpful when communicating a set of information to other people, as seeing a pleasant visual diagram is an easy introduction to what might otherwise be a daunting web of information.
Creating a Business Model
Mind maps can be great supplemental tools to business model canvases or CO-STAR boards when creating a business model and allow you to plot your roadmap in a sequential structure.
Creating a business model in this way makes it visually obvious what the plan is and how it will be executed. Mind maps can act as a hybrid roadmap for your business model as well, and with the introduction of personal design elements, you can create a structure that both plans out the future of your business while also diagramming how the strategy will be executed.
As another addition to our list of mind map examples, creating a business model is a great way to sequentially plot your business model while also infusing collaboration into your plan.
Analyzing User Experience
Because of their sequential structure, mind maps make analyzing user experience easy to understand for anyone.
Analyzing user experience is always goal-centric, but when you’re diving into each step of their journey it can be easy to get lost in the small details that the user performs along the way.
Mind maps allow you to create isolated steps that document a user’s experience while also maintaining the overall focus on their goals.
This added perspective makes analyzing their experience more effective as well because you are constantly wondering how they experience their step within the context of their goal.
Create Internal Operation Guides
Because mind maps are such digestible diagrams, they can be really helpful for distributing information within your business. A great example of this could be while onboarding employees or creating flow charts for future hires.
Creating a master guide for internal operations is really important for your business’s success down the line and creating a mind map that documents all of this ensures that whoever is added next will be able to pick up the information quickly and without any hitches.
Learn more: How To Create a Mind Map?
Conclusion
We all know that mind maps are very versatile tools, and this list of mind map examples proves just that. If you enjoyed this guide make sure you check out our recent post on the QuestionPro Blog about Growth Experiments and how they can help your business. If you want to learn more about online collaboration, stay tuned to IdeaScale Whiteboard.
