Financial professionals have a lot to learn, to maintain, to coordinate, on which to collaborate, and to communicate. Spreadsheets are our universal “hammer” (as in, “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”). But spreadsheets fall short in many ways and for many tasks.

Spreadsheets can expand and collapse hierarchical data with some effort, but aren’t great at it. Representing a web/network or interrelationship? Really not good. And engaging visual/kinetic learners? No, not really.

Enter Mind Mapping software/services. Mind mapping is a graphical/visual way to consider, capture and represent a topic. With simple tools to create visual diagrams, focusing on easy entry and updates of topics, sub-topics and interrelationships, these tools are great for note taking, brainstorming, outlining without being forced into a single hierarchy, and coordinating the capture and agreement on points of view of a group. For financial professionals needing to analyze, comprehend, synthesize, recall and generate new ideas, individually or in groups, mind mapping simplifies the process. And, unlike spreadsheets, it facilitates both easily capturing and understanding the details and communicating the big picture.

As part two of this series on Financial Professionals Getting Graphical, I wanted to move to mind mapping, one of the later tools I adopted. Full disclosure here: much of what I wanted to say today, I have said before, and in more depth than the blog permits. If the rest of this entry elicits any interest, I will point you to my November 2008 Rochester Business Journal article on this topic (1). 

That article takes you back to the strict but beloved English professor (2) who inspired generations to begin their creative process with an outline – and my tendency to reverse-engineer the outline for him, as that wasn’t, and isn’t, how my creative process seems to work. Then through various DOS-based creativity tools for basic outlining, project planning and eliciting creative writing (WriteEZ, the Windows successor of DOS-based Thoughtline, is my long-time tool for facilitated writing – but that’s another story.)

The timing of the column coincided with the Maryland Association of CPAs (MACPA) encouraging its members (3) to investigate the use of MindManager, from Mindjet. In the dozen or so years that have passed, a number of Web-based alternatives have arisen, but I still regularly use the free Mindjet Maps for iPad for offline thought organization, and encourage others to try the free desktop Mindjet trial.

(1) https://rbj.net/2008/11/28/brain-takes-circuitous-route-with-mind-mapping-software/

(2) https://www.hackleyschool.org/news-detail?pk=963862

(3) https://www.macpa.org/mindmaps-turning-chaos-into-order/