Linear Planning Has Failed You. Time to Think Different

Project Plans. PERT and GANTT charts. Critical Paths. All are wonderful linear tools well suited to engineering and construction projects but that fail miserably for innovators and creative thinkers. It’s time to think differently.

One tool that works well for creative thinkers is the mind map. A mind map is a diagram used to generate, structure, organize and classify ideas in a visual format that encourages holistic thinking. We use them in 100 Day Plans to capture ideas and find hidden relationships between solution components.

The beauty of this approach is that it readily acknowledges that brainstorming is an inherently messy process. That you must first generate a list of all that you know. Only when you are confident that you’ve gotten everything out of your head and on to the page can you begin assigning hierarchies and temporal relationships.

The mind map to the left shows the same information exploded to one more level of detail. Here you can see a theme unfolding: for this client to reach her external marketing goal she will be focusing a great deal of attention on internal issues.

In the final image (pictured left) you can see the identification process at work. In one hour of working backwards from the goal, the client identifies that a key internal issue is reliance upon an external component technology. Subsequent work did in fact focus on reducing that reliance.