Mind Mapping For Dummies

Chapter 16

Mind Mapping for Creativity

In This Chapter

Exploring creativity

Using Mind Mapping in the creative process

Brainstorming with MindManager step by step

Some people like to describe Mind Mapping as a creative technique. In this chapter I argue that Mind Mapping is not such a technique. Nevertheless, Mind Mapping can be used meaningfully in the creative process. To show how this works, I first give you some background about creativity and creative processes.

Defining creativity

Research into creativity has been going on now for at least 50 years. The bad news is that in all this time researchers haven’t been able to agree on a generally accepted definition. There are almost as many definitions as there are researchers! However, there are some elements and aspects of creativity that all scientists agree on.

A working definition of creativity which I use runs like this: ‘Creativity produces new and useful things.’ This definition hardly covers all the aspects I introduce in this chapter but it’s useful as a first approximation. Thus, creativity yields what’s new and creative outcomes are regarded as useful.

The 4P Creativity Model

All models are wrong by definition, but ...