Wikis and Strategic Mindmapping

What if your company's top management started throwing its ideas on how your company stands compared with its competitors, how well it performs with its clients and what are its potential strategic choices on a mindmap? I started playing with the idea after giving a try to MindMeister, a collaborative, online, shared mindmapping tool. What could it look like?

Collaborative Mindmapping

The idea of a mindmap is somehow as old as human brains themselves. Mindmaps offer a great way to throw ideas around, keep track and organize them in a flexible yet powerful way. Mindmapping software has been around for some time now, with good Open-Source solutions available amongst others. These softwares have traditionally been thought to be used by one single user who could then share his thoughts with other. The possibility of real-time collaborative mindmapping brings in a whole new area of potential in the way people collaborate together.

The Wiki Connection

Take this example: imagine your top management board sharing ideas about how your company is run, what are the main issues facing it, which strategic path it should adopt and so on. Now imagine the resulting mindmap being turned into a wiki, with one page for every node on the map. Last stage, open this wiki to all of your company's employees and see what could happen.

The Effects Of Collaborative Intelligence

I already argued that there is a strong chance that the people who have the best insights about your competitors and your field of activity are the people working on the front-line, those who are in touch on a daily basis with your suppliers and customers. Retrieving their ideas thanks to a wiki built along the lines of your company top strategic thinking and making an analysis of them could prove an invaluable communication and information gathering for the people who run your business.

Wikis and Mindmaps share a lot of properties. Using them in coordination could create amazing collaboration tools. What if?

Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC