MindManager - Andrew Wilcox

Michael - Good morning Andrew. Thank you for taking part in this conversation.

Andrew - It’s a pleasure Mike.

Michael - Firstly would you introduce yourself, and give our listeners some background to who you are and what you do?

Andrew - I’m Andrew Wilcox. I live and work from the centre of Hampshire, in a small town called Alresford, I practically scaled down from being an employee of a large company called Unilever, to starting a new business’s from scratch. My longest running and current business is called Cabre, and It’s about helping people to exploit MindManager, a software mind-mapping tool.

Michael - Tell me a little about Mind-manager and what it does.

Andrew - Mind Manager works on a number of levels, the easiest one to appreciate it for is its’ ability to replicate Tony Buzan’s Mind Mapping process. It’s a brain-storming tool on one level - on another, I use it to publish websites, make documents, prepare project plans .

Michael - How do you think it benefits your clients?

Andrew - I think it benefits them in a few ways. First of all it brings out the creative side in them, when their bound by products like Microsoft office that are very detailed. Secondly it allows them to do things quicker, because it allows them to go from the thinking-about-it stage to the publishing stage faster than they would with other applications. And finally it gives people a big picture of what’s going on, which they can share.

Michael -Some people will look at the pain you solve for clients. What pain would you say that you solve for them with MindManager?

Andrew - One of the pains that you solve is that when you get a team working on it, the team gets a bigger picture of what’s going on. They become more cooperative, they become more creative. Less into their silos and more into a strong team-building situation.

Michael - So one of it’s applications is in getting a team to share it’s aspirations and its goals, it’s way of working, and then communicating back to them.

Andrew - Yes.

Michael - Where and when do you mind map?

Andrew - Personally, or with clients?

Michael - With clients.

Andrew - There are three situations that I’m involved with at the moment. First of all it’s training clients to use the tool, so individually or through public courses - or online. Secondly it’s helping clients who have projects that are in the early stages. And sometimes I do this face to face, but quite often now I do this online, sometimes I never meet the client - we just talk about it - we produce a picture of their problem, their product. And thirdly I mind map at large conferences with a large team of people, and we record the event.

Michael - What specifically do you do when you’re mind mapping?

Andrew - I think the first thing you’re doing is gathering knowledge about the subject. This can be brainstorming initially, but later can be linking the brainstorm to other sources of knowledge such as web pages and documents that the client already has. And then it’s structuring and organising it into something useful.

Michal - Expanding on that - if you were to teach someone how to do your job, to make a mind map of a meeting or conference, what are the important things that they have to do to get the right result?

Andrew - Listen without judging. If you’re in recording mode, you don’t - if you start judging what’s being said you stop recording.

Michael - How did you become good at this?

Andrew - Practise, as in full practice. And publishing. And getting feedback. Initially I was given the idea by somebody that I met at a conference, that was the initiator twelve years ago.

Michael - What do you think happened to give you the skills to be able to do it?

Andrew - A lot of self-teaching I think. As well as interacting with a lot of excellent users of the product, and the genre of mind mapping. So learning from other people as well.

Michael - When you’re going through this process of mind mapping - what do you believe about the people that you’re mind mapping for?

Andrew - I believe that my best customers come to me because they’ve seen my work, and they like it. As opposed to people who say ‘Andy you do great work, but why do you put it in maps? Why don’t you put it in text? Why isn’t it in nice long lists?” and I’ll say ‘well, because that would attract the wrong clients.’

Michael - Presumably you believe that your clients have something important to say.

Andrew - In general that would be true, yes. You also have clients because you’re interested in them, and what they’re working on as well.

Michael - Do you have an identity or mission when you do this? Who is Andrew? When you’re doing this job of mind mapping?

Andrew - When I’m in a corporate conference recording it, I’m there as a reporter, I want to represent what people are talking about. So that both the people who are in the room can understand what it is, but also the people who are outside of the room can have a good insight into what has happened - and be encouraged to ask the people who are in the room some questions.

Michael - What benefits have your clients told you that they’ve got from this?

Andrew - The benefits that I’ve been told about recently are for instance, someone’s given me a word document which is about their business strategy and they want it to be a website so that they can show potential investors in their business. And I went from their word document to the first version of the website in just a couple of hours. And within several days had reiterated it into something that we would show the client, he was happy with in the way it was written and in the way that I had represented it.

Michael - My understanding of it, from listening to you, is that this whole process can speed things up considerably. It means you can meet a group of people who haven’t yet finalised their ideas, get them to finalise their ideas or their proposition, and almost immediately afterwards be able to communicate it back to them, and then subject to some checking procedures, project it to the outside world - and that sounds a very fast way of communicating some very complex ideas, very effectively.

Andrew - Mind mapping is often talked about as a way of accelerating your learning, when it’s also - with the right software (and mind manager is one of those.) - a way of accelerating your publication.

Michael - A different question, what do you enjoy most about doing it?

Andrew - The variety of work I get involved in. The interaction with people on new products and projects, of which when I first get involved I don’t understand. Each time it’s a sort of learning process for me as well.

Michael - Ok, before I ask you to give your contact details , is there anything else that you’d like to let our listeners know about mind mapping?

Andrew - First of all I would say that I’m not a mind mapper, I’m a mind manager operator. Because there are some very good mind mappers in the world, and they’re my friends and they do a different sort of job to me. So I’d like to make that distinction - because I have once had someone turn up at one of my software course to learn about mind mapping.

Michael - Would you like to explain again what the difference is between the two?

Andrew - Mind Mapping is a process invented by Tony Busan, the trademark is owned by him, he is the inventor of it, he’s published books on it, he has trainers, and there are also many unaccredited trainers around the world - but it is a paper based system, it is very graphical, very memorable, it’s very powerful - I wish I’d known about it when I was at school. What I do is help people to use mind mapping software - which is called Mind Manager - to take those ideas and put them into a computer in a similar format to mind maps, but because you’ve put it into the computer you can rapidly turn it into another form of publication, whether it’s powerpoint presentations or websites.

Andrew - You have the platform to alter things - like if you were to rub something out with pen and paper, particularly if you’ve done it with coloured pens is quite awkward, where as just moving things around with a mouse is quite easy on your computer screen.

Michael - Is there anything else that you’d like to say before we get down to your contact details?

Andrew - The only thing that I would say is that I am a practitioner using one type of software. It’s not the only software in the world. There’s a lot of free software. And what’s very exciting in this field at the moment is that there is a number of web based programs that allow teams to cooperate in maps globally - in teams, online, synchronised, rather than just asynchonisedly.

Michael - Let me have your contact details.

Michael - Excellent, thank you very much Andrew

Andrew - thank you Michael