Many look at the business world as they might a scientific laboratory: bounded byproven realities, tested verities and rigid logic. Every theory is supported by empirical evidence. Yet, even Albert Einstein consideredhimself an “artist”. In fact, he’s often quoted as saying, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Tony Buzan’s world is the human mind, and he’s the individual most responsible for bringing the concept of mind mapping to the business world.
Forthe energetic and peripatetic Tony Buzan, the empires of the mind are not only limitless, they are his life’s work. He has made a career out of the idea of mind mapping, the concept of capturing ideas, thoughts and inspirations in colourful diagrams. Its adherents say it is a simple, but powerful, technique. You don’t have to imagine how successful Buzan is. Revenues from his many and varied activities associated with mind mapping are estimated to be over £100 million annually. He has had a hand in more than 90 books (with over six million sold in 33 languages) and travels eight to nine months every year, covering 73 countries so far. To this can be added his expertise in the martial art of Ikedo, poetry (he was a close friend of the poet, Ted Hughes, and habitually wrote poems while flying on Concorde), rowing, teaching ballroom dancing and much more. Along the way he also started the World
Memory Championships. Buzan’s headquarters are close to the River Thames in Buckinghamshire. As you might expect, his is not the typical corporate office, but rather a low-key, one-person chalet-style house close to his home. “I always saw money as a circulation system. I didn’t want money, I wanted what money could get me; and what I wanted was everybody knowing about mind mapping. The money’s a happy byproduct. I love cars, but my old Mercedes is comfortable. I was told by my accountant to go and buy a better car. I went and checked the better cars and didn’t find one that appealed. And why spend £50,000 on something that I’m going to drive 110 times a year?”
The man himself cuts a sartorial dash, a fit and sprightly sixty-something invigorated, he tells me, by an early morning row on the river. With his prolific output and hectic travel schedule, one would imagine that Buzan is either the best-organized person in the world or the most obsessive. The reality lies somewhere in between. His diary is planned 18 months ahead – “Not totally sorted, but the big islands in that ocean of time are established,” he says quickly. For Buzan, such organization is liberating rather than a tiresome straitjacket. One thing tends to lead to another. “Commitment does lead to opportunity, but I don’t plan two months ahead day-by-day and hour-by hour; there will be certain days that are allocated. In fact, I was reading recently that the average senior business manager has a horizon of three months.
I find that extraordinary; my horizon iseternity, and I play within that.” Think bigBuzan talks big, but he does so naturally rather than egotistically. “My fundamental goal has remained the same – to have every single person in the world mentally literate. By that I mean they know how their brains and bodies work and how thinking and cognitive functions work. Basically, I want everybody to have the operations manual for his or her own brain.
Everything I do is directed towards that.” Buzan believes that mind mapping changed his life and enabled him to explore his many interests. “If I had known how to mind map, my school and academic life would have been extraordinary, a breeze, exuberant, open; instead of the standard student struggling against the reins of study and note taking and reviewing. And not getting as good marks as you knew you could get if you had somehow known a better method.” In his homeland Buzan operates somewhat below the radar, although he did teach 9,000 children in the Royal Albert Hall a couple of years ago. Elsewhere, his ideas are embraced with gusto. Recent years have seen his popularity in Asia mushroom. Interestingly, the name Buzan can be distantly traced to Mongolia, by way of 17th-century French Huguenots; and, Buzan tells me gleefully,Buzan (population circa 9 million) is the second city of Korea. When in his company, it is easy to believe that if the city wasn’t originally named after him, they might want to do so now. In Japan he taught 350 children, their parents and teachers in a leading theatre. Singapore hosts a two-week Mind Map Festival featuring the biggest mind map in the world. It is four stories high and six stories long, made up of panels completed by different schools in and around Singapore, and captures the 42-year history of Singapore.
© 2008 The Author | Journal compilation © 2008 London Business School Business Strategy Review Spring 2008 15
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My fundamental goal has remained the same – to have
every single person in the world mentally literate.
People
In China, Buzan’s latest book has sold 450,000 copies – his publisher has apologized, he tells me delightedly. Buzan appears regularly on Chinese TV. One programme he was featured in was called “Happy Dictionary”, an hour-long special in which Buzan taught seven people about mind mapping, memory, creativity and the mind and body. 350 million people watched it.
The thing that impresses Buzan about China is people’s willingness to embrace learning. “I asked the producer, why call the programme ‘Happy Dictionary’?” I thought that they’d taken programmes in British and translated them. The producer looked at me as if I was a bit slow, and said, ‘Well, Mr Buzan, everybody loves learning, and learning makes people happy. And the dictionary is a symbol of learning, so Happy
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The fads. People will continue to be disillusioned and search for the perfect fad, the panacea. The good news is that business schools now often include mind mapping as part of their teaching equipment.
Have companies put your ideas into practice?
One of the most memorable examples was the accounts department of IBM in New York. They structured their activities through mind maps. This saved the company millions of dollars and made them money. They trained their people how to think.
One organization I worked with is a $50 billion bank with about 1,000 people. Their training covers the mind and the body – mind mapping, innovation, creativity, knowledge management, communication skills, poetry to strengthen their metaphorical muscle, aerobic fitness, Ikedo, rowing, and mind sports like chess and Goh. This has transformed the company’s culture, personal and family lives. People are healthier, and communications skills have been notably enhanced.
So, the power of the brain is accessible to everyone rather than a select few?
Yes, most people think that they’re less able to determine their own future than they really are. People think they’re trapped when they are not. It is self perpetuating until you get a bigger perspective. Once you realize you are trapped, you change. The brain is self-organizing. It’s designed to organize and manage knowledge. It has astonishing power to do that. It is in part a blank slate. If you need it the correct formula, it will organize itself in the proper way.
What is a mind map?
A mind map is a visualization of thought. Knowledge is not linear. All kinds of things radiate from your head when you have an idea. It is like an explosion, a supernova. It is in 360 degrees, three dimensions. That’s the thought process that a mind map helps to capture. Using mind maps, one page of paper can become a 100-page report. If I come back to a mind map in 20 years, I will know instantly what it was about. Without using them I’d struggle.
How does one create a mind map?
The mind really works in multiple thoughts and directions at the same time. This is what I call radiant thinking, thinking from an image at the centre and radiating outward. To make a mind map, start with an image in the centre of a blank sheet of paper and draw connectors branching out over the page. Use both sides of the brain to think about your idea – the right side for images, dimensions, color, and the left side for words, numbers, analysisand logic. Capture all those on one page in an associated way, and you have a mind map.
People are not using their minds as well as they might?
Yes, when you know the potential of the brain, it’s profound and profoundly important. But, if you’ve never been taught about your brain, all you know is that your brain is your real problem. It is three pounds of grey slush and you’re losing brain cells and your memory’s going. Most people don’t like their brains. They’ve been taught that color, imagination and daydreaming are wrong and childish. So when someone comes along and says you need to use color and be playful, the immediate reaction is that they’re talking nonsense. It is not just a matter of teaching people how to more fully utilize their brains, but of removing the blindness with which people have been brought up.
What’s the business case for brainpower?
I gave a presentation to a group of senior executives. One of them said that it was really fascinating but asked what the brain has to do with business. Although it was a humorous question, I gave him a straight answer: by encouraging radiant thinking, we can make the best use of our creative abilities in an easy, natural way. And that can have great benefits for any endeavor.
Imagine a company that is just the same as your own, a clone that opens up across the road. Each of the individuals in the newly cloned company is 10 per cent more intelligent; 10 per cent more fit; 10 per cent faster in everything they do that requires speed; 10 per cent healthier; 10 per cent less stressed; 10 per cent better at learning and thinking; 10 per cent more energetic; 10 per cent happier. How long would it take for the clone to dominate? What would happen to your company? It wouldn’t last long. The thing is that it is quite easy to become the alternative company.
But don’t companies invest more in training and developing people than ever before?
To lose £800,000 in a day, invest £1 million in training – 80 per cent of what people learn is forgotten within a day of training. That isn’t because training is inappropriate; it is because the training doesn’t take into account the way the brain functions. Until training takes the brain into account, there will continue to be new fads and new titular directors of
In conversation with Tony Buzan
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Dictionary; any other silly questions, Mr Buzan? And that, I thought, was profoundly interesting. A country where everybody loves learning and learning makes people happy. That was not a thought, it wasn’t a proposal, it wasn’t an opinion; it was an absolute fact. This was the first time I’d ever encountered a country where that is the given. They just lust for learning. Everywhere I went people wanted me to teach them anything.” Testing times Buzan’s thinking is continually being tested. He appeared in a BBC TV programme, “In Search Of Genius”.
Buzan was given the worst class in a school in the town of Slough and invited to enable them to awaken their previously buried genius. One small boy could not learn three things in a list. As a grand finale, he attempted to memorize 105 different facts about the cars in the school car park – everything from the make, colour, year of manufacture, license plate, to unusual features like a cracked window, ski rack or bumper stickers. In front of the cameras, his mother, the headmistress and his schoolmates, he remembered 104 out of the 105 and sat down to great applause. As the next child was performing there was a sudden scream from the audience: the boy had remembered the missing fact. In such situations, Buzan is clearly being set up to fail.
He shrugs his shoulders, “Adults and kids, there’s not really that much difference between them in terms of teaching them and then learning. I said to the children right at the beginning, “I am here to help you realize your dreams. First of all tell me what problems you have.” They were very open –always in trouble, fighting in the playground, didn’t like the teacher, bullying, all that stuff. So I said, “Okay, now write down your dreams: do you want to stay in school, would you like to go to university, do you want to get good marks or not, do you want to get out of school right away, have a job at the age of 11, do you want to be a miner; tell me what you want.”
Two of them wanted to go into a children’s circus; one of them wanted to be a policewoman, and she was a criminal. I said, “I think you are smart.” It’s the first time they’d ever heard that in their lives, and I said, “I will prove it, but you’ve got to do what I say. And if you don’t want to do this you can leave now. If you do want to do it, I want you to go out of the room and come back. When you sit down, that’s you saying, ‘Tony, I’ll work with you.’ They were angels.” It is difficult to tell if mind mapping will prevail beyond Buzan as an individual. He is understandably positive that mind mapping will carry on and points to the worldwide Buzan Centres as proof of likely longevity.
The organizational role models he respects are Montessori and Steiner Schools, as well as the Japanese martial arts schools in which masters teach pupils from one generation to another.While Buzan is looking to the future, he is not contemplating retirement. He recoils at the notion. “I beg your pardon? Not in my dictionary. Why would I want to stop doing what I love? It’s an absurd concept, it’s like asking a kid when he’s going to stop playing with his toys; never.” And you believe him. ■
© 2008 The Author | Journal compilation © 2008 London Business School Business Strategy Review Spring 2008 17
People
Stuart Crainer (scrainer@london.edu) is editor of Business Strategy Review.
I was reading recently that the average senior business manager has a planning horizon of three months. I find that extraordinary; my horizon is eternity, and I play within that.
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