Fanning the flames of success
IN ANY job, the gathering and filing away of information is very important. Today in the knowledge economy it has become essential so it makes sense that we all listen well and remember what we hear because so much depends on getting it right. Competition has grown to such an extent that one slip up by somebody can cost the organisation their business. Which is why most bosses get really shirty when what they say has been wrongly understood or, worse, when they have not been wholly understood. You can only hold three thoughts in your head and if the boss adds just one more, the chances of remembering drop by 20%. Yet another fact added will reduce retention to 35% of the whole! All because we do not take notes. Once upon a time dutiful employees filed into the boss' room clutching little pads and scribbled on them no matter what happened. Now we do not have mere employees. We now have Knowledge workers who think they have Gigabyte retention capacities and do not bother with the pad and [what's that?] pencil. They think that they can absorb it all and reproduce the information at will. Of course they will not. They cannot. One cannot memorise in the traditional sense because it is really difficult to empty our minds of everything and absorb everything we hear. Oh sure, there are people that can memorise long lists of things, numbers and dates of birth but these are unusual and very talented people who have honed their skills through constant practice. Lesser mortals like myself have to rely on technique to get further in life.
One day a totally nondescript, almost apologetic person came in to see me and asked me if I had trouble with my people remembering things and I confessed that my team were a bunch of geniuses that had had brain-replacement therapy done by substituting what the Almighty had granted them and replaced it with a sponge. Sponge because they hoped to absorb as much as they could. Actually sponge is full of holes so their brilliance rather backfired on them! So I have a dithering group of mindless twits that move about in an uncertain daze wondering what's up - or down. This gentleman said he would like to try and improve the situation and in consequence, I fell on his neck with whoops of joy and agreed on the spot.
Since he began on a day when there was no demand for our being elsewhere - any day actually - I thought I'd attend, though of course I did not really need to - but well... you know. He started by talking of something he called graphic or diagrammatic memoranda by which I gathered he meant drawing pictures of what one thought about a subject. He then proceeded to read out of one of the most boring things ever written by man, woman or beast. We were all so busy yawning that we missed half of what he said though some of us actually wrote down a couple of totally forgettable things. He then introduced us to something he called `fan diagrams'. This involved the noting down of the first main point in a small area, say a small oval on a page and then taking several subordinate points that elucidated the central thought in radiating spokes around it. He told us that this was also sometimes called mind mapping, since every individual would listen and write down the information the way he valued it and each fan diagram would be uniquely the product of the individual that made it - hence lending force to the term Mind Map, (which is now, he said, a copyrighted name). Fan Diagrams do not follow the same principle as conventional listings. The sub-points radiating away from the central thought would be as important to the main point as they are close to it. The farther away, the less important they are. Every time a new point is made a new central thought is encircled and fresh radial lines fan around them. Conventional note taking is cumbersome because while you are scribbling down what you think is an important point, the speaker has already moved on and you miss what is said. In fan diagrams, this `signal drop' is not possible unless the note taker faints.
He went on to show us - I mean them - how such techniques are good for meetings when you are asked to sum up, even when researching when you can stitch together many ideas under the umbrella of a central thought on a single pace. He said it could be used in problem solving too when several solutions could be thought of, and then links discovered between them till the problem was resolved. Besides, once the linkage is established, they could then be stitched together to list a structure that could then be the basis of the terminal report. The best part was the experiment that he demonstrated to us thereafter. He asked us to look at and memorise our fan diagrams. This was really not difficult so we did and then when we were asked to draw it out again we discovered that were all able to do so with 100% accuracy. Such diagrams, he said, lend themselves easily to memory since we created the `pictures' and were therefore able to reproduce them at will. The theory here is that the more parts or senses that are involved with a memory, the easier it is to remember the structure. Well, my team is the ace team today and it is all due to this wonderful person who told us - I mean them - how to do it. And truthfully, it has helped me stay awake through many meetings that resembled a convention of snails and tortoises.
ABHIMANYU ACHARYA
abhimanyu@india.com
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