Organizations all over the world need to find ways to innovate and uncover new revenue streams and service improvements. But innovation doesn’t have to be restricted to increased revenues; there is a complementary relationship between innovation and productivity, which can be just as beneficial internally.
Productivity And Innovation: Clashing Philosophies?
If looked at separately, productivity and innovation appear to be on two different ends of the spectrum. The former is task-centric, and all about management and efficiency; the latter is centered around ideation, exploring new perspectives, and an often intangible goal. Productivity is measured based on output versus the effort put into the task. When output is high without extra effort and expenses going in, then productivity is high. Spending too much on meager output is what most people call low productivity. This is where innovation comes in. Working on the same outcome in the same manner, and with the same tools, can boost productivity — but only to an extent. Employees can become unmotivated by sticking to the status quo, and it’s much more difficult — if not impossible — to improve products or services without some form of disruption or change. Innovation improves productivity through employee engagement, and by giving them an opportunity to work in a collaborative environment. By opening up processes to the whole organization, employees are given more room and flexibility to think out of the box, which can lead to profitable discoveries.
How Mind Mapping Helps
Mind mapping is a tool that aids innovation while boosting productivity for all those involved. Here are a couple of reasons why:
- Less mental fatigue. You can capture ideas from a meeting, interview, conference, or on-the-fly without feeling overwhelmed. The visual, as opposed to linear, representation helps you navigate ideas quickly and arrange them easily. When you use a software, this can be done even quicker with a few clicks of the mouse. Plus, when you return to your mind map, the context of your thinking can be quickly identified without scanning through a list or document to find key details again.
- Easy collaboration. It has been shown that people often come up with their best ideas when they work together. Instead of creating separate documents and trying to compile them, your employees can put a large array of ideas into one small visual field. New ideas which sprout up during brainstorming can be connected to existing ones. With mind mapping software, teams can create shareable maps, which beats file sharing and cloud-based documents.
Both productivity and innovation, therefore, can be optimized with planning. And they can lead to increased outputs of each other. So, how can you use mind mapping to increase productivity and innovation? MindManager is a tool that helps you achieve that. Organize ideas and information in a single view so you can see connections and draw conclusions quickly. Our visual framework helps improve understanding and retention. Information overload can lead to unnecessary stress and worse, loss of a winning idea. Our mind maps are easy to use and edit: just drag and drop to organize and prioritize tasks and information. And then, organize attachments, notes and hyperlinks to display information in a single view. This gives your team planning tools to execute a project successfully. Have questions? Try it out for free.