Original article from the Flevy business blog can be found here: http://flevy.com/blog/strategic-planning-demystified-with-the-mindmap/ I use the Mindmap technique as a starting point in almost every exercise I give during business training courses. Prior to group games, participants are usually asked to spend the first two to four minutes of every exercise generating and organizing ideas on their own, and plotting them on paper in a Mindmap structure. This approach is very stimulating, indeed, when the course requires intense mental effort and creative thinking, such as the case with strategic planning. The Mindmap technique seems to act like a magic switch that instantly elevates the brain to higher levels of performance. Newcomers to strategic planning find it sometimes difficult to visualize why and how the vision translates into goals or objectives, and how goals translate into strategies, and how strategies end up in action plans, broadly speaking. People often confuse goals with strategies (although the concept of goal is where we are going and strategy is how we get there is clear to all), and do not comprehend how a strategy can be also considered as a goal when deriving action plans. A number of approaches were tried to facilitate the notion of how a strategy can become a goal, one using the following example: You want to go to a location in the city that requires a taxi. Your goal is the location and the taxi represents the strategy (means) to get there. Now for a moment you forget about where you are going, and your main concern (objective) is to find a taxi in the street. While waiting a friend drives by in his car and sees you, and tells you he is going to the same location, but you decline to join because you are busy waiting for a taxi, i.e. your main goal has become to find a taxi! Still, some people were not able to digest this abstract notion. The author has a published a number of innovative frameworks on strategy development on Flevy here

1. Strategic Planning Demystified with
the Mindmap
Contributed by Dr. Stephen Sweid on February 4, 2015 in Strategy, Marketing, & Sales
I use the Mindmap technique as a
starting point in almost every exercise
I give during business training
courses. Prior to group games,
participants are usually asked to
spend the first two to four minutes of
every exercise generating and
organizing ideas on their own, and
plotting them on paper in a Mindmap
structure. This approach is very

2. stimulating, indeed, when the course requires intense mental effort and creative thinking,
such as the case with strategic planning. The Mindmap technique seems to act like a magic
switch that instantly elevates the brain to higher levels of performance.
Newcomers to strategic planning find it sometimes difficult to visualize why and how the
vision translates into goals or objectives, and how goals translate into strategies, and how
strategies end up in action plans, broadly speaking. People often confuse goals with
strategies (although the concept of goal is where we are going and strategy is how we get
there is clear to all), and do not comprehend how a strategy can be also considered as a goal
when deriving action plans.
A number of approaches were tried to facilitate the notion of how a strategy can become a
goal, one using the following example: You want to go to a location in the city that requires a
taxi. Your goal is the location and the taxi represents the strategy (means) to get there. Now
for a moment you forget about where you are going, and your main concern (objective) is to
find a taxi in the street. While waiting a friend drives by in his car and sees you, and tells you
he is going to the same location, but you decline to join because you are busy waiting for a
taxi, i.e. your main goal has become to find a taxi! Still, some people were not able to digest
this abstract notion.

3. The author has a published a number of innovative frameworks on strategy development on Flevy here .
Things metamorphosed instantly when the Eureka stroke: Why not start the Mindmap with
the “vision” placed in the core and work your way outwards, drawing the different goals to
realize the vision, and then drawing the different strategies for each goal, and reaching
finally in the outskirts the action plans to realize each strategy?
In short, in the center you have the vision (the dream), and the farther out you go you get to
the real world with the action plans. Hence in the center you have the dream, and in the
outskirts you see the many small tasks that you need to perform on the ground to realize
your dream. More or less, you only need to consider the points in the circumference of the
Mindmap structure, which represent the clear actions to take.
To make it even plainer, a down-to-earth example can be used to apply the notion: Your
vision is to “buy a house.” You plug in the center “buy a house”. Then you ask yourself: What
things need to be considered and realized to fulfill this dream: Specifications, Money,
Location, Search, Timing, etc.? Each point branches out automatically into options, and
each option breaks down finally in the periphery into things to do.

4. By applying the Mindmap notion for the preparation of strategic plans only very few people
kept questioning the logical progression from vision to action plan, and how a strategy can
be also considered a goal from the point of view of the action plan. With the Mindmap
approach the relationship between the vision and action plans became very plain.
This experience is most probably not new, indeed when it comes to people who use
Mindmap software in their daily life for preparing business plans and other. Still, the
sharing of this experience might be interesting to people who did not yet see strategic
planning from the Mindmap perspective. The usually feared strategic planning concept
becomes more or less kids play when using the Mindmap.
Evidently the strategic planning process involves much more than the plain logical
sequence. I have helped prepare many strategic plans, and have gone through the different
complex evaluation and implementation steps with the shared involvement of management
and stakeholders etc. Nevertheless, one cannot deny that the notion is compelling, i.e. that
in the center you have the vision, and the action plans are waiting to be picked in the
periphery!

5. About Dr. Stephen Sweid
Dr. Stephen M. Sweid is a business and innovation consultant and trainer, with over 20 years consulting
experience on the international scene: Europe, USA, Middle East, and Far East. He has involved as
expert consultant in technical assistance projects of international organizations as well as in consulting
projects commissioned by multinationals. He is also an author on Flevy, specializing in breakout strategy
methodologies: view his documents here .

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