Information Mapping: why do I rave about it?
Posted by Andrew Jackson on Thu, Jun 25, 2009 @ 12:00 PM
I guess to answer that question, I have to go back quite a few years to when I was at university. I studied English Literature. This involved 3 years of reading almost every major work of literature ever written (the nice bit) and writing essays about those works of literature (yuck).
Really, I hated it. In fact not only that, but I used to dread it, too. All those ideas in my head meet the essay question I'm supposed to answer. Car crash waiting to happen!
I never knew where to start, I never knew how much to write in a paragraph, I always struggled to move from one paragraph to the next. I never knew where to end. Basically, the essays were a mess. Occasionally, I would pull something out of the bag and manage to write a good essay, but mostly my efforts were mediocre.
Fast forward to the mid-nineties and there I am sitting in a training room learning Information Mapping. What a revelation. Suddenly, I discover there is an easy-to-learn, easy-to-use approach to structuring your ideas and getting them on paper (or on screen). If only I'd known about this when I was at university. I probably would've ended up with a first!
And that moment, in that training room, is for me, what all the fuss is about. Information Mapping is not weird or wonderful or complex or super-clever.
It's about clarity. On a personal level, it's about cutting through the fog of stuff you usually have in your head and giving you a way to provide your audience with the information they need in an appropriate quantity, structure and format.
Some years later, during one of my meetings with Robert Horn, I asked him what had motivated him to research and develop the Information Mapping approach. Funnily enough, it was the student essays he had to mark early in his career. 'There had to be a better way', was how he summed up his despair and frustration.
Thankfully, there is a better way and he discovered it!