On May 16, 2013 the Idea Mapping Workshop was the feature for the first full day of this retreat. A great time was had by all. I’ll be sharing more photos, idea maps and other updates from this event in future posts. In the meantime I want to say thank you to the PRA planning team — Colin Shannon (CEO), Patrick Spine (VP, Human Resources), and Linda Baddour (CFO). Finally a special thanks to Paul Guerrero from Meeting Protocol Worldwide whose attention to detail is unmatched.

PRA is a leading CRO (Clinical Research Organization).

In 21 years of teaching I have never had this happen before. The CEO of a large international company has me teaching a 1-day workshop to 60 of his top people from all around the globe very soon. They have no idea what they are walking into, and for those of you who have attended in the past — you know they will be surprised and have a blast while they learn.

I can’t tell you when or where and risk spilling the beans, but I will definitely share the outcomes after the workshop is over.

To be continued …

So I invite you to like either my Idea Mapping page or my Jamie Nast page.

We took an adventure to E. Wedel’s famous Chocolate Cafe where we sipped on three different recipes of liquid chocolate. The Korsak’s surprised me with a gift of E.Wedel’s hot chocolate mix!

This week I decided it was time to break into this delicious chocolate, but I couldn’t read the Polish instructions. So I called upon my friends for help. In response I received this Idea Map from a very clever Wojtek. I enjoy a good map that is both useful, fun and full of images! Thank you Korsak’s!

Wojtek Korsak is a fellow Idea Mapping expert and the owner and founder of Explorer-Consulting in Warsaw, Poland.

The top attached map was created by Drew (using Mindjet) and used to prepare an innovation award nomination presentation (using PowerPoint) to his Senior Management Team. The map was used to summarize how the innovation was conceived, what was innovative about Larimer County’s implementation of Fleet Services as a Utility, and what he believed the potential outcomes to be.

All the information in this map is somehow included in his presentation. In order to show you how he went from this map to an 11-slide PowerPoint presentation, I’m highlighting 4 areas on his map and sharing an image of how each one of the 4 was dropped into a slide.

For those of you interested in more details on how this map was used, I’ll let Drew tell you in his own words:

“Fleet Services at Larimer County traditionally performed the repair and maintenance on light duty (cars, pickups, vans, police cars) and heavy equipment such as road graders, bulldozers, and dump trucks.  The customer departments paid the cost of repairs, maintenance, and fuel and in most cases the County’s general fund paid for the replacement of the equipment.   Under the traditional model there were issues determining the cost of delivering services to our customers and defining the decision making process between Fleet Services and the customers.

Tim has developed a solid process to successfully teach Idea Mapping to his students. Tim takes the first two class periods to teach this tool to his students. Their first assignment is to create a map with “Who Am I?” as the topic. You can see many of those examples on this blog. Their second assignment is a take home assignment to create an idea map on their topic of choice. These examples are from this second assignment. The first one is about Kendra Moser’s trip to Ecuador, the second is Kendra Krall’s wedding plans, third is Katie Gaudian’s note from chapter 3 of her history class and lastly is Kat Block’s plans for her future. More of these here.

Sure wish I’d learned Idea Mapping when I was in college. Thank you Kurt Bearinger, Natalie Sims, and Nellie Nelson for sharing your maps!

A 3-person panel (comprised of Brandy Agerbeck @loosetooth, Karl Gude @karlgude, and Jamie Nast @jamienast) was given the topic “Paper vs. Online”.  Coming squarely down in Paper was Brandy, Karl held strongly to Online, and Jamie took the middle ground.  The whole thing was expertly moderated by Matt Pierce @mattpierce, host of The Forge.  That was then followed up by an interview with Ryan Coleman @ryancoleman on visual brainstorming.

These photos were from the Idea Mapping Breakout Session where 54 new idea mappers put their new skills to work. Here you can see them in action. Finally a big thanks to Paul who drove my PowerPoint  when we weren’t using the flip chart and markers!

Thought you might enjoy downloading this app to find deals at your local watering hole!