Not-Standardized Project Management : IQTELL, Directory Opus, etc.

Posted by Fredy
Nov 2, 2011 at 01:51 PM

I forgot :

A possible (co-) explanation for this “room-to-breathe” phenomenon in mind mapping progs and the ubiquitous use of just some MS Word files, might be that well-known limitation of your mind - depending on important parts of your IQ - not being able to “held in waiting” - let alone process !!! - more than some 3, 4, 5 - and only for the most intelligent people out there, more than 5 - elements, 5 being VERY good indeed, myself being somewhere between perhaps 3 and 4 - the “common knowledge” of it being currently 7 has been straightened out long ago, and my personal assumption is that those who can treat 7 elements, more or less, are the ones that get 7- and 8-digit revenues as CEO’s.

So, when your eyes wander upon a mind map or anything - business graphics in general -, your range of vision goes more or less hand in hand with the number of (neighbored) elements in your graphic, and you feel (inconsciously) competent with dealing with those 3 or 4 (or perhaps 7, in your case) elements you concurrently see and “ingurgitate” to some level (triggering associative “thinking” / “remembering” / “low-level searching” in your mind, with these 3/4 / 7 elements being the search terms if you allow my staying in this picture) ; hence the thinking-enhancement effect of graphics (for everybody, not just for artists).

Whilst on the other hand, with material presented in a crowded, obviously (!) hierarchically, “embarras de richesse” way (= just too many material available, so there’re getting decisional problems in your way), you’ll probably inconsciously feel incompetent = incompetent to handle all this oversupply spontaneously, and indeed, you couldn’t !

So, finally, it’s not so much the white space “behind” the elements of a mind map that trigger your thinking process (even if it certainly helps), but it’s the compactness, stuffing too many elements in too little a space - and thus getting into your core field of vision, and by this triggering the “OMG effect” - “how ever to handle this ?” - -, of usual outliners that interferes with any “creational” thinking, and this cramped presentation of too many elements your brain cannot process, just by the look of any traditional outline, might put off possible outlining prospects.

The same phenomenon goes into the conventional piece of wisdom, “don’t make lists any longer than 7 elements”, with 7 elements already too many if it were really for that ; depends on the list, alphabetically (or geographically or in whatever order) ordered but lenghty lists of clients, prospects or spare parts are perfectly sane, especially if you make plenty use of divider lines, whilst, for thinking enhancement, deep-levelled jungles of multiple subtrees, even when you carefully observe the rule “no list longer than 7/6/5/whatever”, won’t do anything good for you.

(And PB/TB is badly constructed since it just superposes a (lately even directional again) arrow system upon another flat but monster mind map, by this pretending to be 3-dimensional, which it is of course not, since the management of such links will NOT gather NEW entities then - proposals of re-constructional help they answer with silence…)

No, sorry again, I won’t fall for false “evidence” anymore, I happen to think beyond.