Are you someone who struggles with “Information Overload?”

Policies and practices are constantly changing. 

Laws are changing.

Regulations and government policies are constantly changing. 

And the piles of information that you just have to comprehend, absorb, and share with people just grows and grows. 

Are you putting in 12 hour days, 5 and even 6 days a week?

Bringing work home sometimes on weekends or evenings after a long exhausting day. 

Well, that’s what’s called, Information Overload.

How do we survive in a world of internets and webs, and TV, and media, and journals and magazines? In a way that we are able to utilize the information that’s coming to us in a global economy, in an effective way that makes a difference in the outcomes and competitive advantages we can achieve. 

That’s what this story is all about.

My experience with this started when I was a senior leader executive at IBM, and faced with government regulations, import and export regulations, currency exchanges, and how we were going to get money and products in and out of different countries. We also dealt with stacks of policies and procedures, and laws, and rules that were constantly changing. 

Sometimes I had to read them. 

Sometimes I had to write them. 

Sometimes I had to present them to my front line, sometimes I had to present them to my senior executive team. 

I called it, “the fight for survival.” 

How was I going to be able to endure all of this, be effective at my work, and get the results that my senior executives were demanding, that we needed to achieve in a global competitive market?

Fortunately for me, my CFO happened to see a seminar offered on creativity and how you can absorb information in the information overload world, and utilize that information in a productive way. 

Tony Dottino Course Co-creator with Tony Buzan "Inventor of Mind Maps"That seminar was being given by Tony Buzan, one of the worlds renowned experts on human intelligence and creativity - also known as "The Inventor of Mind Maps." 

After spending three days at that seminar, I came to realize there were skills that I could learn, there were tools I could utilize in my day to day operations that could actually help me absorb this information, process it in an effective way, get my front line folks engaged in utilizing their creativity and helping me put together presentations in one or two page mind maps that I could then present to my senior executives, get things approved, and move into the execution action stage of work. 

That was so empowering and transformational to me, that I eventually got to travel and train these skills across the world, and wound up with a President’s Award for “Teaching Excellence” and an IBM Chairman’s Award for “Leadership Excellence.” 

I left IBM after almost 28 years of a career, and started the Dottino Consulting Group. I’m the President of my own consulting company, and also the founder of the USA Memory Championship™.

Tony Dottino is the Founder of USA Memory Championship™

What I’ve learned over these 26 years of business, is how you can take tools and skills, with memory and mind mapping, and bring that to executives to lighten the load that they carry on their shoulders and help them be more productive, and actually get their personal life back on track. 

Sometimes when I’m talking to executives and I sit in their office and listen to some of their challenges and you see stacks of documents or approval signatures that they need to sign on to, policies that they need to review and revise, I can almost see myself sitting on the other side of the table and putting myself back into my IBM leadership position and feel that empathy for them, but more importantly, feel that I have a roadmap, or that I have a way of helping them overcome it. 

I always remember meeting with a senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at a major airline company, and sitting with this frustrated senior executive.

He said:

“How do I absorb all of the changes that are taking place within the airline. Industry? How do I get that out to my regional sales directors and Vice Presidents? How do I engage the frontline sales team in realizing the changes that they were going to need to make? And how do I grow the revenue in a constantly growing market that was demanding we reduce prices as opposed to the ability to increase them? How do I move people form the back of the plane to front of the plane? How do I get all of this done in an ever changing market that was constantly being competitive, and entering into price wars and competitive challenges?”

We sat down together and we designed what I would define as his very first mind map. 

And that mind maps was able to take what was going on in his mind, and out it onto paper in a holistic way that enabled him to see exactly what his strategies and his business plan was, how he could communicate that to his team, and how he could then mobilize them, and inspire them, engage their creativity, inlays of developing new market channels, and more importantly, increasing the revenue. 

The good news? 

It took us a few years, some of the obstacles: people looking at these one page documents with icons and pictures on it, asking:

Are we in grammar school again? 

Are we learning how to color and draw? 

We’re used to doing 12 to 15 page powerpoint decks.

And now, all of a sudden they were looking at a one page document that basically has the business plan and the company strategy all on one page and document.

Overcoming those objections took a little of time. 

It took a little bit of reeducation of people. 

It took a new way of looking at holistic information, and not having to go through line by line on power point slides. The results were clearly warranted and clearly worthwhile. 

$500,000,000 (half a billion) later it was clearly worthwhile. 

They generated half a billion dollars of additional revenues over a three year period of time. It put this airline on a whole different growth pattern in terms of what they could do. 

I also had the opportunity of working with Con Edison, a utility company in New York City (after the 9/11/2001 tragedies that we had). 

They wanted to know:

How could they absorb a massive project plan? 

How could they put together all the things that were necessary that they needed to get federal regulation and agencies to approve and how could they do it fast enough in a way that could get those approvals and the workers could then go back and do the work that they needed to do, to get the power lines and substations together, put all their pieces together, how could we do that?

Fortunately we had a couple of senior executives there that had been through mind mapping and we were able to sit down together and out down some of the core elements of what needed to be done on one project plans, and actions plans, that enabled them to then communicate to the regulatory organizations and get their approval on things to execute action plans that can get things to happen.

We also worked with a customer service organization that was looking at improving their customer satisfaction results. 

They wanted to know:

How could you get customer satisfaction results in away where customers and unhappy clients could immediately communicate with you in way that you could get the core issues of what was frustrating to them, so that the cpomapnf could learn how to better improve their service levels?

So how could you get people to talk in such an opened and candid way?

I always remember one of the senior executives said, “You know what, pre-formatting these on a mind map allowed people to talk to me in a way where I could just fill in these different branches of information, and see the whole picture. And what the customers (or the complainers) would feel is... You listened to me, you heard what I had to say.”

And so I’ve worked on this method for business-style mind maps over a number of years, with a focus on getting senior leaders to be able to

• absorb information quicker
• distill it into bite-sized pieces
• actually communicate to front-line staff, directors, and managers
• engage people’s creative solving processes 
• get people engaged and wanting to share their ideas in helping the company meet its critical goals, strategies, and business plans

It's always interesting when you first sit down with an executive and you start showing him colored pencils, or maybe on a laptop you can start drawing branches that have different colors on it, and then you look for icons that you can attach to those branches - when brings me back to a simple lesson: a picture’s worth a thousand words. 

So, if we can find what those pictures are, and we can put them on simple branches that we call, “a map of the mind,” wouldn’t that help the brain tap into its infinite creative powers? And then be able to help bring solutions to the table that much quicker. 

Who would argue with doing any of those things? 

Engaging people. 

Getting their creative thought processes inspired, enthused, and engaged. 

And then having them go out and execute plans that they actually developed. 

Which then creates what I call "buy-in and ownership," at every level of the organization, because they were part of the plan. 

Mind mapping is not the end all and the be all, but the tool to help the various thinking processes, the various problem solving processes, the creative solutions process. 

Mind Maps make a whole world of difference in how well you absorb information, how well you communicate that information, and how well you can utilize that information in your day to day activities.

And that’s what we’ve been doing, and what we want to share with each and every one of you - our online course, "Conquering Information Overload." 

We’ve distilled this course into five, 5 minute bite-sized pieces, so that if you can take 5 minutes, for the next 5 days (25 minutes total), you can master one of the most powerful tools for conquering information overload. 

We also give you 15 minutes of practice exercises at the end of each module, so that at the end of your five sessions, you will have 25 minutes of education followed within each segment a 15 minute practice ability that now makes you much more efficient at recording, retaining and communicating information. 

Within 25 minutes you’ll be able to communicate your messages much more effectively and much more powerfully.

You'll be able to communicate information so that it’s retained by the people that need to hear it and execute on it, they will then engage in much more of their own ownership, buy-in, and creative problem solving so you now have the direction and the action-plans necessary to move the agenda forward and focus on your business plans and focus on your strategy - so that they’re not just plans laying off to the side somewhere, but they’re actually actionable to where people are now buying into it. 

People will see the big picture of how all these parts come together. 

People will see how each piece fits into the holistic part of things. 

You’ll have a recording device of how you listening things, of how you read things. 

One thing I found out was that I was able to increase my reading speed by three-fold by learning how to take key thoughts and key ideas and put them onto a piece of paper in a way that facilitated my retention and my ability to recall and use that information.

And you know what the good news is? It’s only $7

Who reading this today, that’s got stacks of papers, looking to engage front line people, leadership levels at all parts of the organization, at all tiers of the organization, wouldn’t want to have more people brining solutions to the table then just the problems?

Who wouldn’t want to be able to absorb things in meetings, and look at key thoughts, and key ideas that are being discussed in those meetings, and be able to synthesize that in a much more powerful way, that is much more usable, who wouldn’t want to do that for $7?

Enroll in our online course, “Conquering Information Overload With Mind Maps,” and start to learn how you can personally manage information overload.

Make a difference in your organization and mobilize your whole team towards common outcomes and goals today.