MindManager and Flat-ilization
If “it’s a flat world after all,” MindManager Maps can be very helpful
In a grad school class about globalization, I joked with a classmate about the concept of “flat-ilization” – that perhaps the world is so globalized that it can once again be perceived as flat. And now Thomas L. Friedman has coined the term “flatism” in the most recent issue of the New York Times Magazine (registration required).
This is more or less a paradigm shift in thinking about globalization, in fact, Friedman is describing the exact same phenomenon, but put from the head to the feet, or, if you will, from globe to plateau. To highlight the contrast to globalization, I believe the term “flat-ilization” is actually more accurate, so let’s use it in the following.
What does Friedman mean when he talks about the “flattening of the world”? It’s mainly a rhetorical move. Friedman is correcting the language that has been somewhat misleading all these years. The effect of “flat-ilization” is the same as that of globalization: “When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate”.
Friedman identifies “six flatteners” that caused a “breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity” — six new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge: Outsourcing, offshoring, open-sourcing, insourcing, supply-chaining, and informing – which is “Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, now allowing anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.” All of these “flatteners” have created the new platform for collaboration: “It is this convergence — of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes for horizontal collaboration — that (…) is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early 21st century.”
So, what does this have to do with MindManager? Well, of course, maps are flat, too. If horizontal collaboration is flat, maybe the interface of this new collaboration should reflect this flatness instead of sending knowledge workers into a painfully global information limbo. And if the world isn’t flat, the MindManager map makes it flat — and brings everyone and everything on one and the same page.
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Director of Global Communications
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Reader Comments
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Posted April 7th, 2005, 6:04 am by Vincent Flanders
I love MindJet; however, there’s one thing about your blog I don’t like. Whenever you have a map image, you don’t make it a link to a bigger image — I can’t decipher what you have. Of course, it would be even better if you included a link to a MindJet map.
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Posted April 7th, 2005, 9:24 am by Tim Leberecht
Here you go!
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Posted April 20th, 2005, 10:41 am by Jack Krupansky
As 3-D visualization hardware and software and applications gradually become practical over the next 5 to 10 years, do you believe that it will not be adopted to any significant degree because most people really do “Think Flat”? Or, is all this “flatism” simply yet another example of marketing hype out of control? Isn’t the ubiquitous web hyperlink a perfect example of why “flat” really doesn’t work? Rather than trying to get everybody to “work on the same page”, shouldn’t we at least try to offer them methods and tools that exploit and even encourage diversity of views and approaches?
I’m willing to bet that your products are very capable of enabling non-flat “thinking” and collaboration.
Commerce and progress are like a set of pendulums, constantly swinging between commoditization (flat) and innovation (non-flat). The world needs both, but the extreme interest and focus on commodization (and flat) is, in my view, somewhat counterproductive.
I would also note that when I read some flat text or see a flat diagram, the first think I do is conceptually and visually convert it to non-flat. Am I the only one that does this?
I recognize that printing presses (and computer printer) and current computer display technologies are biased towards flat, but is that the goal or merely an artifact of old technologies?
In summary, “Think Non-Flat”.
Please give my comments some non-flat thought.
— Jack Krupansky
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Posted April 22nd, 2005, 8:44 am by Tim Leberecht
Here are my flat thoughts:
While it may be essential to spur non-flat thinking, the indeed somewhat flat reality is (at least mine): If you don’t flatten your thoughts, no one will share them.
A decade ago, I worked for a 3D-software company, dreaming of an immersive and democratic cyberspace as the ultimate “public arena” that Habermas had envisioned in a pre-Internet age. But the tough learning was: People don’t want 3D for information display because the computer technologies they grew up with - as you state – were all biased towards flat. This may be different for the next generation of knowledge workers who will be accustomed to acting in the virtual spaces of games, but it is certainly the case for those who represent the mainstream of business professionals today: The world is flat because desktops are flat. And business is not necessarily asking for more depth.
You write, “Rather than trying to get everybody to ‘work on the same page,’ shouldn’t we at least try to offer them methods and tools that exploit and even encourage diversity of views and approaches?” I would argue that working on the same page – as MindManager allows - does not result in a lack of diversity. On the contrary, the ability to be on a page at all and have your thoughts captured and shared with others might actually enhance inclusiveness and pluralism. At the end of the day, it depends on what you do with this page. Flatness is not uniformity: Think of ‘flat hierarchies’ built on leveled playing fields and how they empower everyone to get involved.
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