Tony Buzan, the British pop psychology author who popularised mind mapping as a way to organise information to help users solve problems, make decisions and study more effectively, says he will be spending 18 months writing 10 books. While writing a book may seem daunting to many, Buzan is unfazed. He says his books will be written by “unlocking vaults of knowledge and memory” through, of course, mind mapping techniques.
“According to Leonardo da Vinci, everything is connected to everything else. So, how many topics are there really?” he asks hypothetically.
Buzan published his first book Use Your Head in 1974. He recalls naysayers advising him against it. “People were saying, ‘Don’t write that book because you will be giving away your knowledge’. They thought I wouldn’t be able to write more books after that because everybody would already know what I was going to talk about,” he tells Enterprise during a recent visit to Singapore.
But within a month of its publication, readers were demanding books that elaborated on individual chapters in Use Your Head. Since then, Buzan has authored more than 130 books, published in 150 countries and available in 25 languages.
For his new books, he says he will write about the future and how the human race is progressing. “I can tell you that if it were a bleak future, then there will be no point in writing the books because by the time I finish writing, there will be nobody to read it,” he quips.
Managing the brain
One topic he hopes to address is information overload. During his travels, Buzan polls children aged five to nine on what their main problems at school are. “The main problems are usually memory and concentration, but since last year, children have been shouting out stress,” he says.
This stress stems from having to memorise large amounts of information. “Rote learning flows from the archaic history of the Industrial Age and that is beginning to change because a growing number of parents around the world are taking their children out of exam- based schools. They are saying they want their children to be intelligent and not robotic,” he notes.
Adults are not spared either as they are faced with copious amounts of information from Powerpoint presentations in the workplace. Buzan says such presentations are often loaded with information but presented with such rigidity and linearity that the audience often tunes out. “TGIF, or “Thank God it’s Friday”, is the most common phrase around the world. It really means ‘I hate my job’ and many institutions have surveyed the percentage of people who don’t like their jobs. On average, 87% of people don’t like their jobs. This is mainly because the jobs don’t stimulate the brain,” Buzan adds.
The way he sees it, the vast majority of the population and world leaders reckon we are living in the information technology age. And much like how the population was brought up to be workers during the Industrial Age, the population is now raised to think technologically. He says: “The information technology age has given us wonderful things like the television and the Internet. It has also given us the worst plague the world has ever had and it’s called information overload. We are on the edge of the cliff of destruction. When you have information overload, you have stress.”
To deal with the vast amounts of knowledge, organisations have developed knowledge management teams to gather and cluster information. For Buzan, the saying, “Knowledge is power” is a misnomer as knowledge is freely available anywhere in this age. He warns that people overlook something far more important, and that is managing the brain. “The brain uses certain skills to manage thought. It also has to manage multiple intelligences. So, you have to check all of those and the better those are managed, the better everything else is managed,” he states.
Buzan advocates exercise and a healthy diet in order to manage the brain well. He himself practices Aikido and is a mental games master. He is also adviser and coach of many different types of Olympic events. The four-man sculling team from the UK that he coached bagged the gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
He points out that most corporations do not help their employees in developing their intelligences by stocking boardrooms and pantries with unhealthy sweets and snacks. At the same time, companies usually provide employees with pens in either black or blue ink. He explains: “In the science of the brain, one colour is monochromatic and that is monotonous. And what do people say about monotony? Boring. When you’re bored, your brain tunes out and shuts down and it does this very successfully. That’s what the world is doing to itself.”
Good leaders
On the other hand, he highlights that good leaders ensure that their people develop multiple intelligences. According to Buzan, a good leader should have a vision, be honest, fair and persistent, and have a good sense of humour. “Humour is a survival mechanism. It’s good exercise and reduces stress,” he says.
He also emphasises that a good leader needs to learn how to mind map. A mind map is a diagram used to visually organise information. It is created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the centre of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to this central concept and other ideas branch out from there.
“Bad leaders chatter about education but they know nothing about it and they do nothing about it. Many unintelligent leaders have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on education and all they’ve done is dump all that money into linearity and exams, and reproduce increasingly non-thinking graduates,” he observes. “Mind mapping is the flower of intelligence and it manifests multiple intelligences. It helps all cognitive skills.”
Good leaders who have used mind maps include former president of Mexico Vicente Fox, who created an entire political party using the technique. Elsewhere, American politician and environmentalist Al Gore used mind maps for his book, The Inconvenient Truth.
One of Buzan’s favourite case studies is Singapore. According to him, the late Lee Kuan Yew was a good leader who exhibited multiple intelligences. At the same time, schools here teach children how to mind map. “Singapore has one of the world’s leading education systems and this started with an audit 50 years ago. It was a tiny island with 200,000 people then. Human resource is the prime resource and Singapore put all its energies to develop that resource,” he says.
Buzan believes the world is “on the edge of a new territory”. “The universe is 13.4 billion years old and human beings and the human brain have existed for around 100,000 years. In this context, the human race has just been born,” he notes.
To move forward, we must continue to be curious. Buzan says: “Geniuses make more mistakes than non-geniuses because they try and experiment. They learn from experience, mistakes and successes. Don’t beat the human race up. Give it credit for what it has already done.”
If the intelligences of the population are properly developed, he believes the information technology age will be superseded by the age of intelligence, which could last forever. “The leaders will be truly powerful because knowledge is not power. Intelligence is power and the use of intelligence intelligently is power,” he adds.
This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 707 (Dec 14) of The Edge Singapore.