What is a Mind Mapping?
Mind mapping radiates ideas from a central concept outward into branches and sub-branches, capturing structure the way association actually works — nonlinearly. In projects it serves requirements workshops, risk identification, scope exploration, and retrospectives: fast capture first, organization emerging as you go.
It pairs naturally with affinity diagramming: the map generates and connects; affinity clusters and names. Both exist to get past the tyranny of the bulleted list.
Worked example
Kicking off a museum-exhibition project, the team mind-maps from the center: branches for visitor experience, artifacts and loans, security, climate control, marketing, accessibility. The "loans" branch sprouts "insurance" sprouts "courier requirements" — a scope item that has ambushed every previous exhibition, caught in minute twenty this time because association, not agenda order, was driving.