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If pictures are worth a thousand words, pictures are also worth a thousand ideas.

Cave dwellers had the original grasp of these proverbs when they etched petroglyphic recounts of hunts and other celestial odysseys onto the walls of their caves. Perhaps the pictures were the first training videos. Certainly each ancient graffito was drawn to communicate concepts. Most interpretations of these works of art suggest as much.

Since then, the methods for illustrating ideas have evolved to become known as mind mapping, among other helpful thinking tools like the Venn diagram, PERT chart, concept mapping, and many other types as wide as the imagination.

Mind maps are arguably one of the most efficient ways to get all of the ideas on a topic floating in the head of a person or the heads of a group of people down on paper to consider the ideas relationally.

Almost any doodler has likely, if not unwittingly, deployed the techniques of mind mapping while sketching out ideas in a decision-making process. I used the method for many years before I first heard the practice called mind mapping.

Mind mapping begins with a central idea represented by a circle or other object of any meaningful shape. The main element is typically drawn in the middle of the work surface with room left to expand related ideas around the main point. The iterative process challenges the participant to think creatively.

Each object contributes to the comprehension of the whole and is connected to other objects via lines. The lines are often labeled to describe how the connected objects are related. A full mind-mapped diagram can look like a kid's game board, each object with a meaning and relevant to the overall explanation of the game.

Free form and organic, mind mapping is the right-brained equivalent of the more formal and strict left-brained linear outlining. Mind mapping is a healthy informal precedent, expressing the concepts openly before squeezing them into the confines of a written outline.

Many people use mind mapping to replace traditional note taking, myself included. Porphyry of Tyros, a third-century scholar, used mind mapping methods to understand and explain Aristotle.

Tony Buzan, a British psychology author, is one of the people attributed with popularizing mind mapping in its modern contexts beginning with his own mnemonic use of the method in shorthand note-taking while in school - in fact he went on to trademark "mind maps."

I first observed the full power of mind mapping in synthesizing the brainstorming idea power of a group while in the enraptured audience of Pace VanDevender.

VanDevender was CEO of Prosperity Games at the time and was leading a diverse convocation of industrial and other leaders to develop new ways of productive interactions and relationships among them. VanDevender, now retired from Sandia National Laboratories, is one of the most brilliant and gracious scientist/thinkers in the world in my highest estimation.

That experience was also the first time I felt visceral about the word visceral, a word VanDevender often used to call forth the feeling found in connective meaning and to measure the value of a stated purpose.

Mind mapping, among other such tools, is especially apropos in today's networked and complex world. It is a quick nonlinear approach that helps us to extract meaning from otherwise chaotic situations whether in personal, family, or business environs.

Steve Walsh, a distinguished professor in the management of technology program at the University of New Mexico's Anderson Schools of Management, stresses the use of such thinking tools in his curriculum with his students.

People who know me will say I often frame ideas in the forms of pictures. Perhaps to a fault, though I argue that, indeed, a good mind mapped picture is worth a thousand ideas.

From the cave man forward, human progress is measured by our ability to adapt. To adapt adequately we must first understand.