Manage talks and contracts with mind mapping

Introduction:

People use mind mapping widely in different business processes. In this article we will discuss two very important actions in any business – creating contracts and negotiating. Sometimes your business success depends on unsuccessful talks and incorrectly created contract. You can control both of these things using mind maps.

Talks and contracts with mind mapping

You are afraid of signing incorrect contract? Do you need to be sure that all questions, disagreements and topics have been discussed during negotiations? Use mind mapping to be sure. You can create clear picture of these important business things with mind maps.

By Jane Smorodnikova

Mind mapping can be used to increase effectiveness of almost all business tasks. This article is pointed to describe mind mapping for creating contracts and preparing negotiations. What is the common point of these two subjects? Of course, business partners. When you have a deal with your employee, you can spend some time for talking by means of persuasion or you can just order him something. But when you are talking with another organization’ official representative, you can be confronted by several difficulties, such us:

-          He does not owe to listen to you;

-          He can find only limited time for you;

-          Often he does not really need you or your organization and

-          He always has his own interests in talking with you.

There are many professional books about successful negotiations and many professional legal experts, but we will discuss simple and intuitive methods, which could help you with these non-trivial questions. Even non-professional can create correct contract or to give a resulting talk with business partner. First of all, he need to have a common view of the final goal and then, he need an easy way to keep all needed points clear and transparent, and to avoid forgetting some small and important point. Below we will tell you, how to use mind mapping for this, while working with contract creating and talk preparing and carrying out.

Contracts. From simple to difficult.

What parts does contract consist of?

First of all, you know the sides of the contract and its subject. Also you will often find such parts as:

-          settlement order;

-          sides’ rights and responsibilitys;

-          confidenciality;

-          act of God part;

-          resolution of case order;

-          special conditions, etc.

Then, of course, you should have a typical contract, according to activity of your organization. So, now you have a set of contract’ required parameters. It will help us in creating a template of a contract as a mind map. Main topic – is a briaf contract subject. Branches – are above-listed parts of the contract. It is very simple, isn’t it?

Now you can use this map to think about this contract. You see the whole structure, so, create subtopics for the main points, use comments to create a reminder about important things.

Then it is very useful during concordance – you are always have all things you want to concord, discuss and so on. But this is already about negotiations. We will talk about it in the next part.

Negotiations and talks with mind maps

Here you can use mind maps for two different tasks – work organization before meeting and work during negotiations.

Create a template map, which can be used for meeting preparations. Example structure for the template:

1.       Meeting

1.1.    Before meeting

1.1.1.       Define the subject

1.1.2.       Prepare discussion topic

1.1.3.       Reorganize and range topic list for order of the day creating

1.1.4.       Create day order

1.1.5.       Distribute day order for participants

1.1.6.       Create reminders for the meeting, for example “it is very important to end at the concrete time”.

1.2.    During meeting

1.2.1.       For each topic

1.2.1.1.             Bring into correlation with day order

1.2.1.2.             Define goal

1.2.1.3.             Focus on the main things

1.2.2.       Collect your ideas on the day order map (we will talk about this map later)

1.2.2.1.             Note ALL opinions

1.2.2.2.             Add new branches to talk about this another time

1.2.3.       Note common decisions and concordances

1.3.    After meeting

1.3.1.       Edit day order map

1.3.1.1.             Reorganize it

1.3.1.2.             Keep it up to date

1.3.1.3.             Mark out common points and contradictions

1.3.1.4.             Mark up dependencies and correlations

This template is a map of your steps – mark the steps you have done.

What is day order map? It is a working map with meeting subject as the main topic, discussion topics as branches and so on. This map is used on the meeting and after meeting. If you can use software tool for mapping – you can add date and time marks and use your map as a real day order. For example, it is easily possible with Mind Pad. Also you can use icons for marking and text on links for correlation definition.