I've been using the mind mapping tool MindManager for a little under a year, and in that time I have used it to help me design a class at Northwestern, take notes at a variety of events, and set up notes for a talk at BlawgThink with Jim McGee last month.
I ran a small workshop at Northwestern last weekend, and it seemed a perfect fit to test using mind mapping as the primary engine for flowing the discussion of the workshop. In developing the workshop, I worked with a colleague who doesn't have the software. However, she was able to use the free viewer to review the map, and I used the export-to-Word feature to give her a text version of the map. (She was happy with the viewer option.)
The workshop went smoothly enough, particularly as we were hoping for the workshop to be a discussion and the map was used as starting points and reminders for topics I wanted to touch upon. When there were specific graphics, those could be part of the mind map as well. In presentation mode, Mind Manager will center graphics on the screen with a simple click. Very nice. And when we decided to redirect the workshop midway through the day, it was a matter of simply selecting branches of the mind map in a slightly different order. (We could have even rearranged the branches, if needed.)
There is clearly more to learn, but I like mind mapping for exposing thinking patterns.