Oh my God, that is a mess, isn't it?  With planning like that, Napoleon would have won.

And that illustrates handily the thing I really don't get. I see mindmapping mentioned on writer's blogs as a tool for plotting a novel and I scratch my head.

I get why mindmapping is useful for business where the most you're using it for is to create a marketing plan or a five-page report on why coffee futures are rising or whatever.  And it's wonderful for illustrating to a student how disjointed their paper on the Balkans will be and getting them back within the bounds of an assignment.

But for anything longer than that and certainly for anything multi-threaded like a novel you get a plate of spaghetti and the flowchart rapidly becomes useless.  To be certain, I think I would run the risk of an aneurysm if I tried to wrench my mind around that map of War &amp; Peace and I certainly wouldn't have a coherent novel at the end.