Make fishbone diagrams

You can now make fishbone diagrams using MindMup. Fishbone diagrams, also known as Ishikawa or cause-and-effect diagrams, help identify the root causes of a problem. Shaped like a fish skeleton, the diagram has a “head” representing the problem and “bones” for categories like people, processes, and equipment. Causes are mapped along each bone, branching into sub-causes. This visual tool aids in brainstorming, pinpointing issues, and understanding complex problems in a structured way.

All the usual keyboard and productivity shortcuts that MindMup brings work on these new diagrams as well, allowing you to quickly brainstorm and collaborate on root cause analysis.

Limitations

Some visual aspects of other diagram types, such as line labels, arrows and manual positioning are currently disabled for fishbone diagrams. In general, fishbone diagrams already contain lots of text, and adding more to the labels would make things too busy. We recommend explaining details in the text of the nodes themselves.

Getting started

Just select one of the fishbone templates from the File/New menu to create a new diagram, or switch an existing mind map to a fishbone diagram by selecting View/Map Theme menu.