With the monumental volume of decisions being taken around the globe every day involving a myriad of simultaneous interests and factors, the importance of making time for thinking cannot be underestimated.

This can be in private, small groups, corporate environments or in the open for all to see. A huge difficulty is to find simple, effective and appealing ways of grouping and acting on these disparate thoughts and interconnections.

For those supporting philanthropic causes, the process of ensuring that high grade solutions have been achieved can be complex and convoluted.

At each stage along the way there is the need to measure. This goes beyond the relatively simple metric of money to include people, the environment and invisible ‘virtual’ components. At each stage complexity is added.

Additional layer are provided by the fact that a problem in one area of the world can easily require different solutions to similar ones in another.

Fortunately an overarching framework to align decisions and the management of resources exists in the form of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).  Although not perfect in scope and content, they are sufficiently cohesive and robust for different stakeholder groups to coalesce around when thinking about and making plans involving our future. In addition, thanks to philanthropy journals such as Alliance, the global awareness of the SDG framework continues to spread.

One of the valuable ways of bringing people and ideas together comes from themed philanthropy events. The collective brain power can be huge and precious. However life being what it is many thinking and collaboration opportunities fail to be taken up effectively – normally through the challenge of time constraints. What a joy it would be to see the risk of such waste kept to a minimum.

A potential solution exists. It comes in the form of a new 3D visual thinking software platform called Thortspace. Thoughts can be captured, shared and acted on with ease. The platform is being used already across a broad range of interest groups including, for example, business, politics, media, academia and personal wellbeing. It is used for problem solving, time-saving, knowledge capture, collaboration, education, training and more. Because of its visual nature and the flexibility in the way it can be used, the platform lends itself to cross-silo inter-group engagement.

It generates an interactive, space-rich, subject-specific view of content which is easy to use and allows you to pursue subjects at macro and micro levels. In addition it provides the ability to draw on researched information from other sources which can then be added to your own 3D space. Searching by word is easy as is use on multiple systems and devices of choice.

It can be shared and used for dynamic, collaborative team thinking. It is useful to those wanting to harness and share brain power at any time before, during or after an event.

The world of philanthropy has been presented with a most useful addition for engaging in the complicated decision making choices involving the most important plans for the planet.

Edward Hoare is founder of Universal Risk