It’s now time to collect and create information. Resist the temptation during this initial phase to sit down with presentation software; it’s not quite time for that yet.

The subject of this chapter is generating ideas through a variety of techniques. The first, most obvious idea that comes up is not usually the best one. You need to proceed tenaciously, continuing to generate ideas related to the theme until all the possibilities are exhausted. Often, your best, most clever ideas won’t appear until the third or fourth round.

You’ll use a mental process called divergent thinking, which permits the creation of ideas to proceed in every imaginable direction. It encourages the development of content that’s new and original. This phase is messy, so set neatness aside and just stay in this unstructured space while you scout for new ideas and uncover existing ones. Broadening your search to increase
the number of possibilities allows for unexpected
breakthroughs, so freely explore every idea—
and don’t make judgments!

• Idea collection: If you don’t want to start from scratch, you can review presentations created by your peers; but there is a lot more information out there. Echoing what others have already said isn’t the best way to establish a connection with your audience.

It’s fine to collect ideas that are readily available, but better to purposefully mine all the other relevant resources for inspiration.

When prospectors pan for gold, they scoop up a pan full of dirt and gently agitate it until the gold, which is heavier, sinks to the bottom. They don’t know in advance if any given pan will yield a gold nugget, so they collect “dirt” from many locations. It’s like the idea collection phase. Examine industry studies, data from competitors, news articles and blogs, surveys—everything. Search both deep and wide, gathering as much data as you can from competitors’ documents, so you’ll be able to develop a position that differentiates you from the crowd. Learn everything you can about your subject, and extend your search into tangential areas for additional insights.

• Idea creation: Creating new ideas is different from collecting ones that already exist. To succeed you should be curious, persistent, and willing to take risks. You need to think instinctively—from your gut—and let yourself be guided by your intuition.

Turn to your creative side for ideas that no one has ever associated with your big idea before—and even ideas that have never existed. Accept that when you probe the limits of what’s possible, you’ll be working in a bit of a fog. It’s impossible to see the future clearly at first. Stay open-minded and remain willing to explore the unknown. You’re experimenting, risking, dreaming, and creating new possibilities.

Grab a sheet of paper or a stack of sticky notes and jot down everything you can imagine that supports your idea. The goal is to create a vast amount of ideas, and you’ll be prompted to add even more over the next several pages! But don’t worry; you’ll filter, synthesize, and categorize all of them and craft a meaningful whole later on.

Now that you have begun to collect and create content, this first batch of brainstormed content might be primarily comprised of facts. Facts are one type of content to collect—but they’re not the only type needed to create a successful presentation. You must strike a balance between analytical and emotional content. Yes, emotional. This might not be a step with which you’re comfortable, but it’s an important one nonetheless.

Aristotle claimed that to persuade, one must employ three types of argument: ethical appeal (ethos), emotional appeal (pathos), and logical appeal (logos).¹


Facts alone are not sufficient to persuade. They need to be complemented with just the right balance of credibility and content that tugs at the heartstrings.

Stating fact after fact in an hour-long presentation doesn’t let your audience know why these facts are important. Use emotions as a tool to bring emphasis to the facts so they stand out. If you don’t, you’re making the audience work too hard to identify the decision they are to make. Staying flat and factual might work in a scientific report, but simply won’t work for the oral delivery of persuasive content.

ETHICAL APPEAL

Connect with the audience through shared values and experiences. Create the right balance of analytical and emotional appeal; this will bolster your credibility. The audience will feel connected to and have respect for your idea.

LOGICAL APPEAL

Develop a structure to keep 
the presentation intact and 
help it make sense. Make a claim and supply evidence 
that supports the claim. It is necessary to use logical 
appeal in all presentations.

EMOTIONAL APPEAL

Stimulate your audience through appeals to their feelings of pain or pleasure. When people feel these emotions, they will throw reason out the window; people make important decisions based on emotion.

Randy Olson's Four Organs of Communication ³

ANALYTICAL APPEAL
ONE THE HEAD
The head is the home for brainiacs. It’s characterized by large amounts of logic and analysis. When you’re trying to reason your way out of something, that’s all happening in your head. Things in the head tend to be more rational, more “thought out,” and thus less contradictory. “Think before you act” are the words analytic types live by.

EMOTIONAL APPEAL
Spontaneity and intuition reside down in these lower organs. They are at the opposite end of the spectrum from cerebral actions. And while they bring with them a high degree of risk (from not being well thought through), they also offer the potential for something magical.

TWO THE HEART
The heart is the home for the passionate ones. People driven by their hearts are emotional, deeply connected with their feelings, prone to sentimentality, susceptible to melodrama, and crippled by love. Sincerity comes from the region of the heart.

THREE THE GUT

The gut is home to both humor and instinct (having a gut feeling about something). You’re a long way away from the head now, and, as a result, things are characterized by much less rationality.

People driven by their gut are more impulsive, spontaneous, and prone to contradiction. Gut-level types say, “Just do it!” Things that reside in the gut haven’t yet been processed analytically.

FOUR THE GROIN
At the bottom of our anatomical progression is the groin. Countless men and women have risked and destroyed everything in their lives out of passion. There is no logic to these organs. You are a million miles away from logic in this region, and yet the power is enormous and the dynamic universal.

In most organizations, the tendency is to generate content from the head, because rational, analytical thinking is trusted and rewarded. Most people shy away from the emotional regions (heart, gut, and groin). But these less rational regions are the source of the passions, hunches, and even scientific hypotheses that lead to the creation of big ideas.

If you want to communicate powerfully to the broadest audience, you must learn to communicate “from the bottom up.” Okay, sex appeal may not have a place in your presentation. But gut-feel and emotion definitely belong. Many decisions are made on instinct or from the heart, including the decisions of your next investor! But while it helps to move down from the analytical region, you shouldn’t abandon it completely. The analytical types in your audience will want rational proof, and if it’s absent, your credibility could be ruined.

What is it like to create presentations from your whole self—both analytical and emotional?

Begin by setting aside the spreadsheets and matrices and imagining what could be. Let your lower regions guide you on an exciting adventure. Don’t allow yourself to feel silly as you imagine the unknown. The ideas you generate may be riskier, but they will also be bolder, more innovative, and more interesting. Once you’ve explored this unfamiliar territory, use your head to analyze what you’ve turned up. As you proceed, move back and forth from the head to the gut to be sure that you’re achieving a balance.⁴

“Emotions and beliefs are masters, reason their servant. Ignore emotion, and reason slumbers; trigger emotion, and reason comes rushing to help.” Henry M. Boettinger⁵

People are naturally attracted to opposites, so presentations should draw from this attraction to create interest.

Communicating an idea juxtaposed with its polar opposite creates energy. Moving back and forth between the contradictory poles encourages full engagement from the audience.

When you take a strong and clear position you create the opportunity for audience members to come up with a strong opposite position, creating contrast. The odds are good that any time you make a claim, there is someone in the audience who supports a counter claim. Obviously, you believe your point of view is the right one—but others are likely to disagree.

Establish the gap between what is and what could be using contrast. Most people take the obvious approach of contrasting the world as it is today (or was historically) to what it could look like tomorrow. But it could also be “what the customer is like without your product” versus “what the customer could be with your product.” Or “what the world looks like from an alternate point of view” versus “what the world looks like from your point of view.” The gap boils down to any contrast you present between where the audience is now, and where they could be if they accept your perspective.

Presenting differing points of view and perspectives isn’t just a case of being thorough. It’s interesting to audiences—and there’s proof.

In a 1986 article in the American Journal of Sociology, John Heritage and David Greatbatch analyzed 476 political speeches in Britain and studied what preceded the applause.

They were interested in understanding, for example, why the response to one speech was total silence, while other speeches received applause almost twice per minute. What factors were appealing enough to the audience to evoke an actual physical response (clapping)? Their conclusion, based on the study of over nineteen thousand sentences, was that contrast plays a clear and important role in generating audience response. Nearly half of the instances when the audience applauded were directly linked to a point in the speech where the speaker was communicating a contrast.⁶

The following exercise will help broaden your own perspective and create room for you to consider and address the audience’s alternate beliefs. Confronting their perspective gives you credibility; you’ll even hear opponents say things like, “Wow, that was thoroughly thought-out.”

Create Contrast

Revisit the ideas you’ve generated up to this point. For each one there will be a contrasting idea that’s inherent to it. An intelligent rebuttal can exist for each idea you present. Even though you may not include them in your preparation, it’s important to know what they are and understand them.

You can use the columns of contrasting elements on the next page as a jumping-off point for exploration. The majority of your ideas will probably belong in one of the two columns. Study the elements in the columns and brainstorm new ideas you haven’t yet thought of. For each point of view you’ve established, create an opposing point of view. Move from the top of each column to the bottom, and then repeat the process from the bottom up. This can help trigger even more ideas. When you have completed the exercise, you should have a solid list of contrasting ideas.

Contrasting the commonplace with the lofty transforms audiences toward what could be. These thematic ideas are what creates the shapeliness of the up-and-down pattern in the presentation form. 

Up to this point, you’ve been collecting information and generating ideas. Now it’s time to give meaning to those ideas. To transform static, flat information into something that’s dynamic and alive, you’ll employ the medium of stories. Stories reshape information into meaning.

When the brain processes information it attaches meaning to that information. This process helps us put information into categories, reach decisions, and make determinations about what things are worth. People value relationships—and even material goods—based on the meaning they evoke.

If you try to persuade your audience by reeling off the features and specifications associated with your topic, whether it’s software or philosophy, your presentation won’t have meaning—not until you include a human in the mix. A medical device is a good example. The attribute that brings meaning to it is not its clean design or the strength of the alloy—it’s the fact that it saves lives.

Its features only become truly valuable when your audience sees how they impact human lives. Ask yourself if there’s a story that conveys how the device is used to save a life, or perhaps a doctor’s valuable time. That’s where the meaning lies.

Stories help an audience visualize what you do or what you believe; they make others’ hearts more pliable. Sharing experiences in the form of a story creates a shared experience and visceral connection.

The rest of this chapter focuses on how to make information meaningful and, as a result, make the audience more receptive to the ideas you are communicating.

“Stories are the currency of human relationships.” Robert McKee⁷

I’m sure you have items lying around in your garage that you keep because they’re precious to you, even though they’d be meaningless to anybody else. I have those items, too.

At the time my Gram passed away, there was nothing in her home of much material value. She was a quick-witted lady who lived a simple, non-pretentious life in a small house built near an orchard and won awards for the poetry she wrote. When it came time for the dreaded task of dividing up her belongings, I knew exactly what I wanted: it was a small, stained teacup. This trinket was precious to me, although it wouldn’t be worth a dime at a yard sale. I didn’t want it for its design or its craftsmanship. I wanted it because of the way I used it. I would visit Gram and sip from that cup for hours at a time while she told stories to me. The monetary value of that cup was nothing. But to me, it was priceless.

The value of one’s belongings or even their life is not based on what it physically is; the real value comes from the meaningfulness associated with it by another person.

Personal stories are an important part of most great presentations. There will be times in your presentation when you want your audience to feel a specific emotion. One way to do this is to talk about a time when you felt that very same emotion. This technique establishes a connection between you and the audience that’s sincere and credible. A catalog of personal stories related to various emotions can be a helpful resource.

One instinctual way to recall stories is to reflect upon a timeline of your life. You can go year by year, or cluster the years into phases like early childhood, elementary age, middle school, high school, college, career, parenting, grandparenting, and retirement.

There are other ways to recall useful memories besides the chronological approach. Disrupting the chronological flow can lead you to a deeper—and possibly dormant—group of stories. Instead of focusing on chronology, focus on people, places, and things. While exploring these three areas, draw sketches based on your memories and make notes about the emotions 
they trigger.

• People: You can call up relational memories simply by making lists of people you’ve known. Begin with a hierarchical family tree that shows the conventional familial links. Then, go beyond those links and connect your relatives to one another based on relationships or situations where they have interacted in some way. You can also sketch people who have influenced you, and explore relationships you’ve observed such as teacher/student, employer/employee, friend/friend, or enemy/enemy. The power dynamics in these relationships can generate exciting stories, so recall the feelings and think through the relational dynamics you have with the people in your list.
• Places: Recall spaces where you’ve spent time and sketch them. These could be your home, your yard, your neighborhood, an office where you worked, a church you attended, a sports stadium, places where you went on vacation—any space, including virtual spaces. Then, use these memories to create spatial recollections. For example, mentally walk from room to room, recollecting and drawing as many details as possible. You’ll “see” things you’d forgotten.

This process will trigger memories of long-forgotten scenes, scents, and sounds. Sketching allows you to “change gears” and access other parts of your mind and body, allowing you to surface more memories.

• Things: Make a list of the things you’ve owned that are valuable to you. It’s not important whether or not they were expensive. What counts is their emotional significance. Then ask yourself what’s the story behind these things that make them so precious to you. Do you cherish an old beat-up car because that’s where you had your first kiss? Or a teddy bear because it stayed with you in your bed after you had your tonsils taken out? Draw pictures that show these items in the environment where you usually found them with as much detail as possible. This will evoke even more memories and feelings. Sketching your memories is a wonderful aid to recalling and classifying stories. If the idea of sketching makes you uncomfortable, you can look for images online or in magazines to represent your stories.

The point is to create visual triggers for memories and then write down as much as you can—giving special attention to how you felt throughout the story. Then, whenever you have to relate a personal anecdote with conviction, you can refer to this collection of stories.

When I get creatively stuck, I bounce back and forth between writing and visualizing. This process sparks new ideas, metaphors, or visual explanations.

Once I needed a story for a presentation to convey remaining calm under pressure. I wanted to pull from an actual childhood memory. Instead of making a chronological timeline of my youth, I sketched the floor plan of the house where I lived as a little girl to trigger visual memories. As I traveled mentally from room to room, I recalled dormant memories of a lost turtle, stage productions in the basement, and other vivid images.

But most importantly, I found my story. While drawing the floor plan of the upstairs, a memory of my four-year-old little sister, Norma, came flooding in as I sketched a closet door. She’d accidentally locked herself in the closet. The lock was made in the early 1900s and was on the inside of the closet. It had a difficult two-step process that involved turning a dial and moving a lever sequentially to open it. I felt helpless and clawed at the door from the outside while she screamed on the inside. My grandfather ran off mumbling something about finding the ax. Images of a bloody mess shot through my mind; I had to do something. I quieted Norma down enough to explain the choice of having Grandpa hack the door down or calming down and listening to my instructions. On her tippy toes, she carefully turned the knob, pressed the switch and was freed just as Grandpa ran back into the room. I knew she could do it but only with calm, persistent determination. The story worked perfectly!

Stories strengthen presentations by adding meaning. Used well, stories, analogies, and metaphors help create significance and stimulate the senses. Stories can be one sentence long or weave through an entire presentation as a theme.

Stories are easy to remember and repeat. When you present information in an anecdotal form you add an emotional charge. Stories are also a more digestible format for information. The template on the following page is a condensed version of The Hero’s Journey⁹. You can embellish this template and add as many details as you like, but the fundamental structure remains sound. Think about what types of information help illustrate your point best and then try to come up with ways to present some of that.

When
Once upon a time
in 1993
Two months ago
Years ago
In ten years

Transition
there was
I heard about
I bought
I saw
there will be

Who/What
a manager
a person (name)
a computer
a car
an event

Where
in marketing
in Singapore
on eBay
in a garage
somewhere

Context
At the time
This was happening

Conflict
Which put us in conflict with
We knew that couldn’t continue
The results weren’t acceptable

Proposed Resolution
So
We tried this

Complication
(Optional but effective)
What risks were there?
Were you worried?
What if it failed?

Actual Resolution
In the end … (doesn’t
have to be positive)

MIP (Most Important Point)
What’s the moral or core message?

Hop to It

Technology has no meaning unless you understand how people use it and benefit from it. This often creates problems for presentations about technology. Companies tend to emphasize the product and its features, instead of focusing on how it can make users’ lives better.

Take, for example, the original slide you see to the right and listen to the original script. At first glance it seems to describe how the technology can help people, but it’s actually just a laundry list of features.

The script is accurate, succinct, and completely devoid of charm or character. It answers the questions “what” and “how” while completely ignoring the “why.” In other words, technology is capable of many things—but audiences need to be given a reason to care.

To give them that reason to care, use a story. Paint a picture that includes a human element to which they can relate; tell them “why.” Eventually, you can pull back the curtain to reveal the inner workings of the technology, but only after you’ve got them hooked. A sure way to lose an audience is to dive into an explanation of how a magic trick works before you’ve amazed them by performing the jaw-dropping trick itself.

To the right, the original presentation is transformed by capturing how Cisco’s technology helped a small businessman become more agile and smart in managing his business.

When your company’s tagline is “the human network,” telling how humans benefit from this network is important. Weaving it into a story with a real character is even better.

Numbers can be captivating if you move beyond just spouting the data. According to Now You See It author Stephen Few, “As providers of quantitative business information, it is our responsibility to do more than sift through the data and pass it on; we must help our readers gain the insight contained therein. We must design the message in a way that leads readers on a journey of discovery, making sure that what’s important is clearly seen and understood. Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely on you to give them a clear and convincing voice.”¹²

Numbers rarely speak for themselves. How big is a billion? How does that figure compare to others? What causes the numbers to go up or down? You can leave it up to individual interpretation, or you can explain the bumps, anomalies, and trends by accompanying them with narrative.

There are a few ways to explain the narrative in the numbers:

• Scale: Nowadays, we casually throw around profoundly large (and minutely small) numbers. Explain the grandness of scale by contrasting it with items of familiar size.

WaterPartner.org’s 2008 animation: “This year, 1 white girl will be kidnapped in Aruba, 4 will die in shark attacks, 79 will die of Avian flu, 965 will die in airplane crashes, 14,600 will lose their lives in armed conflict, 5,000,000 will die from water-related disease. That’s a tsunami twice a month or five Hurricane Katrinas each day, or a World Trade Center disaster every four hours. Where are the headlines? Where is our outrage? Where is our humanity?”

• Compare: Some numbers sound deceptively small or large until they’re put into context by comparing them to numbers of similar value in a different context.

Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini’s 2010 CES Presentation: “Today we have the industry’s first-shipping 32-nanometer process technology. A 32-nanometer microprocessor is 5,000 times faster; its transistors are 100,000 times cheaper than the 4004 processor that we began with. With all respect to our friends in the auto industry, if their products had produced the same kind of innovation, cars today would go 470,000 miles per hour. They’d get 100,000 miles per gallon and they’d cost three cents. We believe that these advances in technology are bringing us into a new era of computing.”

• Context: Numbers in charts go up and down or get bigger and smaller. Explaining the environmental and strategic factors that influence the changes gives the numbers meaning.

Duarte Founder Mark Duarte’s Vision Presentation: When rolling out the 2010 vision, Mark showed a graphic depicting four bold strategic moves the organization had taken every five years since its founding twenty years ago. He explained how each strategic span of five years formed the corporate values. Then, he overlaid historic revenue trends over the same five-year increments showing how Duarte weathered each economic storm, emphasizing the role each strategic surge created in growth and opportunity. There was little resistance in understanding why the next five-year plan was worth supporting.

Telling the narrative implied in the numbers helps others see the meaning of the numbers.

Now that you’ve amassed all the analytical and emotional content possible, it’s time to narrow it down. Many of the ideas are unique and were possibly fascinating to uncover. But you can’t say it all—and no one wants to hear it all.

The ideas need to be filtered down to the points that succinctly support your big idea. The pages in this chapter have walked you through divergent thinking by generating ideas. You collected factual and emotional content and considered contrasting perspectives.

Now it’s time for some convergent thinking. Divergent and convergent were identified by J. P. Guilford in 1967 as two different types of thinking that occur in response to a problem. Divergent thinking generates ideas, while convergent thinking sorts and analyzes these ideas toward the best outcome.

So hopefully, all the ideas you just generated give you some great creative choices to sift through.

In his book Change by Design, Tim Brown says, “Convergent thinking is a practical way of deciding among existing alternatives. Think of a funnel, where the flared opening represents a broad set of initial possibilities and the small spout represents the narrowly convergent solution.”¹⁴

You may feel that every idea in your funnel is insightful and riveting. It took a ton of time to generate them! But now it’s time to sort and organize them—and you’ll need to kill some of them off. Kill them off? Yes; and the best

filtering device you have to decide which ones must go is your big idea itself. Revisit it, and eliminate any idea you’ve generated that doesn’t clearly support your one big idea.

It’s a violent creative process to construct ideas, destroy them, group them, regroup them, select them, reject them, rethink them, and modify them. Use both divergent and convergent thinking processes repeatedly until you have the most salient content to support your big idea.

When you feel that you have firmly established your position and filtered your ideas, review the matrix from page 122 and validate that you retained enough interesting contrast. You don’t want contrast to hit the cutting-room floor during the vetting process. Filtering is very important. If you don’t filter your presentation, the audience will respond

negatively—because you’re making them work too hard to discern the most important pieces.
While they are listening, they are determining in their minds what was interesting versus what was superfluous. And given the current social media environment, they have a forum to—very publicly—let others know their impression of your presentation. Their feedback can be brutally honest, too. So if you don’t edit it, the audience will be frustrated, and they might have the creative chops to distribute their thoughts to thousands of their social network followers.

Make edits on behalf of the audience; they don’t want everything.

It’s your job to be severe in your cuts. Let go of ideas even if you love them, for the sake of making the presentation better.

It’s unlikely you’ll ever hear an audience member say that your presentation would have better if it had only been longer. Audiences don’t want more content. They want more clarity! The ability to balance the amount of information that’s withheld versus the amount that’s communicated is what separates great presenters from the rest. A presentation’s quality depends just as much on what you leave out as what you choose to put in.

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it— whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. MURDER YOUR DARLINGS.” Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch¹⁵

Now that you’ve edited down the content, you’re going to cluster it by topic and then turn the topics into discrete messages. Grab a fresh piece of paper or a stack of sticky notes and write out the three or so major topics that support the big idea and spread them out, giving them breathing room. The important points should be top-of-mind after all the research you’ve done, but if you’re struggling to limit them to five, it might take a bit of mental negotiation to murder another darling or two.

Each topic should overlap as little as possible. Make sure that nothing relevant to your big idea has been overlooked. There’s a thinking process commonly used at McKinsey, a global management and consulting firm, called MECE (Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive):

• Mutually Exclusive: Each idea should be mutually exclusive and not overlap with the others; otherwise you will confuse the audience. (“Hey, haven’t we talked about the acquisition already?”)

• Collectively Exhaustive: Don’t leave anything out. If you plan to talk about your competitors, you should not mysteriously leave one out. The audience expects you to be complete.

Once you’ve nailed down the key topics, list three to five supporting ideas around each. To the right is an example from a presentation announcing an acquisition that would be delivered at an employee meeting.

The topics you initially generate are usually a single word or a sentence fragment. In the same way that a big idea shouldn’t be a topic, these little ideas need to be transformed into messages as well. Again, a message should be a full sentence that’s emotionally charged. Topics are neutral; messages are charged. Now that you’ve created clusters of ideas around the topics, you’re going to transform the topic into a key message for each cluster.

Each message should feature as much contrast as necessary to effectively communicate the point.
In the acquisition brainstorm on the previous page, the first acquisition failed. They shouldn’t jump right into discussing the new acquisition (what could be) without acknowledging the first failed acquisition (what is). The message of the new acquisition must include an acknowledgment of what was learned from the previous failings, or the audience will feel like this new acquisition will fail also.

Changing topics into messages ensures that the content supports one big idea and that each message has an emotional charge to it. In the next chapter, you’ll be arranging and structuring these messages.

Here are examples of changing the topics on the previous page to messages: