4 Reasons brainstorming may sabotage your presentation
August 7, 2008 by Olivia Mitchell
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Many people plan a presentation by brainstorming. I don’t recommend it. Brainstorming is an attempt to capture everything you know on a particular topic. That’s likely to overwhelm your audience.
Here’s an example of a brainstorm for a presentation on financial planning to small business-owners.
Brainstorming to prepare a presentation leads to many problems:
1. You’re likely to end up having too much information in your presentation
In the brainstorm above, there are heaps of great points and nuggets of information that small business owners might find useful. It’s going to be difficult to decide which to include and which to discard. But if the presenter attempts to cover all these points, he’ll overload his audience with information. The more you include, the less your audience will remember.
2. You’re setting yourself up for a lot of editing work
So you realise that you need to cut down on all the points you’ve generated through brainstorming. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to do that editing. You’ll have spent time brainstorming points, only to then spend time editing them out. Wasted time.
3. You risk not being able to find a focus for your presentation
All the points and ideas that you generate during brainstorming clutter up your thinking. In the brainstorm above, there are so many areas of interest that’s it’s going to be difficult to decide what should be the focus of the presentation. And a tight focus is the secret of an effective presentation.
4. You may end up with unrelated points in your presentation
In an effective presentation each point contributes to the focus of the presentation and logically follows from what has been before. That’s difficult to achieve if you’ve generated a whole heap of unrelated points through your brainstorming.
An effective way to prepare a presentation
A key skill in planning an effective presentation is to drastically limit the amount of information you include. So instead of brainstorming as your first step in planning your presentation, decide on what is the one thing you want your audience to remember from your presentation.
The brutal truth is this:
Your audience is likely to remember only one thing from your presentation
Don’t leave what they remember up to chance. You decide what the one thing will be.
In the financial planning presentation, the presenter decided that the one thing they wanted people to remember was that small business owners need to save for their retirement and not rely on their business to fund their retirement.
Craft this into a Key Message
The one thing should be crafted into a clear and memorable Key Message . It should be easy for you to say and easy for your audience to grasp and remember. Here’s the key message for the financial planning presentation:
Your business is not your superannuation policy
So don’t brainstorm. Work out your Key Message - and then develop the rest of your presentation to support that Key Message. Preparing your presentation in this way, will save you time and effort and you’ll deliver a message your audience will remember.
Go well with your next presentation. If you found this post useful, subscribe to my RSS feed.
Related posts:
- How to save time preparing a presentation
- The three key ingredients for planning a presentation
- How to say nothing in your next presentation
- Will Smith’s keys to a great presentation
- Quiz: Are you a winger or a stickler?
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Why not come up with your key message and then use brain storming to come up with your supporting material? You show a mind map in your post. Mind mapping is a great tool for exploring a topic. They are particularly helpful when it comes to Q&A.
Thanks,
Jeff
Hi Jeff
Thanks for your comment. Yes, you could do it that way. I think it depends how familiar you are with the topic. In the area of developing business presentations - which is what I specialise in helping people with - most people already have all the information they need on the topic at their fingertips. For them, I don’t think it’s necessary to do a mind map.
If you’re developing a Toastmasters speech on a topic you’re not so familiar with, it may be useful to do a mindmap.
Once you’ve identified and crafted your Key Message my suggestion is to ask yourself “What will my audience want to know”. I wrote a post about this that you can find here http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/content/answer-your-audiences-questions/ .
Olivia
Hi Olivia,
I’m new to your blog, but excited to see your content as I develop many presentations. I agree with your conclusion but disagree with some of your supporting points. I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘brainstorming’ recently as most of our users (MIndjet MindManager) say they ‘brainstorm’ with our software. In many cases, people use the term to describe the process of jotting down and visualizing their thoughts and ideas. While some people do use brainstorming to capture everything they know, many use it for specific purposes to aid their thinking processes. It can be applied to generate new ideas and innovative ways to look at problems or situations that are commonly overlooked. Or, you could brainstorm and capture what you think your audience really cares about, what they want to hear or what their preconceptions might be. It can also be performed with a variety of software apps (Mindjet or others) that make managing information fast and easy so you’re not spending valuable time editing. A big benefit that we hear often for visualizing your thoughts in MindManager is the greater clarity of thinking and the ability to see the big picture. They map out their key point(s) and then break them into supporting points. The visual hierarchy of information creates implied priorities which can be reorganized by simply dragging and dropping (software, in this case, is much easier than using a whiteboard or paper). Overall, the process of brainstorming and mapping helps many see the big picture and reorganize content into cohesive points. I agree many try to make too many points! I look forward to checking out your other posts as I’m always searching for great info on making great presentations.
Hi Michael, thank you for your thoughts - I think you bring up an important distinction - there is a difference between brainstorming and mindmapping. I’ve been using the terms somewhat interchangeably - which isn’t very useful. So from what you’ve said above:
Brainstorming - generating new ideas, connections and thoughts by rapidly and uncritically writing down everything you can think of on the topic.
Mindmapping - capturing your current thoughts and ideas on a topic.
I don’t recommend brainstorming when you’re planning a presentation because most of the time you don’t need new ideas - you already know what you need to know.
On the other hand I can see that mindmapping can be useful. Once you’ve captured your thoughts you can then choose what to include and then organise them into a logical flow.
Olivia
This is good point Olivia. Brainstorming is only first step to prepare for a presentation. Good presentation is a focused, structured and clear. Brainstorming is like turning the soil before you plant the seed – the message. Thank you for your good point.
Hi Mariya
Thank you for your comment. I agree with you on the criteria for an effective presentation. Most of the time, if you know your topic well - you shouldn’t need to brainstorm - in order to create a clear and focused presentation. Olivia
Hi Olivia, A very good piece of advise. Unconsciously, I have been doing what you say. You also remind me the most important job for preparing a presentation is to craft a clear and memorable Key Message. Thank you.
Hi Phemey Pon, Glad its been useful. Olivia