5. Fellini on Creativity

Consider All the Possibilities—Before You Present

Federico Fellini, the legendary Italian film director noted for his imaginative cinematic works, had some very explicit ideas about the creative process. In Fellini on Fellini, his book about his art, he described how he generates ideas:

I hate logical plans....Myself, I should find it false and dangerous to start from some clear, well-defined complete idea and then put it into practice....The child is in darkness at the moment he is formed in the mother’s womb.¹

Crafting a presentation is a creative process. In what has become standard operating procedure in business, most presenters reverse Mr. Fellini’s approach. They start with a “clear, well-defined idea,”—usually in the form of a set of company slides—and then “put it into practice” by standing up to present. The result is the predictable data dump.

That’s because this approach reverses the natural functions of the human mind, known among psychologists as “divergent” and “convergent” thinking. Neuroscientist Casey Schwartz described the difference in a blog about creativity on The Daily Beast website:

Divergent thinking is the ability to generate spontaneous, often unexpected ideas or solutions ... Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is understood as divergent thinking’s opposite: the kind of thought process that allows you to narrow down your options.²

When presenters begin their creative process with slides, they are narrowing their options for ideas. The solution is to do your convergent thinking after your divergent thinking; to let your mind to do what it is going to do anyway: generate ideas randomly—and then capture them in brainstorming.

Before you even consider your slides, consider all the ideas you want to discuss, but treat them as words, not images. If you start with your slides, you front load your mind with everything from the color or size of the font to a pre-existing sequence. Instead, start with your ideas and write them on paper, or on a computer screen, a white-board, or Post-it Notes. Then look at all of the ideas objectively and decide which ones you need and—more important—which ones you don’t need.

Do the data dump in your preparation not in your presentation. Do your divergent thinking before your convergent thinking.

Get creative.