20. The Outline Trap

Britannica and Brainstorming

One of the early lessons we all learn in school is how to make an outline;¹ how to create that waterfall of Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, and lowercase letters that cascade down to the bottom of the page, if not dozens of pages of interminable term papers. Thus we are programmed to arrange our ideas in a hierarchical order—in sharp contrast to what our brains do naturally: generate ideas in random order.

To demonstrate: As I sit writing this chapter, I glance at a ball-point pen on my desk. The logo on the pen reminds me that I got it at as souvenir at a conference. I remember that I met a man at the conference who told me about a book on presidential politics. This reminds me that I had been planning a blog on the same subject, and so I open a file with the notes on that subject and... you see where this is going.

I’m sure that if you were to track your own thought patterns, you would discover the same winding, random path. That’s the way every human mind works: unstructured.

And yet, when businesspeople sit down to develop a presentation, they immediately start to apply structure, in either a hierarchical outline form or by organizing a set of existing PowerPoint slides to create a new “deck”—each approach forces structure onto unstructured ideas.

In Chapter 6, “How Woody Allen Creates,” you read that he and other artists let their random ideas flow unimpeded, capture them in notes as they occur, and then lay out the notes in a panoramic view. Mr. Allen tosses scraps of paper onto his bed, other film directors use storyboards, architects make papier-maché models, military officers use wall size maps, and businesses encourage employees to doodle their creative ideas on whiteboards during product development or strategy sessions. The Wall Street Journal reported that sales of Idea-Paint, a paint product that turns a wall surface into a whiteboard, have doubled since 2008.²

For your presentation development, you can do your brainstorming on a whiteboard, a computer screen, or Post-it Notes as you generate your ideas, but what is as important as the free flow is that you see the ideas you generate in a panoramic or landscape view.

The simple reason for this aspect of the creative process is that our eyes are set side-by-side in our heads, making the landscape view more pleasing and open than the portrait view. If you start with an outline, the constricted view imposes a ranking sequence too early in the process. A panoramic view allows you to see the conceptual relationships among your ideas.

Even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica has come to understand the importance of visual thematic relationships. The publisher of alphabetized—sequential rather than conceptual—reference works for almost 244 years, discontinued its print version in 2012 and went digital. As part of the transition, they included a link map feature that looks like a brainstorming session you might do on a whiteboard.³

Walter S. Mossberg, the author of the Wall Street Journal’s “Personal Technology” column, reviewed the feature and wrote that the publisher, which “has always been expensive, and a bit stodgy...has produced a slick app.... Perhaps the coolest feature is the link map, triggered from an icon at the top of each article page. This generates a spider web of icons representing other articles related to the one you were reading.”⁴

The 35,000 foot view shows patterns that lead to clear stories; an outline traps ideas.

Take the high road.