5.2. BRAINSTORMING AND DEVELOPING A THEME

This is where you get to play James Carville or Mary Matalin, depending on your politics. You know exactly what you want to communicate—for illustration purposes, we'll pretend that they desperately want to know if you are awesome—and now it's time to pave a clear road to the logical conclusion that because of X, Y, and Z, you are exactly that. We have to use our heads here, because there is a distinct difference in whether the audience wants to know why you are awesome and if you are awesome. Why suggests that while they suspect you are awesome, they want quantitative evidence for this assertion—you run the 100m dash in such and such time, your hair smells like coconut and roses, you yodeled in Switzerland for P.E. credits in college, and so on. If, on the other hand, suggests that they have doubts about your awesomeness—they saw a YouTube video of you dancing at a bar several weeks ago and now seriously question whether you are capable of coaching their pre-K dance team.

Brainstorming must be a comprehensive process wherein nuance is the name of the game: We're trying to find a balanced, effective message for a specific demographic and a specific objective. Convincing the board you're the guy who can cut distribution costs by 33 percent requires an understanding of what matters most to a board member; convincing the hardworking folks down in the warehouse to work more efficiently, cap salary increases, and eliminate unnecessary positions will take a different approach. Although we're cutting distribution costs by 33 percent regardless, only one group is predisposed to like it.

The pitfalls should be obvious. In the latter scenario—trying to encourage a group of warehouse workers to do more for less—you clearly don't want images of suit-wearing businessmen, rising stock prices and profits, and so on. Here, we'll focus on pride in hard work, job security, and the correlation between company contributions to 401(k)s and company efficiency. With any luck, a strong correlation exists.

No matter whom you're speaking to, you will rarely be personally representative of your target demographic. Board members don't present to each other; they listen and discuss together. Warehouse workers are the same. Each party communicates with the other, something that requires a strong effort in taking different perspectives. Not doing so guarantees that first, second, and third ideas will likely end up being tossed in the trash. If you cut out brainstorming, you may walk into your speaking engagement holding a very, very hot potato with no one to whom you can toss it.

Beyond the primary pitfall of poor brainstorming, there is a second hazard: audience fatigue. Imagine how often groups of warehouse workers are visited by management types and implored to work harder, more efficiently, and with little to no hope of pay raises. Don't you think managers have used up every analogy that can be thought up during a 10-minute potty break?

Unless you are Don Draper, the consummate ad man of AMC's Mad Men (and someone who still takes a profound amount of time to brainstorm), the first ideas that come to your head are most likely the easiest, most conventional, and most boring ideas you will have. The human mind works like this: We're creatures born to survive, which means that we opt to conserve energy whenever possible. Your brain will sabotage your efforts at brilliance by attempting to find the easiest, most accessible solutions for any problem it is faced with. Conserving resources has been a recipe for survival for as long as organic life forms have existed; you and I are no different.

A great way to hurdle this unfortunate mental obstacle is to begin every brainstorming session thinking about what not to do. Work with partners to determine what is cliché, what is expected, what has been heard over and over and over again. Record these ideas and you'll begin to find the empty space—the place where you have an opportunity to approach the topic from a fresh angle, introduce a new idea, or catch your audience offguard. Accomplishing a sense of originality is like putting a massive sail on the canoe of your presentation: It will take you further than even your hardest work.

Try to avoid creating a static and monotonous environment during the brainstorming phase. Our brains are scripted: We think in certain ways in certain scenarios. While breaking out of these predetermined scripts is crucial to getting novel material, you'll never achieve this by locking the same five people in a conference room day after day. Mix it up: Work both individually and in groups. Break off in pairs; convene for collective discussion. When things get stagnant, head to a coffee shop, go for a walk—just do something different. Contrary to popular belief, creativity is both culture and practice; it is not a gift that some people just have and others don't. Breaking away from the script is as simple as keeping your brain on its toes, and that means changing environments, having new interactions, and maintaining continued engagement.

Eventually, you and your team arrive at a decisive theme that runs through the entire presentation. This theme—which is usually an analogy or metaphor of some sort—acts as a grounding wire for an audience trying to keep up with your expertise. They may not understand cloud computing, but they do understand the water stations at marathons: Doesn't it make more sense to get your water from the station nearest to you, rather than the one back at mile six? Doesn't it make more sense to keep it constantly available on an as-needed basis by providing a host of easily accessible stations, rather than wheeling a water cart for 26.2 miles? When the technical jargon gets confusing, the audience can always compare what you are saying to something comfortable and familiar—as long as you provide a continuous theme.

And please, do make sure it is continuous. Theme hopping may sound like something college graduates should do for a year before entering the workforce for the remainder of their lives, but in reality, this tactic is frustrating and really not any better than having no theme at all. Cloud computing is either lightweight, easily accessible refreshment during a marathon, or it is a pond of ever-present lily pads providing frogs with constant safety as they flee a hungry largemouth bass (clearly representing the threat of data overload on terrestrial servers, not to mention the operating costs). Make it both, and you'll have an audience picturing frogs running marathons while trying to figure out why a marathon runner would be afraid of a largemouth bass.

You'll notice that whatever we say cloud computing is, we do not say that it is like clouds—because seven of our competitors have already delivered this white and fluffy angle. Taking the same approach is likely to make the audience's choices foggy, and we want the choices clear as the blue sky because we want to be chosen. Take the extra couple of days to really dig down deep and come up with a truly unique approach. He who gives an ingenious presentation is himself ingenious—and we all prefer to work with ingenious people.

Now that you've brainstormed and developed your theme, it's time to lock it down. We're going to make the switch from MacGyver to Matlock—from creative to pragmatic—so that our presentation contains both the spark of originality and the raw power of sound logic. Think of your presentation as the annoying memos about dress code violations in the office and presentation success as landing those memos in a trashcan as far across the office as possible (for dramatic effect). Clarifying objectives and thoroughly developing themes are wadding up the memo; outlining the presentation is like the toss. Skip the first two steps, and no one knows where the flat sheet is going. Skip the last step, and you've got a beautifully crumpled, annoying memo still sitting on your desk. Practice enough and you'll fill that trashcan up with so many annoying memos they'll put you right in the corner office (provided you clean up your attire, that is).