Scientists have long been fascinated by how different mental functions are centered in different areas of the human brain. Most of the higher brain activities occur in the cerebrum, which is divided into left and right hemispheres. According to most scientists, the left and right halves of the brain are responsible for different forms of reasoning. The left side controls logical functions and is associated with structure, form, sequence, ranking, and order. It tends to operate in a linear, first-one-thing-and-then-the-next fashion. The right side controls creative functions and is associated with concepts. It is essentially nonlinear in its operations. The right brain bounces around among concepts, following connections that are impossible to explain logically.

Building a presentation is a creative process. That means starting with the right brain.

Here’s the problem: Most presenters, when developing their stories, tend to apply a left-brain approach to what is really a right-brain process. They try to jump immediately to a logical, structured, linear end product when their right brain is still caroming in nonlinear mode.

Why? Because businesspeople are results-oriented rather than process-oriented. I’m sure that you, like most businesspeople, are quite process-oriented when it comes to critical matters such as long-term strategy, product design, or problem-solving, but these are all subjects for off-site meetings. Backstage!

When it comes to results-oriented tasks, such as developing a presentation to a very important audience (front and center stage), you are eager to get there in the shortest distance between two points. You think that a time-consuming process might delay the result. But if you choose a left-brain process while your right brain is free-associating, you’ll wind up traversing that seemingly short distance between points over and over and over again. You’ll end up spinning your wheels and spilling out a Data Dump.

The solution is timing. It’s not a matter of more time; it’s about the proper use of time. Get the sequence right: Let the right brain complete its stream-of-consciousness cycle before applying the left brain’s structure. Focus before Flow.

A vivid illustration of the distinct difference between right and left brain functioning is spoken language. Speech reflects how the right brain operates in its spontaneity, in its grammatical and syntactical messiness, and in its frequent logical leaps.

Let’s illustrate with an excerpt from the live presidential debate between then-Governor George W. Bush of Texas and Vice President Al Gore. The debate, in a town hall format, took place on October 17, 2000, and PBS anchor Jim Lehrer was the moderator. Each candidate was given a chance to respond to questions posed by ordinary citizens. Here is Governor Bush’s response to the following question: “How will your tax proposals affect me as a middle-class 34-year-old single person with no dependents?”

Remember (if you still can) that the original question had to do with how a 34-year-old single person with no dependents would be affected by the candidates’ competing tax plans.

The response given by Governor Bush (soon to be President Bush) veered and rambled all over the place. He never specifically addressed the question of how a 34-year-old single person would be affected by his tax plan . . . except at the very beginning of his ramble with a broad, general assertion: “You’re going to get tax relief under my plan,” which didn’t explain how much relief or what kind.

Governor Bush began by talking about offering an increased tax exemption to those who care for “an elderly,” forgetting or ignoring the fact that the person who asked the original question specified that she had no dependents.

Next, he skipped to Medicare (a subject of less-than-immediate interest to a 34-year-old). Then he skipped further off the path on to the topics of world peace, military policy, education, and, finally, work ethic.

Six subjects later, in his last sentence, probably recalling that the original question dealt with taxes, Governor Bush belatedly referred again to “tax relief in the proposals I just described,” skimming over the fact that he never did describe any tax proposals.

This is not meant to pick on George W. Bush. Some of our most effective political leaders have been known to speak in a rambling fashion (Dwight D. Eisenhower, for one). And, speaking crisply and logically is no guarantee of statesmanship or political wisdom. Depending on your own political views and personal tastes, you might find Bush’s speaking style infuriating, comic, or refreshingly human.

The essential point is a more general one. An excerpt of spoken language, when transcribed and printed, will never read like well-crafted prose. As a personal example, I recently recorded myself during a program with my clients, delivering the same material I’ve delivered for two decades. When I read the transcription, I was surprised to see how irregular my word patterns were. The reason: Spoken language is governed by the right brain. Rather than focusing on the rules of logic, grammar, syntax, and consistency, the mind flows freely, wherever the concepts lead.

By contrast, the production of written language tends to be governed by the left brain. When most people sit down to write a letter, memo, or report, their minds are front-loaded with those left-brain functions: logic, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Rather than bouncing freely from one idea to the next, considering names, references, and concepts that may or may not be clearly developed, they move methodically through a sequence of points, meticulously self-correcting their syntax and logic as they go.

The result is a document that is technically correct. It doesn’t contain fractured sentences like George W. Bush’s “You’ll be in a world in which—fits into my philosophy, you know, the harder work—the harder you work, the more you can keep,” or repetitions like his “Now, I hope people understand that Medicare today is—is—is important.”

If the writer’s thinking is being ruled by the left brain, the natural flow of concepts is often impeded. As a result, the ensuing document almost inevitably omits ideas that are necessary or, worse, includes ideas that are unnecessary, overly detailed, or irrelevant.

You’ve probably written documents this way yourself: sitting down cold at your keyboard and banging out an email, memo, or letter, “editing” it for style and content on-the-fly. If so, you may have had the experience of reading the document afterward and discovering that you’d completely forgotten to mention an important fact or idea, or you may have stuck in a completely irrelevant detail. This is a natural by-product of left-brain dominance.

Developing a presentation by starting with left-brain considerations such as logic, sequence, grammar, and word choice (or, for that matter, the color, style, and design of slides) is ineffective. Crafting a presentation is a creative task, and it must start with the resources that are available only on the right side of your brain. Use the right tool for the right job.

Therefore, begin your story development process by doing what your brain is going to do anyway: follow the stream of consciousness, and capture the results during Brainstorming.

Since most presentations lack a clear point (the first of the Five Cardinal Sins), why not start with it? In other words, start with the objective in sight, and work toward it. Here again, this rule incorporates the wisdom of Aristotle and Stephen R. Covey.

Now that you appreciate the importance of Audience Advocacy, you must analyze what your intended audience knows and what they need to know to understand, believe, or act on what you are asking. Use the following three metrics to analyze your audience:

External factors are conditions that are “out there,” in the world, independent of you and your audience. They can impact your message and how it may be received. Some external factors are positive, and some are negative. For instance, when making a pitch for investment dollars for your company, a rapidly expanding market for your product would be a positive external factor, while the emergence of powerful new competitors would be a negative external factor. You must consider all the external factors as you prepare your presentation. In some cases, you may need to change the content of your presentation or alter its structure to respond to unusually powerful factors. Be sure that you include counterpoints to the negative factors.

Throughout the preparation process, keep in mind the physical setting for your presentation. These factors, too, may affect the content of your presentation. You can analyze the setting by asking and then answering these classic journalistic questions:

You must determine all these factors and define them in your Framework Form before you start your Brainstorming. Use the Framework Form shown in Figure 3.2 to assemble and capture all the preceding information as you develop it.

Figure 3.2. The Power Presentations Framework Form. (You can download a copy of this form by visiting our website, www.powerltd.com.)

Define all these factors as clearly and as specifically as possible. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all presentation. Build a presentation tailored to one audience, on one occasion, presented by one set of presenters, conveying one story, with one purpose. A presentation that is not custom-built will inevitably be less effective and less likely to persuade. Why bother presenting at all if you are not prepared to invest the time needed to make your presentation all that it can be?

Does this mean that you need to start every presentation from scratch? Not necessarily. After you’ve done the process once, the second time will be much shorter, and shorter still for each succeeding iteration. In the 20 years I’ve been in business, the process has never taken me more than an hour and a half the first time with a client, regardless of the subject, from the most complex biotech company to the simplest retail story. It usually takes 15 minutes the second time, and less each time thereafter.

Eventually, you’ll be able to click and drag parts of one presentation into another. The key is to develop each presentation by starting with the basic concepts of the Framework Form. This initializing process will help ensure that each presentation you make is effectively focused on each persuasive situation you face.

Resist any temptation to skip or short-circuit the Framework Form process. Don’t take it for granted that everyone in your group knows and understands the mundane who-what-when-where-why details of your presentation. Lay out these facts in advance; they will have a positive impact on what should and should not appear in your presentation, and in what form.

Now that you’ve set the context and focus, you’re ready to begin developing potential concepts. Now your right brain, rather than thinking about attire or schedule, can focus on more relevant ideas. You’ll want to capture those ideas as they emerge, and that’s where we turn to Brainstorming.

While your team is Brainstorming, the right brain must rule. Remember that most businesspeople are left-brain-oriented, conditioned by education and experience to apply logic, reason, and rules to every activity. Learn to stifle this tendency during your Brainstorming. Avoid wordsmithing ideas. If you get bogged down in debating the proper words, you’ll impede the free flow of fresh concepts. It’s hard to avoid wordsmithing at first, but you’ll find it surprisingly liberating.

Remember: There are no bad ideas in Brainstorming. Avoid censoring any ideas. The person whose idea is rejected is likely to feel rebuffed and may become reluctant to offer other ideas. When anyone mentions a new idea, jot it somewhere on the whiteboard, even if it strikes others as trivial or irrelevant. Even a seemingly needless idea can be useful, since it may stimulate someone else to bring up a related fact that may turn out to be important. Get it all down. Don’t worry about recording too much information; not everything on the whiteboard will end up in your presentation. Consider all ideas during Brainstorming as candidates, not finalists. The right time to do the Data Dump is during your preparation . . . and not during your presentation!

Avoid thinking about structure, sequence, or hierarchy. If you find yourself wanting to say, “That idea should go up front” or “That idea should close the presentation” while other ideas are popping up, it would be like trying to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time. Structuring front-loads your mind with sequence, order, and linear thinking, the hallmarks of your left brain. Instead, let the concepts tumble out in nonlinear fashion, just the way the synapses of your brain fire naturally. Think about structure later. Remember: Focus before Flow.

Give yourself enough time to do a thorough Data Dump. Don’t put down your markers the first time there’s a long pause in the conversation. Chances are the group is just taking a mental breather. Most Brainstorming sessions feature two or three “false finishes,” each followed by an explosion of new ideas, before the group has really exhausted its store of information and ideas.

When you are truly done, your whiteboard will be filled with lots of circles. At that point, the entire group will be able to see all the elements of your story, all the candidate ideas, laid out for easy examination and organization.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should: It is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that many businesspeople use in strategic planning, product development, or problem-solving sessions. Well, these are the very same minds and the very same subject matter that go into a presentation. Why not use the same process?

One of the benefits of Brainstorming is that it provides a panoramic view. It’s like spreading out all the parts of a kid’s bicycle before you start trying to follow the all-too-complicated assembly directions; or the way a chef lays out all the ingredients for a complicated dish before the cooking begins in what’s called a mise en place. Spreading out the raw materials of your presentation gives you ready access to and control of all your ideas.

Contrast this approach with a left-brain, linear process. The typical left-brain method is to start by designing Slide 1: “Okay, we’ll open with our company mission statement”; then Slide 2: “Now let’s talk about the management team”; then Slide 3: “Now the statistics about the marketplace”; and so on. The problem with this approach is that, as you focus on the slides one by one, each slide effectively covers and hides the slide before. As a result, you’re looking at only one concept at a time. You never see the whole story at once; therefore, you never see all the components organized into a few key high-level units.

Instead, the Brainstorming approach follows the right brain’s natural functions. It allows your ideas to pour out in a random, nonlinear fashion, ensuring that every relevant concept (as well as every irrelevant one) gets a place on the radar screen. Later, you’ll enlist the help of the left brain in bringing order to the raw materials you’ve generated.

Brainstorming generates a host of ideas of varying importance, loosely related to one another. The first step in getting from this relative chaos to an organized, clearly focused presentation is a technique known as Clustering.

Actually, we’ve already used Clustering to a degree. In the previous group Brainstorming example, every time the group exploded a concept into a series of related concepts, forming a group of linked circles on the whiteboard, they created a cluster. These clusters reflected the natural relationships among the ideas as they poured out during Brainstorming: parents and children.

Clustering is a necessary technique for organizing any complex material for presentation to an audience. It’s also an ancient concept, dating back to the classic rhetoricians of Greece and Rome.

There’s a story, probably apocryphal, about a Roman orator whose memory was legendary. (It may have been Cicero, although the documentation is sparse.) The orator often spoke in the Roman Forum extemporaneously for hours, without referring to a single note. His secret was a memory technique that is still used today. We can imagine him explaining it to a curious admirer in a dialogue like this: “You asked me how I can speak coherently at length, without written notes. Did you notice today how I walked around the Forum as I spoke?”

“Indeed I did. I assumed you did so in order to reach out to those in every corner of the audience.”

“In part,” replied the orator. “But there was a more important reason. As I walked from point to point around the edges of the Forum, I paused for a time at six different marble columns. Those columns are my memory aids. Each one symbolizes and reminds me of one group of ideas. Thus, rather than memorizing dozens of particular details, I have to recall only the six key ideas. Each of those key ideas evokes the details related to it.”

Did Cicero really use this technique 2,000 years ago? No one knows for sure. But today I urge my clients to use the same technique to distill the ideas in their presentations. Clustering lets you reduce the 40 or 50 ideas that fill your whiteboard to five or six Roman Columns, the key ideas that organize all the rest. Each column has a group of subordinate ideas. Now instead of trying to organize many ideas at the detail level, you can organize them at the 35,000-foot level.

When you look at your whiteboard filled with ideas, you will find key clusters emerging from the chaos. Examine the whiteboard, and use a new marker color to highlight the most significant ideas. The idea is to make the parents stand out visually from the mass of data, as shown in Figure 3.4.

Figure 3.4. Parents and children.

As your group works on identifying clusters, you may find yourselves identifying links and connections that didn’t occur to you before. That’s fine; just draw lines on the board as needed, or erase and redraw the circles and lines as necessary. You may find yourself shifting concepts around: “Say, doesn’t that point about the changing demographics of our market belong with ‘Key Trends’ rather than with ‘Sales Potential’?” “How about connecting ‘Cost Savings’ to ‘Customer Benefits’ instead of to ‘Unique Product Features’?” No problem; move the children and link them to the most appropriate parent.

If some ideas seem to have no connection to any of your Roman columns, now is the time to ask whether those ideas are truly relevant and necessary. Perhaps they don’t deserve to survive the transition to the finished presentation. And if you think of new ideas that should be inserted, go ahead and add them. That’s all part of the process.

As you can see, the technique of Clustering begins the process of organizing and introducing logic into the presentation. After having deliberately held back your left brain, you can now let it begin to get into the act.

You may be tempted to short-circuit the process by skipping the Brainstorming stage. “Why not start with clusters of key ideas?” you might say. “I could probably sit down right now and list the five main points we need to emphasize. That would save us all a lot of time.” That’s your logical left brain speaking. It wants to avoid the messy, uncontrolled process of free association. But the human mind doesn’t work that way.

Start by unloading a “Splat!” of ideas in whatever order they came out, free-form . . . a total Data Dump. Organize them later, and later still polish them into words and sentences and paragraphs and, ultimately, into slides. This process is called Splat and Polish.

In my many years in the media, I’ve learned that most professional writers . . . novelists, journalists, playwrights, technical writers, and historians . . . follow this same process. Not one of them will write a single page of text until they’ve done their research, brooded over their topic, and assembled a mass of notes about it. They may note their ideas on Post-its, on dog-eared index cards, in spiral-bound notebooks, or simply in stacks of loose pages. Those notes, of course, are their Data Dump.

Results-oriented businesspeople, unfortunately, don’t use the same process when creating a presentation or, for that matter, when writing a report, a speech, or a memo. That’s the way businesspeople are accustomed to thinking: Get to the endpoint as quickly as possible. Find the shortest distance between two points. They figure that the quickest way to get a presentation done is to just start writing. Logical, yes? Yes, and wrong.

Here’s a story that illustrates the pitfalls that the Splat and Polish approach can help you avoid:

Judy Tarabini (now McNulty) was a vice president in the technology unit of the Hill and Knowlton Public Relations Agency when Ben Rosen, continuing his promise to help me grow my business, introduced me to the firm. After I delivered my program successfully to one of Judy’s clients, she began to call on me regularly for her other clients.

In 1993, Judy joined the corporate communications department of Adobe Systems. It wasn’t long before she called on me to work with Adobe. This time she had a high-level, mission-critical presentation: Adobe was about to introduce its Acrobat product, and they were planning to have their entire senior management team, about 15 strong, fan out into the market to make launch presentations. Judy was so positive about my program, she convinced Adobe’s entire senior management team, including the founding chairman and CEO, John Warnock, and his cofounding partner and president, Chuck Geschke, to participate in a story development session with me.

As always, we started with a blank slate. I stepped up to the immaculate whiteboard in the amply appointed executive conference room at Adobe’s then-brand-new corporate headquarters in Mountain View. (They have since moved to even newer and more advanced facilities in San Jose.)

I started drawing out the executives. We began with Point B, we continued on to the WIIFY, then we moved on to the Brainstorming. As those very bright and very high-powered people spouted their thoughts, I raced to capture them on the whiteboard. We got lots of clusters: the Acrobat rollout schedule, the distribution plan, the Acrobat partners, the product benefits, the market, and many more. Before long, the whiteboard was filled to the edges with clusters of ideas.

Then there was a pause. I looked around the room and said, “Please take a moment and look at all the clusters on the whiteboard. Tell me whether we need to alter any of the ideas, whether we need to consider shifting associations, or whether we’ve omitted anything.”

A thoughtful silence ensued. Then suddenly, reverberating in the silence, there was a sharp thwack! Chuck Geschke had slapped his palm against his forehead, as in the “I should’ve had a V8!” television commercials. Then he broke into a sheepish grin and said, “We’ve left out what Acrobat does!”

Does that sound odd? Sure it does. But it happens a lot. You’re so close to your business that it’s easy to take key ideas for granted, or to overlook or forget about concepts that are second nature to you but unfamiliar to your audience. That’s one huge reason why you should never try to end-run the Brainstorming process and rush past story development. Take the time to make certain that everything (and that means everything) that may be relevant has had a chance to surface. Realizing what you omitted five minutes before the start of your presentation will be too late!