CONVERGEDIVERGE
CREATE
CHOICES
MAKE
CHOICES
118 Resonate
Now that you’ve amassed all the analytical and emo-
tional content possible, it’s time to narrow it down.
Many of the ideas are unique and were possibly fasci-
nating to uncover. But you can’t say it all—and no one
wants to hear it all. The ideas need to be filtered down
to the points that succinctly support your big idea.
The pages in this chapter have walked you through
divergent thinking by generating ideas. You collected
factual and emotional content and considered contrast-
ing perspectives.
Now it’s time for some convergent thinking. Divergent
and convergent were identified by J. P. Guilford in 1967
Murder Your Darlings
as two different types of thinking that occur in response
to a problem. Divergent thinking generates ideas, while
convergent thinking sorts and analyzes these ideas
toward the best outcome.
So hopefully, all the ideas you just generated give you
some great creative choices to sift through.
In his book Change by Design, Tim Brown says, “Convergent
thinking is a practical way of deciding among existing
alternatives. Think of a funnel, where the flared opening
represents a broad set of initial possibilities and the small
spout represents the narrowly convergent solution.”
13
“In the divergent phase, new options
emerge. In the convergent phase, it
is just the reverse: Now it’s time to
eliminate options and make choices.
It can be painful to let a once-
promising idea fall away.”
Tim Brown
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Create Meaningful Content 119
Although you may feel that all the ideas you generated
are insightfully riveting and took a ton of time to gener-
ate, they need to be sorted and organized—and some
ideas need to be killed off. Killed? Yes; and the best filter-
ing device you have is your big idea itself. Review it again,
and eliminate all the fodder you captured that doesn’t
distinctly support that one big idea.
It’s a violent creative process to construct ideas, destroy
them, group them, regroup them, select them, reject
them, rethink them, and modify them. Use both divergent
and convergent thinking processes repeatedly until you
have the most salient content to support your big idea.
When you feel that you have firmly established your posi-
tion and filtered your ideas, review page 105 and validate
that you retained enough interesting contrast. You don’t
want contrast to hit the cutting-room floor during the
vetting process.
Filtering is very important. If you don’t filter your
presentation, the audience will respond negatively—
because you’re making them work too hard to discern
the most important pieces. While they are listening,
they are determining in their minds what was interesting
versus what was superfluous. And given the current
social media environment, they have a forum to—very
publicly—let others know their impression of your pre-
sentation. Their feedback can be brutally honest too. So
if you don’t edit it, the audience will be frustrated, and
they might have the creative chops to distribute their
thoughts to thousands of their social network followers.
Make edits on behalf of the audience; they don’t want
everything. It’s your job to be severe in your cuts. Let
go of ideas even if you love them, for the sake of making
the presentation better.
Audiences are screaming “make it clear,” not “cram
more in.” You won’t often hear an audience member say,
“That presentation would have been so much better if
it were longer.” Striking a balance between withholding
and communicating information is what separates the
great presenters from the rest. The quality depends just
as much on what you choose to remove as what you
choose to include.
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of
exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and
delete it before sending your manuscript to press. MURDER
YOUR DARLINGS.”
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
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