Harvard Business Review Guides Ultimate Boxed Set (16 Books)

Choose Your Best Ideas

Up to this point, we’ve been focusing on how to generate presentation ideas and content. That’s actually the easy part. It’s much harder to trim everything down so only the most effective messages remain. But the quality of your presentation depends as much on what you choose to remove as on what you choose to include.

Many of your ideas may be fascinating and clever, but you can’t fit them all in—and no one wants to hear them all, anyway. Connect, analyze, sort, and filter the ideas so you use only the ones that will yield the best outcomes. Designers call this part of the process convergent thinking, and they refer to its opposite, idea generation, as divergent thinking (see figure 2-2). As Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, ...