4 ways brainstorming can ruin your presentation

Many people plan a presentation by brainstorming. I don’t recommend it. Brainstorming is an attempt to capture everything you know about a particular topic. That’s likely to overwhelm your audience.

Here’s an example of a brainstorm for a presentation on financial planning to small-business owners.

Brainstorming to prepare a presentation leads to many problems:

1. You’re likely to end up having too much information in your presentation.

In the brainstorm above, there are heaps of great points and nuggets of information that small-business owners might find useful. It’s going to be difficult to decide which to include and which to discard. If the presenter attempts to cover all these points, he’ll overload his audience with information. The more you include, the less your audience will remember.

2. You’re setting yourself up for a lot of editing work.

So, you realize that you need to cut down on all the points you’ve generated through brainstorming. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to do that editing. You’ll have spent time brainstorming points, only to spend still more time editing them out. Wasted time.