Creative Thinking – The 25 Stages in Creating a New Presentation

It never fails.

If I am creating a new presentation, I go through the same tortured creative thinking stages EVERY TIME.

As I pass the various STAGES, they always feel familiar based on past experiences.

Yet no matter how much creative thinking I do or how much I recognize the stages and WANT to skip over those that cause the most frustration and anxiety, I repeat them every time while creating a new presentation.

Creative Thinking Stages for a New Presentation

After seeing how my last new version of a presentation went, and in the midst of creating not one new presentation, but working on three new presentations this past week, I listed these twenty-five stages of creative thinking in the hopes of avoiding the most painful ones.

I am not sure that hope will ever come to fruition, but at least now, there is a road map to know where I am at in the twenty-fives stages of creating a new presentation.

1. I'm tired of all the old presentations, so how about creating a new presentation?
2. What have I gotten myself into here?
3. This outline for the new presentation came together pretty easily.
4. I have a lot of previous material I can reuse.
5. There's so much raw material here it's tough to wade through and get it organized.
6. I should perform some secondary research to test my ideas.
7. There are a lot of other people already addressing this, and they're probably smarter and have better experience than I do.
8. I've got a mess on my hands and the original outline for the new presentation doesn't make sense anymore.
9. Maybe it would work to start over, do some more creative thinking, and develop a new outline in PowerPoint.
10. The new presentation outline seems to work, of course, there isn't a strong beginning or end, so now it's just a matter of moving SOME of the big file of content into the new PowerPoint.
11. I don't have nearly enough material to fill the time.
12. I'm going to have to develop a whole new handout, and who has time for that?
13. I just got the attendee list, and EVERYBODY who's coming to this session already knows WAY MORE than I do.
14. This shorter version is finally starting to make some sense.
15. With the beginning added, the new presentation feels good.
16. Looking at it now, this new presentation is about 20% too long so I'm going to have to cut some slides.
17. I really don't have a lot of this content committed to memory, so I had better listen to recordings of similar content I've already presented.
18. There are several stories from those recordings that should go into this presentation.
19. The new presentation is close, but going back through the attendee list, I'm still not sure what they're going to learn.
20. I'll work through the notes on the plane there.
21. After hand writing my notes on the plane, this new presentation really clicks, especially after a few more tweaks.
22. Sitting here the night before, it's still way too long and the ideas aren't meaty enough for these attendees.
23. Going through the presentation last night, I fell asleep because it was so boring to me, so it's going to be boring for the attendees.
24. It's time to give the new presentation, so we'll just have to see how it goes.
25. That went REALLY well.

With the new presentations I’ve been creating the last week, I’m at around stages ten through thirteen on all of them.

I have a long way and a short time to go until stage twenty-five.

Wish me the best! - Mike Brown

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