Bottoms Up
Your brain’s natural method for organizing data for public speaking
Years ago, I faced one of the most difficult speaking engagements of my life: my father’s funeral. Though not the largest audience I have spoken to, the importance of this assignment was staggering.
With only two days to prepare, I started building an outline of my remarks, as I had dozens of times before.
And I hit a brick wall.
It just wasn’t coming together.
I would start creating an outline structure, and then get stumped. I got concerned. This wasn’t my first rodeo. I’d delivered hundreds of talks before, but even drawing on my experience and all the tools I had learned in school, I completely failed to come up with a structure that felt right.
On the morning of the funeral I still didn’t have my remarks prepared. My nervousness was growing. Feeling frustrated and stressed, I got up early and went into a room by myself to try one more time. With only a few hours left, I had to come up with something suitable to say about the man who had raised me, the father I loved.
Despite my mounting desperation, I put pen to paper and just started writing. I ignored any semblance of structure. As I wrote, random memories and impressions that represented my father’s life spilled out onto the page. I wrote anything and everything I could think of. After just a few minutes, I had a list of 25–30 core things I knew I wanted to talk about. As I pored over the list, I began to see connections between ideas and an organization began to form. The items represented three main attributes my father possessed and these attributes would form the structure: honesty, hard work, and finally, devotion to faith and family.
The creation of my talk now moved along quickly. My anxiety of a few hours earlier was gone, replaced by confidence and clarity. By the time I reached the podium, I felt totally prepared as I spoke of Three Attributes of a Wonderful Father.
Now What?
My experience at my father’s funeral stuck with me. I hadn’t set out to discover anything new, but the process was different than anything I had done before and provided a lot of food for thought.
Why had the traditional approach to outlines — the one I had learned in school and which I had used so many times before — failed to work for me? Had the emotions or the circumstances forced me to work differently?
The typical approach to outlines — moving from general-to-specific — I call top-down outlining because it starts with the top-level ideas and works to the more granular details. Most of us are used to top-down outlining. We start an outline list with roman numerals and fill in details as sub-items. It’s the process we learn in school; it’s intuitive and common.
Most of us are used to top-down outlining
But in this case I had done the opposite. Instead of moving from general to specific, I ended up starting with specific details and then creating the general structure. What was it about this reverse outlining process that I had stumbled upon that made it work so well?
After some pondering and research, I learned that our brains do not assemble information in a linear fashion. Our brains organize information in neural networks of connected ideas. That is, they make connections between ideas or facts, then combine these connections into clusters of facts and ideas, then combining and connecting clusters to each other and so on.
Now, it would be presenter suicide to model your presentation on a neural network. We don’t peddle confusion or trade in blank stares! Imposing structure and order on the organic format naturally extant in our brains is essential to communicate clearly. Nobody wants to sit through a rambling jumble of loosely connected factoids that they have to try to organize themselves. Ultimately, you still need an outline — an organized and thoughtful flow of ideas. But there’s power in tapping your brain’s natural function to help you arrive at that destination.
I came to call the process I discovered speaking at my father’s funeral, bottom-up outlining. Bottom-up outlining is different from the traditional approach. It starts out messier, following the way our brains naturally assemble and categorize information, but instead of imposing structure at the outset, the bottom-up approach imposes it after all the relevant information is on the table.
As excited as I was about my revelation, I wasn’t ready to abandon the advantages of traditional outlining. Rather, I concluded that there are two equally valuable outlining approaches, and that to have the greatest chance for success — every speaker really should master both.
Bottom-up Outlining
Contrasted with top-down outlining, bottom-up outlining moves from small ideas to big ideas, with small ideas coming first and big ideas coming as they distill naturally from the small ones. Bottom-up begins with a random, unstructured brain dump of all the details. Creativity gurus call this loosening. I call it creating a free list.
A free list is an unstructured listing of information to include in a message. The free list can result from data gathering (e.g., interviews, questionnaires, or database searches) or from brainstorming. When creating a free list, consider your message objectives, as well as the audience needs and wants. Think of the information needed to answer all relevant questions (which I call the five W and two H questions), who, what, where, when, why, how, and how much? Be thorough and detailed in your thinking.
While creating a free list, don’t worry about sequence or organization — just add the ideas to the list as they come to your mind. You’ll organize them later.
After you have purged your ideas comes a phase of constricting as the items are clustered into categories and then sequenced as appropriate. It’s something like dumping a deck of cards onto a card table. Quick analysis is enough for you to perceive that all the reds go together, then all the blacks, etc. Once the clusters have taken shape, you are able to address each cluster in your desired sequence, from small number to large.
The finished outline may look very similar to what you ended up with from the top-down approach. But, you used a different route to get there.
When to Use Different Outlining Methods
Both top-down and bottom-up outlining are legitimate, and both should be learned and applied as appropriate. Let’s say, for example, you are creating a presentation on your company’s successes and failures over the past year. Most likely, you will create a simple two-part presentation with failures first and successes second. All you have to do is develop both lists, put them in an appropriate sequence, and you have a good outline.
Things might be more difficult if you needed to present something more ambiguous like key challenges facing your company in the next two years. Rather than simply reporting on the past, you will need to anticipate the future, include subjective and persuasive elements, and be sensitive to any cultural or political issues that relate to your remarks. This type of complexity doesn’t lend itself to an intuitive and simple outline without some effort.
These two outlining methods should always be a part of a presenter’s toolkit
Rather, you’ll be better off taking time to first create your free list of topics and details up for consideration. Then, after developing the list, you can categorize the ideas (likely pruning some of them) and sequence them into a logical order — such as most important to least important, or chronological order.
This bottom-up process — create a free list, categorize the list, and sequence the categorized list — is a logical and simple way to create the body of presentations that don’t have an obvious and inherent information structure.
These two outlining methods should always be a part of a presenter’s toolkit and be used whenever and wherever they can be of value.
This article contributed by Dr. William H. Baker, originator of the GoReact video feedback software.
