×
Would you like to know more about Elevate and Engage?
Enter your details below and we will let you know more details leading up to the release of this new book series.
As I was packing my bags to return to Sydney I realised there was a parallel between my packing process and communicating.
Really?
Read on or skip to the three ideas at the bottom for the ‘TLDR'.
Packing for the return trip was vastly easier than when we left for our one month away.
On the way out it was quite an effort.
I wasn't sure what the weather would be like: the forecast kept changing for the Pacific North West, so it seemed smart to be ready for anything.
I also wasn't sure exactly what we would be doing. Did I need mainly casual clothes, or to factor in some smarter nights out? How much hiking would we do? Not sure.
I was also in a rush as I left it late to pack.
The answer was to think carefully – and quickly – about multi-purposing and coordinating each item.
This meant items went in and out of the bag, and quite a few things were added at the last minute.
This made for a full looking bag that wasn't as organised as it could have been.
The reason it was easier to pack for the return was that there was no more thinking to do.
I knew exactly what to pack.
Unsurprisingly, the bag is neater and looks less ‘stuffed' too.
But … what on earth does this have to do with preparing communication?
We encourage clients to separate thinking from writing and ‘PowerPoint-ing' to ensure the end communication works.
This way, the ideas in the final communication aren't ‘thrown in' anywhere, the story isn't overstuffed with excess baggage with the overall message being muddled.
When the thinking is done, it's super easy to ‘pack' ideas into a well-synthesised, logical and engaging piece of communication.
To that end, here are three ideas to help you nail your thinking so it is super fast to prepare a high-quality document.
That's right … nail the messaging before you open the Board paper template, PowerPoint … or whatever medium you are using.
I hope that helps. More next week.
Davina
I love what I do.
I help senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time.
This involves 'nailing' the message that will quickly engage decision makers in the required outcome.
I leverage 25+ years' experience including
My approach helps anyone who needs to engage senior leaders and Boards.
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, Woolworths.
Learn more at www.clarityfirstprogram.com
(*) Numbers are based on 2023 client benchmarking results.
Two of this week's coaching sessions shone a very bright light on how storylining is about much more than ‘putting words on a page'. It's about surfacing the ideas that we want to convey.
So, this week I will focus on how you can use a storyline rather than how you build one.
Let me give you the high level story first and then explain by way of example.
As you may know, a storyline is a tool for mapping your ideas, which can also be described as a thinking machine.
One of my old colleagues went so far as to call it an ‘insight engine'.
This is true if we understand the rules that hold our ideas together and use them to test whether the ideas on a page ‘fit'. If they don't, we can use the rules to work out what is wrong and to strengthen or replace the ‘misfit' ideas.
This both pushes and guides us so we think harder and communicate more impactfully because our ideas are more impactful.
In the classic sense, we can use storylines to prepare our communication so we engage our audiences better.
The thinking rules that make the ‘machine' work provide an opportunity to use storylines to develop our strategies, not just describe them. This can be particularly effective when we collaborate with our colleagues.
This is where this week's coaching comes in.
In both sessions we needed to prepare a story that the participants would deliver to their senior leadership in our final workshop together.
The stories needed to be practical and focus on live problems that were substantive enough to engage their leaders.
The challenge for these two groups was that they were not in the midst of a natural paper cycle, and so didn't have anything big enough to share.
Our solution was to use our storylining session to address a problem that they had not yet thought through fully and come up with a solution.
In one case the team developed a strategy for fine tuning their recent organisational transformation to agile ways of working. In the other, they did two things. They
It worked a treat, so I wanted to explain how we used the storyline as a tool to help them work out what their strategy was, not just describe it.
It has a deeper purpose which you can take advantage of once you really lean into the storylining rules.
I hope that helps.
Kind regards,
Davina
I love what I do.
I help senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time.
This involves 'nailing' the message that will quickly engage decision makers in the required outcome.
I leverage 25+ years' experience including
My approach helps anyone who needs to engage senior leaders and Boards.
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, Woolworths.
Learn more at www.clarityfirstprogram.com
(*) Numbers are based on 2023 client benchmarking results.
Last week I mentioned that I have been working on some huge stories lately, and that these have been instructive in many ways.
One of the most comforting is that even huge stories look simple when they are done: it's just that the process for getting there isn't so simple.
By trusting the process and the structures and continuing to ask ‘Why?' when it didn't look right, we landed a super simple story that packed a powerful punch.
Here are two key takeaways from our experience:
On the surface, these two ideas appear simple too. Trust me when I tell you that our heads really hurt after our session even though our story looked incredibly simple too.
Trust the process and structures together with your instincts to land the story. If I reflect back on why we were able to land a simple and clear message for the $1bn savings story, it was because the stakes were too high if we did not.
The team could not afford to have the Minister ‘unpick' the messaging given they wanted a major shift away from the Minister's preferred approach for prioritising investment initiatives.
So, the challenge was to find a high-level structure that resonated and to deliver it with precision and skill, listening both to our instincts as well as our structures.
We chose a Close The Gap deductive structure, and relied heavily on the finer detail within the deductive modules supported by The So What Strategy and the Ten Point Test to bring it home.
While it took a while to agree on the high level structural pattern, it took much longer to make it ‘sing'.
Keep asking ‘Why?' to make what is obvious to you obvious to your audience. The key that turned the lock for us was the answer to the age-old ‘dumb question': Why?
Why was the team's approach better than the approach that the Minister was wedded to?
This proved challenging and took quite some time to articulate as the team was so close to the problem and to their solution, which highlights a common challenge we all face.
By the time we write our stories, we are ‘sold', so we want to move to how we will deliver the new program / project / or whatever we are discussing.
However, our audience isn't there yet which means we need to shift our own heads back in time to surface our own reasoning.
This is why it was so hard to say that ‘the greatest chance of successfully improving X system while cutting expenditure is ensuring that the division heads ‘own' the approach.
On the surface that is so simple it's almost silly. However, trust me when I tell you it wasn't easy to get there.
I suspect you are familiar with the challenge, which is why I thought it might be helpful to raise it here.
So, in terms of next steps for you: I encourage you to think about opportunities within your own communication where you need to persist to articulate the ‘right why'.
Wishing you a great week.
Kind regards,
Davina
Keywords: deductive storylines, Close the Gap
I love what I do.
I help senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time.
This involves 'nailing' the message that will quickly engage decision makers in the required outcome.
I leverage 25+ years' experience including
My approach helps anyone who needs to engage senior leaders and Boards.
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, Woolworths.
Learn more at www.clarityfirstprogram.com
(*) Numbers are based on 2023 client benchmarking results.
Many have called for the Death of PowerPoint as they are understandably under-whelmed by so many presentations.
But given the many complex elements that make up a powerful presentation, it is too simplistic to blame the presentation tool.
It is, after all, hugely powerful when managed well and so widely used it is hard to kill off.
So, the question remains: how do we create consistently powerful presentations with or without PowerPoint?
Two words: stop rambling.
If the presenter gets to their point quickly they will engage their audience far better than dragging everyone through all the background detail and a seemingly endless list of irrelevant charts and diagrams first.
Here are four ideas to help you stop rambling your presentations (using whichever tool you prefer):
Firstly, the hard part: Identify the main point you need to make for this particular audience – your ‘so what' – and write it in a sentence.
Yes, just one. Write it in 25 words or less, in words that are simple and clear enough for someone removed from the situation, such as your grandmother, to understand.
Secondly, chunk your supporting points in a way that will work for your audience
Work out if you need to persuade your audience that this is the right big idea, or whether they will want to know how to implement it.
Thirdly, create your PowerPoint (or Keynote, or Slides presentation) and get someone to help you with the visuals if they are critical to your presentation.
Neil Young of www.ogcommunicationdesign.com is both fast and fabulous. With or without Neil, make sure you have one message on each page and a diagram to match, avoiding too many bullet points and using font that is large enough for your audience to read. Wherever possible, use more pages rather than less.
As you have already worked out, there is quite an art to this.
Gene Zelazny of McKinsey & Company fame provides outstanding counsel on this subject in his two excellent books: Say it with Presentations and Say it with Charts. Both are available from his website: www.zelazny.com.
I take no fees from either Neil or Gene.
Lastly, make like Winston Churchill.
Wear a hole in the carpet as you walk back and forward in front of the mirror practicing until you get it right.
There really are no shortcuts, either with making a good presentation or with getting rid of PowerPoint.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Davina Stanley is founder of the Clarity First Program, which helps mid-career experts communicate so their good ideas get the traction they deserve – fast.
Davina is a fan of PowerPoint (when used well) and of Neil Young who is a master information designer.
Neil can be contacted at [email protected]
The Minto Pyramid Principle is a widely lauded approach for preparing clearer business reports.
Developed by a McKinsey & Company team led by Barbara Minto in the 1960s, ‘pyramid’ helps people use logic and structure to organise their ideas into a logical and coherent reader-focused argument.
At Clarity First we love this approach.
It enables us to think top down, draw out insights quickly and communicate complex ideas clearly.
However, despite much evidence from our own work and its popularity across consulting and business strategy teams in particular, very little formal research has been undertaken into its actual effectiveness.
Perhaps it was enough to say “It’s McKinsey: It’s good”.
However, Dr Louise Cornelis (another ex-McKinsey communication specialist) recently changed this when working with a series of Masters’ students at Groningen University in Holland.
She undertook a qualitative study to understand whether preparing a business report using a ‘top-down, reader-focused pyramid structure’ was actually helpful to the reader.
Dr Cornelis’ findings demonstrate some irony.
Writers and readers don’t always agree on what is ‘reader-focused’ unless the writer first educates the reader about what ‘reader-focused’ actually means.
Here is why that seems to be true.
#1 – Audiences are hard wired into their old habits
It seems that our readers are hard-wired into what they expect and can be confused by a new way of doing things unless it is explained to them.
In the case of business reports, many people are accustomed to receiving reports written with titles such as ‘Executive Summary’, ‘Background’, ‘Issues’ and a ‘Conclusion’ at the end and are quite lost when these are absent.
They can be confused by Pyramid reports that ignore these section titles, preferring to instead have customized titles that reflect the content of the report: a bit like newspaper headlines.
#2 – Consultants and others using the approach often forget to explain how their approach works
When, however, the approach is explained they not only like the Pyramid Principle approach much better, but can read the documents significantly more quickly.
Readers who were provided with a short description of the structure before reading the documents were able to grasp the main message from a document almost five times faster than those with no preparatory explanation.
Dr Cornelis found that people very much appreciated the Pyramid Principle report-writing approach but only when they understood what it was trying to do.
So the next time have a good idea: remember to ensure your significant others understand the benefit, even when the idea is specifically for the them.
Keywords: design your strategy, develop your storyline, research
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Louise Cornelis is a communication consultant based in Rotterdam. Louise specialises in helping her clients use structure and logic to communicate clearly, having learned her craft at McKinsey & Company and honed it by working with a wide range of clients since.
She particularly enjoys grappling with complex challenges that relate to helping others not only communicate clearly, but want to do so. The Clarity First team very much enjoys thinking about these challenges in collaboration with Louise.
Structured thinking techniques are powerful for those who need clarity in their problem solving and cut through in their communication.
Getting the most from these techniques requires a bit of discipline, though, as well as a simple strategy..
Here are four elements of such a strategy that we recommend:
Read on for ways to put these ideas into practice.
Start small, aim big
It is hugely tempting when presented with a new technique to try to swallow it whole. The productivity and work quality benefits that structured thinking offer are deliciously substantial and new and beneficial ideas are exciting: their newness being in itself motivating. Once you have seen someone do something well, you want to do that yourself. However, we don't want you to fall at the first hurdle.
Some people are overwhelmed by the volume of things to know, which makes it too hard to get started, others try to implement all of the techniques at once and find that the extra time commitment is too great, while yet more hold back on trying the techniques until they have a substantial piece of work, by which time they have forgotten key concepts.
We encourage you to start with some small short-term goals and a commitment to sticking with them to reach your long-term ambitions. Here are three ideas to get you started:
Tackle the techniques from the top down
Significant benefits come from seemingly simple things, in this case identifying and solving the right problem. Using the context, trigger, question approach as well as our killer alignment questions will help you nail the problem you are solving, which makes it significantly easier to solve. Consequently, we encourage you to focus on this first, and learn how to master issue trees, workplans and storylines later.
Use one-pagers early to boost productivity
Everybody hates unnecessary rework. It is demoralising, frustratingly unproductive and slows down decision making. It is not uncommon in large corporates for teams to rework large documents 10 – 12 times before a management team will sign them off. We have occasionally heard of teams reworking documents more than 50 times before a decision is made.
However, introducing some simple disciplines around one-pagers can radically reduce this frustration. We have found that teams deliver higher value insights and work more productively if they involve decision makers early in their process by
Don't get sloppy with your logic (if you want to consistently deliver high order insights)
Structured thinking helps you not just clarify your thinking, but distil higher order insights from your data. However, it will not do this if you let go of the rules that underpin smart thinking. So, we encourage you to hold yourself to account in using our checklists and other tools to ensure you do not get sloppy with your logic (and your results). I am sure you saw what I did there logically?
If you would like to learn more about our approach, you might enjoy reading our new book, The So What Strategy. You can get a preview chapter here to see if it is for you. You could also look at my free course, 4 Tips to help your complex ideas cut through.
Let us know if you would like to keep in the loop as we prepare more tools to help you make structured thinking stick by clicking the orange ‘let us know' link or emailing us at [email protected].
Keywords: leadership, leadership communication
I love what I do.
I help senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time.
This involves 'nailing' the message that will quickly engage decision makers in the required outcome.
I leverage 25+ years' experience including
My approach helps anyone who needs to engage senior leaders and Boards.
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, Woolworths.
Learn more at www.clarityfirstprogram.com
(*) Numbers are based on 2023 client benchmarking results.
Many people think that fantastic communicators have unnatural gifts, an innate mastery of a dark art that is so hard to master that it must be with them from birth. You know who I mean, those who command a room or craft stunning prose that transports us to another place.
In contrast, those with technical backgrounds are often told from a young age that they are no good at communication: they would be better off if they stuck to the sciences.
But, what if that were not entirely true?
It may surprise you that your analytical skills can be an advantage when preparing powerful business communication. Here are three ideas to help you make the most of your analytical brain when communicating:
Let me explain more about each of these three here.
Think long and hard about your purpose and your audience before doing anything else
Before you put pen to paper, invest more than you normally do in understanding your audience. Think about who they are – think through who will make a decision, who will influence that decision and who else you need to consider. Also think about what keeps them up at night about your topic. How much do they know already and how much do they care about it? If you don’t know, find out.
The next step is to think equally deeply about your purpose and phrase it by finishing this sentence: As a result of this specific piece of communication, I want my audience to know think or do …. What?
As a CEO of a mid-sized manufacturing company (who originally trained as an engineer) said this week: “I spent more time thinking about where my audience was at than I have ever done before to make sure my presentation started at the right place for them, rather than just for me.
“In the actual meeting itself, we then spent about one hour out of three confirming we agreed on the starting point for the discussion. This meant that the rest of the time together was hugely productive and we were able to walk everyone through our presentation really easily and got the decisions that we needed to move forward.”
Use your critical thinking skills to clarify your proposition
Working bottom up to test that your proposition is valid is critical if you want to be confident that your proposition stacks up. Here are five steps to help you do that:
Structure your story using a pattern
It may shock you to learn that there are a small number of commonly used patterns for effective business communication.
In spending a combined five plus decades between us (this too is shocking, we know!) helping consultants and other professionals clarify their thinking so they can communicate clearly, we have distilled what we think are the top seven patterns for day-to-day business communication. Here they are:
You may be pleased to know that although there is plenty of room for artistry in using these patterns, it is not essential. Synthesis plus logic will lead to great clarity and great impact on their own.
Click here to download a chapter of our book describing the Action Jackson storyline pattern.
Keywords: critical thinking, leadership communication, pyramid principle, the so what strategy
I love what I do.
I help senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time.
This involves 'nailing' the message that will quickly engage decision makers in the required outcome.
I leverage 25+ years' experience including
My approach helps anyone who needs to engage senior leaders and Boards.
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, Woolworths.
Learn more at www.clarityfirstprogram.com
(*) Numbers are based on 2023 client benchmarking results.
This new book introduces seven most commonly used storyline patterns for business communication
How often have you invested significant energy to prepare a piece of communication only to be confronted with this most uncomfortable question from your audience: “So what?”
It’s one of the most uncomfortable questions in business.
Your audience asks because they want to know why the ideas in your presentation should matter to them and to the business, and they want to know in one simple statement. You might have spent hours, days or even weeks preparing, but they want a succinct answer that summarises everything for them in an instant. And you want the earth to open up and swallow you because you don’t know how to answer this question succinctly.
If you don’t answer this question well, all of your work can be for nothing. Early in our careers, we were both on the receiving end of this question and not ready to answer it. Those memories are some of our most crushing, yet also our most instructive.
What’s the solution? To avoid the embarrassment and frustration of not being able to answer that one simple question, you must state the ‘So what’ clearly and unambiguously at the beginning of your communication and then make the case to support it.
But, how do you do that?
Our new book, The So What Strategy, outlines a three-step process to do just that while also offering our favourite seven storylining patterns so you don’t need to start from scratch.
1. Start thinking before you prepare your communication: During this phase, we encourage you to dig deep so you can articulate your purpose clearly and also be confident that you understand your audience well.
2. Structure your thinking: Here is when we recommend mapping your ideas into a logically organised hierarchy – what we call a storyline – so that you can articulate your main point in just one sentence and back it up logically. There are three things you should know about storylines:
3. Share your communication: Once the structure of your thinking is clear, this can be translated directly into any form of communication: phone conversation, email, paper or PowerPoint pack. The key is to make sure that the structure of the thinking drives the communication, not the problem-solving journey you went on or the medium itself.
Davina Stanley and Gerard Castles are founders of Clarity College and Clarity Thought Partners. They are also joint authors of The So What Strategy, released this week. Both trained at McKinsey & Company and serve some of Australia’s most respected organisations.
Keywords: books, leadership communication, online business writing training, the so what
I love what I do.
I help senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time.
This involves 'nailing' the message that will quickly engage decision makers in the required outcome.
I leverage 25+ years' experience including
My approach helps anyone who needs to engage senior leaders and Boards.
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, Woolworths.
Learn more at www.clarityfirstprogram.com
(*) Numbers are based on 2023 client benchmarking results.
The Minto Pyramid Principle is a widely lauded approach for preparing clearer business reports.
Developed by a McKinsey & Company team led by Barbara Minto in the 1960s, ‘pyramid’ helps people use logic and structure to organise their ideas into a logical and coherent reader-focused argument.
At Clarity First we love this approach.
It enables us to think top down, draw out insights quickly and communicate complex ideas clearly.
However, despite much evidence from our own work and its popularity across consulting and business strategy teams in particular, very little formal research has been undertaken into its actual effectiveness.
Perhaps it was enough to say “It’s McKinsey: It’s good”.
However, Dr Louise Cornelis (another ex-McKinsey communication specialist) recently changed this when working with a series of Masters’ students at Groningen University in Holland.
She undertook a qualitative study to understand whether preparing a business report using a ‘top-down, reader-focused pyramid structure’ was actually helpful to the reader.
Dr Cornelis’ findings demonstrate some irony.
Writers and readers don’t always agree on what is ‘reader-focused’ unless the writer first educates the reader about what ‘reader-focused’ actually means.
Here is why that seems to be true.
#1 – Audiences are hard wired into their old habits
It seems that our readers are hard-wired into what they expect and can be confused by a new way of doing things unless it is explained to them.
In the case of business reports, many people are accustomed to receiving reports written with titles such as ‘Executive Summary’, ‘Background’, ‘Issues’ and a ‘Conclusion’ at the end and are quite lost when these are absent.
They can be confused by Pyramid reports that ignore these section titles, preferring to instead have customized titles that reflect the content of the report: a bit like newspaper headlines.
#2 – Consultants and others using the approach often forget to explain how their approach works
When, however, the approach is explained they not only like the Pyramid Principle approach much better, but can read the documents significantly more quickly.
Readers who were provided with a short description of the structure before reading the documents were able to grasp the main message from a document almost five times faster than those with no preparatory explanation.
Dr Cornelis found that people very much appreciated the Pyramid Principle report-writing approach but only when they understood what it was trying to do.
So the next time you have a good idea: remember to ensure your significant others understand the benefit, even when the idea is specifically for the them.
Keywords: design your strategy, develop your storyline, research
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Louise Cornelis is a communication consultant based in Rotterdam. Louise specialises in helping her clients use structure and logic to communicate clearly, having learned her craft at McKinsey & Company and honed it by working with a wide range of clients since.
She particularly enjoys grappling with complex challenges that relate to helping others not only communicate clearly, but want to do so. The Clarity First team very much enjoys thinking about these challenges in collaboration with Louise.
I love what I do.
I help senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time.
This involves 'nailing' the message that will quickly engage decision makers in the required outcome.
I leverage 25+ years' experience including
My approach helps anyone who needs to engage senior leaders and Boards.
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, Woolworths.
Learn more at www.clarityfirstprogram.com
(*) Numbers are based on 2023 client benchmarking results.