Connecting the dots in a business case or other leadership presentation can be tricky.

Your decision makers need to open the document to quickly find a clear and useful point of view that they can evaluate and respond to.

However, in writing we often need to ramble for a while to find the point.

As one client said this week, he couldn’t imagine how to crystallise his message without iterating on ‘seven pages of writing’. He says iteration helps polish the information and draw out the message.

He is right that writing is a thinking tool.

However, if it is your only tool, your process will be slow, frequently lead to murky papers and slow decisions.

Both you and your decision-makers will be stuck in the weeds, working below the level you are paid to work at.

How often do you dive right in and draft your paper only to then socialise it to a slew of comments in Track Changes?

An alternative is to hack the high-level messaging before writing the actual document. This involves either working solo or (preferably!) collaborating to do the following:

1. Dump your ideas out on a whiteboard or another note taking device. Do not do this inside your final document. You will become wedded to that draft and want to polish it to perfection. This is a process for drawing the ideas out only.
2. Gain extreme clarity about the outcome you seek, and from whom. Write this out as a single sentence and gain agreement on it before you go further. This will be harder and take longer than you expect. It will also save you and your stakeholders significant amounts of time before you get a good decision.
3. Structure your messaging as a one-pager to include the following and reflect that structure in your final paper or presentation:

• A short introduction that draws your audience in.
• A single main message that ties the whole message together. If your audience only reads one thing, this is it. It should be more like option 2 than option 1:

§ Option 1 – We explored types of solutions.

§ Option 2 – We recommend scaling the team so we can roll out AI tools to lift productivity across the division.

• Two to five supporting points that back that main message up.

These messages must not ask your audience to follow from point 1 to point 2 to point 3 to potentially more points before getting to the big reveal. You will lose the audience before they get there.

Instead, theme your points. Synthesise the point for each theme, making sure that together these points offer a complete case that will get you a decision.

To truly engage your decision-makers, you must learn to both summarise and synthesise. This is central to delivering value and, assuming you want to, progress in your career.

I hope that helps. More next week.

Kind regards,
Davina

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Elevate, the book – helps leaders set their teams up to set up a new dynamic across their team that will elevate everyone’s skills, helping the team get better, faster decisions.

Engage, the book – helps individual contributors prepare papers and presentations that leaders can approve without reworking.

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