My art teacher caught me cutting corners this week. It reminded me how we hide the same thing at work.
I've just returned to art school after decades away. I'm loving it, and it keeps teaching me things about how I help you.
Here's this week's.
The official homework didn't excite me, so I finished it quickly. It wasn't slapdash. It was good. I figured I could get away with it.
Then I spent real time on something I actually wanted to do: practising techniques by drawing pears. Five of them. I tried different approaches, tested what worked, and had a lot of fun. My favourite is below.
In class, my teacher saw straight through me.
She loved the pears and picked out the same favourite I had. Then she turned to the assignment and gently spelt out what it would have taken to make it great, not just good.
Here's where it lands for our work.
Most of us know how to make something good enough. And sometimes that is truly sufficient.
The harder question is knowing when ‘good enough' isn't and when it is.
Here’s the single most useful filter I've found.
Focus on the messaging first and worry about polishing the PowerPoint when you must.
PowerPoint happily eats time. But the thing that actually moves decision-making is a rock-solid message: clear, specific, and saying something worth saying.
A tight message in a plain doc beats a beautiful deck built around a fuzzy message every time.
So before you open the next PowerPoint, ask: will this really get the outcome I need?
If you feel a snag or the voice in your head is hesitating, fix your messaging first.
Feel free to download these one-pagers to help you lay out your messaging and test if it works.
Then, and only then, prepare your PowerPoint deck (if you must!).
More soon,
Davina
Whenever you're ready, here are five other ways I can help you:
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.
Engage, the self-paced course – supports both individuals and leaders prepare more insightful papers and presentations for senior leaders and boards.
Extreme Clarity, the 2-hour workshop – introduces techniques for structuring your messaging.
Board Paper Bootcamp, the 2-week program – helps you clarify and convey complex ideas to senior leaders and boards.
WANT TO LISTEN?
- Risk Management = Change Management
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- Baking Learning & Growth into BAU
- Helping Leaders 'shift testing left' to derisk projects
- A Case Study in Digitial Transformation
- How to help a senior leader come back from a misstep
- How to hit the ground running in a big new role
- How to communicate during great change
- How to turbo charge your transformation
- How to make your presentation butterflies fly in formatio
- Introducing my two new books: Engage and Elevat
- Implementing unpopular decisions with minimal political damage
- Overcoming resistance to coaching
- How to match your method with your message
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ABOUT AUTHOR: DAVINA STANLEY
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
- learning structured thinking techniques at McKinsey in Hong Kong in the mid 1990s before coaching and training their teams globally as a freelancer for a further 15 years
- being approved to teach the Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto in 2009
- helping CEOs, C-suite leaders and their reports deeply understand their stakeholder needs and communicate accordingly
- seeing leaders cut the number of times they review major papers by ~30% and teams cut the amount of time they take to prepare major papers by ~20%*
- watching senior meetings focus on substantive discussions and better decisions rather than trying to clarify the issue
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.
