Tired of spending your nights and weekends rewriting your team’s reports and presentations? Communication expert Davina Stanley shares her expertise on how to elevate your team’s reports and presentations. Leveraging her experience in structured thinking and communication, Davina highlights the importance of clear messaging, strategic framing, and audience understanding. She introduces the RISE framework (Ready, Iterate, Settle, Embed) as a tool for leaders to help their teams create impactful communications without sacrificing time on endless revisions. Tune in to learn how to transform your team’s communication and achieve greater impact.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Davina Stanley – How To Elevate The Quality Of Your Team’s Reports And Presentations

Welcome to the People Strategy Forum. We’re delighted to introduce Davina Stanley. She is a master at making complex ideas clear. She’s the author and founder of Clarity First. She’s the author of many books. Davina comes from a journey from rural Australia to high-stakes boardrooms of global businesses, and it’s nothing short of inspirational.

She spent her early days helping on her family’s farm, and she also grew and developed to shape businesses as a consultant for McKinsey in Hong Kong. Davina has harnessed her skill set and her experiences to help a lot of those leaders out there simplify and communicate their messages effectively.

I mentioned she’s an author of many books. A couple that we’re going to be talking about are specifically Elevate and Engage. Join us as Davina shares invaluable insights on elevating the quality of your team’s reports and presentations and ensuring clarity leads to real business results. Welcome, Davina.

Thanks, Sam. Thanks for having me.

Early Days On The Potato Farm

As I often say, what I like to do when diving into these conversations is hearing a little bit about you. I know that you have a very interesting and incredible backstory. Let’s start with the early days on your father’s potato farm. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I started out on a very small one near a place called Hanging Rock, which in Australian terms is a little bit famous. There was a movie about that. It’s a beautiful spot just an hour or so out of Melbourne. We had a small farm on rich soil, and it was right near where my father had lived as a child and also where his ancestors had come from, Cornwall, to mine gold. It’s not far from that. He found that the smog from Melbourne, the closest big city, was getting a bit too close. He wanted to move to get more land. He moved quite a way away when I was about four.

I grew up on a farm of about 800 acres, which is not terribly big in Australian terms. It was land that because of the advent of fertilizer, you could grow things on it. You wouldn’t have been able to 100 years before at all. We had dirt roads. It was an hour and a half to school on the bus. It was reasonably remote, although not in an Australian setting. I grew up pretty free and unencumbered by a whole lot of expectations that city kids are raised with. I grew up with the idea that anything is possible. I just had no idea what that was.

We were encouraged to focus on our schooling. We weren’t the kids who were taking days or weeks off to help with harvest or anything like that. We did get involved in grading potatoes or throwing fleeces for sheep or dagging fleeces. Looks like Howard knows what that is. You’re taking the dirty bits off the fleece and throwing it away to make sure it’s clean before you scoop it all up and put it in a bale. We did all those things.

We had great conversations that were just part of our natural life. We’d negotiate with the company that we sold our potatoes to that makes potato chips. Can we negotiate a farm gate price or are they going to insist on a gate price? Which is better for us? A business strategy or the potato company has set out an edict that a certain percentage of the potatoes only may be bigger than that. Therefore, how do you make sure you use all of your potatoes that are that maximal size and you don’t waste them? What are the economics of that?

You make a ring of the size, and you get someone to throw the potatoes through that look big and make sure all of the potatoes that are big enough fit, and you tip them on top of the load, and then the potato chip company works out what you’re doing. They say, “No, none of that.” You find a way to mix them in. All sorts of strategic decisions that you don’t think about when you’re farming. I had no idea that I was getting a business education in the middle of rural Australia. It was just part of life.

The trucking company calls and says that Bill, the Dutch truck driver that you know, can’t read. He is illiterate, for example, and knows how to get to your house by navigating all these different ways. He hasn’t slept for three days. He is not to be loaded too much. You would have had dinner with him and made sure he slept in the truck. All of these things.

One thing you said that was striking to me is 800 acres. I grew up on a cattle ranch, to give a little perspective, but it certainly wasn’t 800 acres. The other thing you mentioned is going to school and it was an hour and a half bus ride. I imagine that’s an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back. Is that right?

Yeah. Plus, the bike ride to get to the bus.

Plenty of time to think and study on the bus. Is that where you did your homework?

No, because it was too bumpy. I have motion sickness. I would have read to the extent that I could. When I was a kid, the bus was quite full too. There were a lot of people on it. Technically, it took 60 kids. By the time it got to school, it was standing room only. There were a lot of people to talk to. That was where your social life was because there was no social life other than at school and on the bus, so I didn’t do my homework on the bus.

Transitioning From Rural Life To Mckinsey

What brought you from that rural environment to McKinsey? What was the transition there?

It was in a few steps. I started out as a kindergarten teacher because I wanted to escape the farm. It was the only thing I knew. I was a fourth-generation teacher on my mother’s side. It’s like I’m going to do that because there’s no question that I’ll be able to do it. I did that and very quickly worked out within the first term of study that this wasn’t what I should have done. My dad said, “You finish what you started,” and so I did. I got a job teaching in a boys’ school in Melbourne, Australia, which predictably didn’t go as well as I would have liked.

I jumped ship, and I was happy to do anything that would pay my rent and give me a bit of time to work out what it is like to live in a city. How do you navigate that? I was on my own in a big city in Melbourne. Long story short, I married young. My husband was in banking. I always wanted to be in consulting but ended up in banking. We moved to Hong Kong when we were in our mid-20s. I had jumped into corporate communication when I made that jump, and I was doing anything I could. I worked as a secretary.

They said to me, “You need to go back to school.” I asked, “What do I study?” They said, “You can write. Study that.” I studied that. I got to Hong Kong and was working in a communication role in a PR firm and hated it. Andrew saw a job advertised at McKinsey. He went, “That’d be fun.” He looked at it and said, “I think that’s for you.” It was a communication specialist role.

I looked at the ad and I had this great feeling about it like, “I think that’s my job,” I said, “What’s McKinsey? What’s management consulting? I have no idea.” He then explained and I thought that sounds fun. I went for the interview and it’s a process. I met one of my dearest friends in the interview queue because we were all going through the many steps to get into McKinsey. Teresa and I met. Her take on it that she relays back is, “They have to hire two.” My takeaway was, “I’m sunk.”

They hired two. She went to Beijing and I went to Hong Kong. I got in that way. I was a communication specialist in the Hong Kong office for about three years. I moved to New York, six months pregnant with a one-year-old, and a full-time job offer with them. Given that Andrew was traveling five days a week, I thought it was probably not the time to take with two under two. I took the freelance route pretty soon after that and freelanced for them for about fifteen years, which then gave me the opportunity to build my own practice and start doing my own things, but focusing very much on the technique that I’d learned at McKinsey and then applying it in a corporate setting.

McKinsey uses a technique called structured thinking for solving problems and for communicating. The work that they talk about is very much in a consulting context. How do you tell the answer to the client when we’ve done some analysis? That’s useful. There’s more to it when you’re communicating inside a corporate environment. Whether you are writing an email or presenting to your board, the techniques are broadly the same. The depth of effort is very different. As I’ve worked a little bit in consulting still but more in corporate environments, just helping people apply these fantastic techniques in that corporate setting has been a lot of fun.

The Journey Behind The Two Books: Elevate And Engage

I imagine that some of that experience is what’s driven you to write your two books, Elevate and Engage. Can you tell us about the difference between those two books and who they’re directed towards?

They come in a way, as I said. Elevate is for leaders because leaders often underestimate the value they bring to their team when the team is preparing a communication. They’re often the ones who are spending their nights and weekends rewriting their team’s communication. A client described to me yesterday that she feels like she’s an ambulance driver. She’s triaging all the time and she’s lying awake thinking, “I that communication minimum viable or not? Can we get away with it, or is there some bomb hiding in it that’s going to come back and cause a struggle?”

Knowing how to shift the burden back on the team by leading early on in the process of preparing a significant communication is important. I drafted Elevate for leaders who want to do that, to get their nights and weekends back and set their teams up to flourish so that everyone can flourish a bit more. That’s the leader side.

Engage is for the team member who is drafting the communication. It goes deeper into things like understanding stakeholders and boards, providing examples, and providing case studies for the ten communication patterns that I offer. It’s going into them in a lot more depth rather than just explaining how they work and showcasing the ten patterns.

At a high level, it’s going a lot deeper with that so the people who are doing the work can picture and see how it comes together. The leaders’ book also includes ideas for building the team’s skills. How do you coach them? How do you maybe run a workshop to teach them the basics so that they can then do it, or what have you? It’s about trying to create a new operating rhythm.

Communicating Complex Topics To Leaders

One of the biggest challenges we have, especially in what we do, and a complex topic, is compensation. It’s very analytical and very number-intense. We’re very comfortable with it, but then how do you package it and present it to leaders so they get it without them getting overwhelmed? I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

The thing is to connect the numbers to the commercial reality that the company or the client finds themselves in. If you’re thinking about it from a leadership standpoint, there are four steps that I offer in Elevate. I use RISE as my acronym. First of all, ready the team around the strategy where it’s you writing for someone, and you don’t have a leader briefing you so much. You’re doing the same thing, but you’re thinking about, “What is the outcome I need from whom?” You’re getting very specific about that.

Mapping your stakeholders and working out who in your case on the client side would be the actual decision maker, or maybe there are a couple. Who would be the powerful influences? What’s going on in their minds? Why do they care about the research that you’ve done into remuneration or whatever the topic is? Are they going to be excited by the proposition that I’m putting forward, or is this going to be a hard pill to swallow? If it’s a hard pill, why? Why is it?

Getting very deep in understanding very specifically what you need to overcome and what you need to address so that you can target your messaging in a very commercial way that hits the business need rather than just saying, “Here’s what we found.” Getting ready and doing that thinking first feels like it’s taking a lot of time because you’re not writing the document. You’re not putting anything on paper but for yourself.

A lot of people dive into the writing to write for themselves because they need to clarify for themselves what they’re saying, and then they forget that they were writing for themselves, and they give it to their audience, and their audience goes, “What’s that?” Pushing yourself and your team helps to do this piece collaboratively for significant communications much faster. Work that out. Who matters and what do we need from them?

Do that, and then the team would draft, hopefully, using one of my patterns. I have a little tool that I’ll show you. It’s a decision tree to help people work out which of the ten patterns. There’s a lot on that, I know. You can’t tell anything from it, but it’s a decision tree. You work your way through.

Once you’ve worked out that statement and the outcome that you need, then you can pick a pattern and populate your messaging. I encourage people to do it as a one-pager, a highly structured one-pager with a short introduction, not screens, and background but a short introduction, one single message, and then 2 to 5 supporting points organized one of two ways, either as a grouping or a deductive structure, using logic. The team would do that, and then the leader’s role would come into play again.

Let’s iterate around that messaging, and because it’s on a one-pager, it’s easy to see the flaws in the thinking or the strengths in the thinking. Whereas, when you send a draft PowerPoint or a draft paper report to your manager or your colleague and say, “Can you take a look at this for me?” what happens is they open it up and they take a look, and they go, “There’s lots of great stuff here, but I need a good window of time to do this justice.” That’s hard to find for everybody because we’re back-to-back with meetings, and it’s busy.

They park it until it becomes urgent, which, from a leadership standpoint, is where the real pickle comes. It’s two days before you have to submit it to the steering committee or the board. You think, “I have to look at Mary’s paper now.” You get it out and have a look, and you end up rewriting it because you don’t have time to go back to Mary to say, “Mary, what were you thinking about this? Did you have that?” You might go back to Mary to get some extra numbers or something, but you have to rework it yourself. You’ve put yourself in a corner.

If you send that draft as a one-pager, you can open it and go, “Great. I can see what Mary’s doing here. Maybe I need to come back to that.” I can do it in an achievable amount of time. I can do it in maybe 15 minutes, maybe 30, but quickly. I can flick it back to Mary and say, “Mary, it looks amazing. Just make these minor adjustments,” or, “Mary, I think we’re on the wrong tram. Let’s have another go at that. Here are my thoughts. Can you send me another one-pager? Can you iterate?”

You get the chance to intervene early in a way that is fast and focuses on what matters. It focuses on the messaging because, by asking Mary to draft it as a one-pager that sits, not in the way that one of my engineering clients said on an A2, I think they said A1 or A2, and four-point font, because I said to them, “How are you going?” They said, “We’ve solved your problem with the one-pager. We didn’t like it. It was letter size. It was too small. We decided that a bigger size and a much smaller font would be fine.”

The effort of crystallizing the message into a concise, structured format puts the burden on the communicator, not on the audience. Share on X

This is the point. The point is to crystallize it all into a ten-point font on a single letter or A4 page. The effort of doing that puts the burden on the communicator, not on the audience. You’re shifting the dynamic. You’re pushing the thinking onto the people who should be doing the thinking. I’ll just recap. If you are ready and the team iterates that messaging, then the document is easy, and you can settle the document very quickly by skimming and making sure that they haven’t gone off-piste, to use a skiing term, with the messaging between the message and the document, and then deliver it.

At the very end, E is embed. Have a quick discussion and say, “What went well there about our process of working? What did we learn about the stakeholders? What did we learn about the business needs, the business strategy, all of the things that affect the communication that we can then feed back into the process?” It’s something that people forget to do because they’re busy and they move on.

Tailoring Communication To Different Outcomes

Once again, it’s RISE. It’s ready, iterate, settle, and then embed. A lot of times, we write materials to get a certain type of outcome. Can we go through the different types of outcomes and maybe how our approach may differ for each?

One that’s too common is, “I want to update my audience.” There’s no outcome there. One of the things I encourage people to do is drill into it. I want them to understand. They might say, “I want to update them because they need to understand this,” or “They need to know this.” You say, “Why?” Become like a toddler, “Keep going. Why?” until you get to the real reason. “So they can execute on blah, blah, blah.”

Understanding and knowing are valid, but only in a limited set of circumstances. If somebody needs to understand or know something, they might need to understand a plan. You’d have a series of steps. I call that my nugget pattern. They might need to understand some findings that you’ve had from your research. How would that look like when you’re talking about some prem work that you’ve been doing, you have some numbers, and you need to share? I’m making a guess here, but maybe what a typical CFO is paid in their industry for their company size or something like that, then you might be going back with what I call my nugget pattern, which is the pay band for a CFO in this size tech startup would be between X and Y, and here’s why that’s true. Here’s the evidence if you like. I call that nugget.

Those two are pretty easy. They’re a main message that summarizes everything, and then a small number of supporting points to back it up. They’re easy. Where it gets more interesting is when you have an action like, “I need them to endorse, I need them to agree, I need them to decide.” When you’re talking about things like strategies, maybe you need to weave options into the discussion, options for the best way to deliver your recommendation, options for the best approach broadly.

“We should go to Hong Kong,” or “We should move to Japan” versus “How do we do that?” You might have options on either one of those. That’s where it gets much more interesting. We have a mix of the two forms that I described, which I understand are a bit abstract unless people have come out of the consulting world. I call it a grouping. Some people call it inductive, which is a list of points, like a list of actions or a list of reasons, or deductive, where you’re building a case. That’s where it gets fun because how do you describe why something is the right thing to do?

 

That’s where we have a heap of patterns. I have my ten here, which I know looks alarmingly to see on the screen, but it’s useful. You might, for example, have a pattern, which I call golden, which is my favorite. I don’t get to use it very often because when you’re persuading, often you need to be a little stronger. This is an opportunity that is exciting. You’re introducing something new that they don’t know about. We have an opportunity to expand our market size or attract new customers or something, an opportunity to do something better. “This is the best way to capture it, so let’s do this.”

That’s a positive upbeat story, and everyone loves to tell that story. Sometimes you want to turn a situation into an opportunity, and that can be done to an extent but if you are putting lipstick on a pig, it’s better not to, because you lose your credibility. It’s to be used only when it is a genuine opportunity. The opposite of that is much stronger, very direct, and quite engaging, but not to be overused. I call it ODEA, where you say, “We have a problem, everybody. This is the problem. Let me explain to you why it is a problem. I know you don’t know about this, but let me explain why we’re in a world of trouble here.”

You get their attention by doing that. However, the good news is there’s a solution. Here’s why a solution is the right solution. Therefore, we recommend implementing this plan to pull it together. There are two examples of strategies. It depends on the outcome, but also the context that you’re in. If we think of the process that I gave you there around RISE, ready, iterate, settle, embed, when you’re getting ready, you’re thinking about the outcome you’re looking for, but you’re also diving into the issues. That helps you understand which pattern you might want because if it’s a decision you need, you have a series of options that are around strategies and so on but then, do you need to discuss options or not?

If you look at the patterns, you can fairly easily think, “That one feels right. I’ll color that in and see if that works.” Sometimes you get to a place where you say, “It’s not quite working.” I’m fighting with the pattern. I need to fit within the confines of the structure. That’s part of the deal because the structure helps you think. I’ll try another one rather than starting from scratch.

It’s playing with different options to see what is going to be most impactful.

Guided by a decision tree to help you pick a promising prospect rather than, “Where do I go? I don’t know,” and then starting from anywhere.

I know a lot of our listeners are going to be saying, “I’d love to see this decision tree to help me guide through this process.” Is that something that’s in your book as well?

Absolutely. Yeah. I call it the pattern picker, where you connect that strategic thought around, “What is the outcome I need from this communication?” and then it’ll direct you towards some options and ask you some more questions. You go through and say, “We’ll try that one,” or it gives you a couple to try.

Communicating To Employees Vs. The Board Of Directors

I know we started here talking about preparing some of these materials for some high-level audiences, such as the board of directors and so forth, but can you tell me how communication differs from what our teams provide to a general audience, such as employees across the organization versus preparing something for the board?

You’re thinking perhaps about a town hall or something like that if you’re speaking to everybody, or perhaps an email that’s going out like, “Here’s the strategy,” or some announcement. Is that what you mean?

Right. Specifically, the first thing is, what is the difference that we need to have in the mindset when communicating to a general employee audience versus a board of directors?

First of all, you’re going to be thinking about the outcome you want. In both situations, you’re going to be thinking about the outcome you want. When you’re thinking about your stakeholders, you’re going to be generalizing more with the broader audience because you’re not able to say, “I’m speaking just to Mary and Bill. I’m speaking to a thousand people.” You can only generalize by group.

You’d want to think about the issues that matter and what objections they might have to what you’re saying or what might excite them about what you’re saying. Is it that you need to get them on board with a new way forward? Is it that they’ve not been doing what you want them to do? You have to cheer them up and get them more engaged in something that you think matters. “Why are they not performing at that level? Why do they seem disengaged? Why are they focusing on Japan versus Hong Kong?”

Once you understand that, then I think you can draft your story, structuring it using exactly the same principles. When you are doing something to a broader audience like that, you often need to certainly be clear and structured. To me, that is the baseline. I think because the audience is bigger and the stakes are higher in a way, you need also to layer onto that structure a more personal story and more emotion. You need to be much more conscious of that.

For example, you might begin with something that they can relate to that’s not a fact but a story. I’ll use one example. If you’re speaking to a group of people in a warehouse, you could say, “Our delivery performance has fallen over the last six months. Too many people are not receiving what they ordered.” You could say that. That’s factual, or you can also say, “People, last week Ned from Nebraska was on the phone again, and he explained for the fourth time this month he received tea bags instead of televisions.”

It’s much more personal, isn’t it? Same thing, but a much more engaging way to hook your audience in at the very opening. Probably telling them something that they knew, something familiar, but ouch, you feel for Ned. You’re making it much more personal. I think you want a lot more of that woven into your structure to engage a very big audience. You need to make it very relatable, and that’s much more important, much more concrete, rather than a decision-making audience, which I appreciate also. I think they’re much more open to, “What’s going on here? What do we need?”

They think more conceptually often too. You can be confident that a senior decision-making audience can think more conceptually because it’s part of a senior job. You have to think strategically. It’s part of the criteria for a senior role. Whereas a broader audience, some people will be analytical and not necessarily engaged with that conceptual thinking as much, and some people will. Everyone can understand Ned from Nebraska being a bit cross.

Do you need more repetition when you’re talking to a broader audience?

Yes, I think so. That’s a good point. I think you do. You need to invest a lot more time in the presentation of the idea in terms of the way you’re crafting it, and things like alliteration as well, or having an acronym, or having memorable slogans that are short and catchy. You need to invest a lot more into those aspects. I call them fine-tuning sorts of aspects. If you weigh up where the value is, if you’re communicating to get a decision about something pretty regular from a board or a steering committee or whatever, you’re not going to go to that level because you want to get the thing moving.

If you want to motivate a big group, you need to invest a lot more in the artistry of it. Share on X

Whereas when you’re communicating to a big group that you need to get them motivated, you need to get them moving forward, and it’s action-oriented, and you need sustained and combined momentum, you absolutely have to invest a lot more in that. The artistry of it if you like. It takes a lot more time to do that.

In short, you mentioned as far as the broad audience, you need to understand your demographic and what their main concerns are and use storytelling to help engage them in the conversation. With the boards, it seems like you take a deeper dive in understanding each individual member of the board, where they’re coming from, and then be higher-level, making sure that you’re pointed on what you’re expecting out of that engagement and so forth, and being very direct.

I think you have to group people when you have a big audience so you can generalize a bit.

The Journey Of Developing Effective Communication Materials

We’ve spoken a lot about the Elevate book, and now if we dive into the Engage piece and how we get our team members to develop this wonderful communication material. Can you take us through that journey?

Absolutely. If we think of RISE, the leader’s process. For those watching on video, if you think of the two lines, it’s going across. You have the leader at one level and the team sitting at another level. What you have then is when the leader is getting everybody ready, the team member has a role to play. I use five Fs for this one down below, some alliteration and a bit of repetition there to help with that.

 

When the leader is getting you ready, your job as a team member is to help flush out that strategy. It’s not all about the leader, it’s about you helping them clarify what the outcome is needed for this communication because you have value to bring as well. Firstly, flush out the strategy. If you’re working on an email for something simple, you’re using the same thing. You might just take a heartbeat, jot something down on a notepad, and say, “What do I need from this audience for this email?” If it’s something significant, you’re working with your leader to flush that out.

Once that’s clear enough to you, you will frame up your messaging, and you’ll use a pattern to do that. I have the decision tree, the pattern picker, to help people work out which one might be useful here so that they can start mocking it up using a pattern and then fill it in. You want to finalize that messaging in concert with your leader as you’re iterating it with them, so you’re finalizing it, firming it up as that one page, so that it becomes crystal clear, logical, engaging, clear, insightful, and all of those things.

Once that messaging is clear, then you would flip it into document format, because most likely, you’re the person doing the legwork on it. You would convert it, flip it into a PowerPoint, a Google Doc, or whatever the tool is that you’re using. You might be working within a template too, which can be an extra step that you need to take that can be challenging. People often start writing in a template, which I think is tricky. I think it’s better to start with the messaging. You flip it there, and then finally, your feedback and feed-forward. You’re saying, “What did we learn from that? What went well? What did not?” As an individual contributor, you can drive this process as much as your leader can, and often you need to.

If it’s a fairly routine communication. It’s an update, for example, that you do every week or every month. You might be driving it. You might think, “This one is special. I need to involve my leader. I need to get them involved because they don’t realize quite how special this one is” We don’t need to tell them everything is awesome here because it’s not, or we need some help to get things moving forward, or we need extra resources or something. Even though there’s a leader’s role and a team member’s role, the team member can drive the process where they need to. Often, they will need to.

Once again, the framework of the five Fs is flush it out.

The communication strategy, yes.

Make sure you put a frame around the messaging, then fill it in, go into the details, and then firm up those details. Is that right?

Firm up the messaging, and then flip it into a document.

A document, and then get feedback on that material.

After it’s done, after it’s delivered, after it’s presented, that sort of final that closes the loop, “What did we learn here?”

The Importance Of Feedback In Communication

If we wouldn’t mind diving into the element of getting feedback, because I think that’s quite important, and it’s often left out in a lot of communications. Can you walk us through what that looks like?

For the most part, it’s going to be a quick conversation, either in a one-on-one or if a team’s involved in collaboratively writing something, then it might be in the team meeting. It’s as simple as, “How did that go? Did we get the outcome we wanted? Did we need to iterate madly at the last minute? Did we get the decision we wanted the first time? Was the conversation substantive in that decision-making forum?”

Was it everyone trying to say, “Thanks for the doc, but can you explain to me? Can you clarify?” Was it lots of that? Was it, “Cool, so how can we do this? That looks great.” What was the tenor of that conversation? Was it good quality? If it’s lots of clarification, then you missed the mark. We’ll do better next time. What did we learn about where the stakeholders are at? Have they shifted their perspectives at all? Did we learn something useful about how they’re thinking about the strategy for our area, or what matters for our area?

Just process, did we do the thing? Did we think about our strategy early, or did we shoehorn ourselves into a corner at the end? Did we do the one-page message map? Was it well architected? Did we do the peer review on it before you sent it to me? Did you do everything you could as a team to protect the leader, peer-reviewing that message before sending it up?

Peer review specifically means having other team members go through the material, perhaps using a trusted advisor to have them look at that. What I often see is if there’s a close relationship with somebody on the board that you can trust and you can bounce it off them.

In some ways, people might think, “This sounds like a lot of work for a piece of communication.” If I give an analogy here, just to explain how it can help, we find it cuts the amount of time everybody takes in preparing the communication quite materially. I think lawyers who count their time in six-minute units are a great example of that. A long time ago, I was teaching lawyers how to get to the point, and how to get their advice across in 30 seconds. It’s a common response because the law is complicated. There’s a lot behind that.

We were doing that. I worked in a small office. It was part of a bigger firm. I was rotating around the whole time. I went to this office, and then I wasn’t going to be back to that office again for a year because they didn’t have that many new hires or what have you. I’d just been in two new senior associates were hired. They said, “We can see that everyone communicates here very differently than the way lawyers are taught to communicate, which is to describe their problem-solving journey, then ta-da at the end,” which is common in technical communication. “We have to do something about this because that woman, she’s not back for a long time. What are we going to do?”

They said, “We’ll read through the materials. We’ll get a briefing from some people who’ve been through the training. We’d better buddy up, or we’re going to die here because we have no idea what we’re doing.” They said, “We’re going to commit for a month to get to the whiteboard and map out the messaging for every piece of advice we write until we feel like we understand this and we can do this. Otherwise, we’re in trouble.” They did that. Very quickly, they realized they were cutting the amount of time. They’re reciprocating. That’s the important piece here. You have to be reciprocating. They were cutting the time it took to draft their advice massively.

Don't think about communication as beginning writing to hitting send on the document. Think about it as getting the decision. Share on X

Lawyers who count their time in six-minute units are pretty aware of the time shift. Anecdotally, bringing forward the thinking, which is what this is all about, bringing the thinking piece early on into the process and focusing on the messaging first, it’s the right kind of hard, but it’s usually much faster if you think of beginning the process to start writing through to getting a decision. Don’t think about it as beginning writing to hitting send on the document. Think of it as getting the decision. Think about that as the time-space. You will cut the time significantly.

How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Communication

We’re coming up on our time here, but one final question. How is artificial intelligence changing the game of communication?

It’s doing a few things. It helps summarize the information that it’s given. That speeds up the process a bit because it’s clear. It’s easier to work out what the data is. What it can’t do though is important. It can’t yet connect the information, the facts, the data to the commercial reality. It can give you ideas, which is very powerful, but it also isn’t what I call MISI.

It doesn’t always organize ideas in a way that means that there are no gaps and no overlaps or the ideas in consulting speak, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. If you look at them, it gives you ideas, that’s great. It summarizes, that’s great but it doesn’t add the insight. It doesn’t add the value. Be careful. It can’t do your job for you, thank goodness, but it can help you quite a lot.

Looking Ahead To 2025: What’s Next?

What is the next thing that you’re looking forward to in 2025? What are the big things you’re working on?

That’s a good question and something I’m thinking about a lot this week. Honestly, having moved countries a year and a bit ago, delivered two books in the last twelve months, and maintained, and hit my revenue target, I’m just relieved. In terms of next year, I’m keen to button up or knuckle down on the leaders, working with the leaders so much more and helping them set their teams up to succeed. Exactly how that plays out, I’m not sure. You’ve caught me with a question that I’m not quite ready to answer yet, but I’m excited about taking it forward. I just haven’t had the time to think what I need.

Advice For Leaders Looking To Elevate And Engage

Hopefully, the holidays will provide such relief for you to dive deep into that. Many of our leaders out there are thinking about how they can learn more about these two, Elevate and Engage. What would you say to them?

They can come to my website, ClarityFirstProgram.com, to learn more about the books specifically. If they want a quick dive into how this stuff works in practice, then I have a Ten Minutes to Better Emails course, which they can sign up for at ClarityFirstProgram.com/Emails. If they’re thinking, “I’d like to work with her just to test this out and see how it goes,” I offer a program called the Board Paper Bootcamp. I’ll be running that again in May 2025 on a platform called Maven. You can find out all about it on my website. That’s perhaps a few different ideas that people can explore.

I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us. This is very helpful to me because Howard and I often work with our teams to deliver very clear communication. I appreciate your time and helping us with this.

My pleasure. Great to talk to you both.

Have a great holiday.

You too.

Take care, everyone.

 

Important Links

• Davina Stanley on LinkedIn
• Clarity First Program
• Clarity First Program on X
• Communicating Up on Facebook
• Board Paper Bootcamp on Maven
• Elevate: How to Lift the Quality of Thinking in Your Team’s Board Papers Without Rewriting Them Yourself
• Engage: How to Engage Senior Leaders and Boards Without Burning Nights and Weekends Iterating on Your Papers

 

About Davina Stanley

Davina Stanley is a communication expert who helps mid-to-senior executives transform the way they approach critical meetings, including ExCo and board discussions. She specializes in simplifying complex ideas, sharpening messaging, and creating streamlined communication strategies that save time and deliver impactful outcomes.

With a proven track record of success, Davina has helped clients cut pitch preparation time in half, reduce board paper review time by over 80%, and consistently improve the quality of leadership communication. Her clients include CEOs, ExCos, and leadership teams from global industries across Australia, Asia Pacific, Greater China, the US, and the UK.

As the creator of the Cutting Through podcast and a range of online courses and resources, Davina offers practical tools to help leaders communicate effectively. Her popular programs include the Better Emails in 10 Minutes course and the Board Paper Bootcamp.

Based in Seattle, Davina leverages virtual platforms to deliver engaging, results-driven training to clients across time zones.