Clarity Counts: Transforming Communication For Impact With Davina Stanley

 

Effective communication hinges on clarity. Join Elizabeth Bachman as she engages with Davina Stanley in a thought-provoking discussion about the pivotal role of clarity in conveying complex ideas. They explore the challenges professionals encounter in conveying important messages and discuss strategies for simplifying information while preserving its essence. Davina shares insights on synthesizing information to captivate audiences, prioritizing key messages, and streamlining communication processes to save time and reduce workplace stress. Through engaging examples and discussions, Davina provides actionable strategies for enhancing your communication skills and achieving your goals.

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Clarity Counts: Transforming Communication For Impact With Davina Stanley

Introduction

Davina Stanley, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Elizabeth. It’s wonderful to be here.

Dream Interview

It’s really fun. Your assistant sent me the connection to you, and I looked at this and I said, “I need to talk to her.” We absolutely agree on so many things. I’m really very excited about all these interesting things you’re talking about. First, let me ask you, who would be your dream interview? If you could interview someone who’s no longer with us, who would it be? What would you ask them? Who should be listening?

Interesting. The person I’d love to interview was my great, great, great grandmother. Her name was Betsy Treweller. She left Cornwall in the 1850s with two children, one of whom was 4 and the other one who was about 6 and went on a very long, wind-powered journey to Australia. She arrived in this new country that was then very underdeveloped.

With these two little people, her son nearly died. The four-year-old nearly died on the trip over. Knowing she may well never see her family again, this is a momentous shift in life to go and join her husband, who had gone a couple of years before, in fact, four years before, because he’d never met his son. She arrived in the port in Melbourne, and then had to walk or sit on a dray, depending, for many days to get into the forest to where the goldmine was where he was working.

There’s a book that my dad’s cousin has written called Over the Log that describes life. I grew up in the country in Australia. This puts such another spin on when you drive around these gold mining areas that are uphill and down and there are mountains where there were gold mines before, the residue heaps, and so on. You just think, what would that have been like to leave everything you’ve known? Her husband was 1 of 11 children, and 6 of them came to Australia. Imagine being the parents as well. There were 5 of those 6 children they never saw again. What would make you do that? They were hungry.

Cornwall was pretty tough back then. It’s a pretty big thing to do, isn’t it? Just learn about her perspective on life and how she got through it all. The mental toughness, as we would think of it, is phenomenal. I suspect back then, they were more hardy than we are. The physical aspects of life, one of the first things he said was, the husband said to her, “Now, Betsy, we don’t fuss about laundry and all those things here. When it’s really dirty and stiff, we wash it, but we just don’t make work for yourself. Don’t try and make this house like it was in Cornwall. It’s just not going to be that.”

Wow. The things were, and to decide it was a thing that people did, people left because you had to. If you’ve got eleven children and the land goes to the eldest, the others all have to go somewhere. Still, that’s a very interesting thing. I had a great, great, something great grandfather who sailed around the continent from the East Coast of America to the West Coast and then brought his wife and many daughters there. They never saw their friends again. They never saw their parents. They moved West.

That was then just the territory. At some point, people did that. I think we think of it less just because it’s easier to move around these days. Nowadays, we have the internet. I’m on one continent and you’re on another, but not Australia. It’s just the things we take for granted. I imagine our great-grandchildren will think, how did they ever survive in the days when they had to talk by Zoom, and they couldn’t get into a transporter and just step through?

Communication Traps

I don’t know. Who knows? One of the reasons I wanted to ask you, I’m going to ask you about your books, but before I do that, I want to ask you about the communication traps that you talk about. I think we should start with that, and then go to the books and how that’s all used in the books. You were talking about the three big communication traps that we fall into. Tell us, please.

I think there are three length track changes and how the brain works would be the three top ones that I think of.

Tracking changes, as in using the review function in Word?

Yes.

Not all of our readers speak English as a first language.

Good call. Absolutely. One of the things that I hear people talking about when they come and talk to me and say, “Please help my team,” it’ll be because they say, “Please make it shorter. It’s just too long.” They’re thinking the solution is to make it shorter. Fewer words, fewer pages. If you listen to some fairly senior business people, too, it’s the language they use. Jeff Bezos talked about that when he set the Amazon method in play, which, if people are not familiar with that, is very clever. It says if you have a half-hour meeting, you have a three-page prose paper. If you have a one-hour meeting, you have a six-page prose paper, all calculated for making a decision.

What paper?

Prose-written.

Prose-written paper. Got it.

When you want to put an idea forward to say, “Give me more money for this,” or “Let’s change the way we’re solving this problem,” let’s think about how many pages we’re going to give according to how long the meeting is, as a bit of a proxy for how much information we can convey. I think the challenge is that a beautifully crafted three-pager, let’s say, could be that you need to read from the beginning to the end to understand the message. It’s not actually the time it takes to get the words past your eyeballs that matters. It’s how quickly you can glean the message? How quickly can you understand what it is that somebody is saying, what they want from you or what they want to tell you?

There’s a way of organizing your ideas. If we forget about words, and we forget about pictures and documents and things like that and focus on the decision that you need and the ideas that you need to convey to get those decisions, you can get your message across in a heartbeat. I think the question is not the length of the document. It’s length of time to understand. It’s the wrong metric.

If you step back and have a structured way to collaborate, you can convey your message in a radically shorter time. Share on X

Say that one again.

It’s not length of document. It’s length of time to understand, but even more, length of time to make use of the ideas. The messages

 

What do you mean by that?

I can tell you some information about things that have been going on. You might say, “Great, that’s a terrific summary of where we’re up to. That’s useful as far as it goes. Actually, have you crafted your messaging not just to look back at what’s happened but the implications of that?” Even more than the implications, knowing what’s happened, let’s say, and what that means, the implications, what do we do about that? How do we be very precise about where we want to go, what you’re recommending, what you’re saying?

Getting out of sitting down and thinking you’ve got to write sixteen drafts of a PowerPoint or a paper with your colleagues and mash it all together to get to some perfectly linguistically neat paper, or how about you stop? You’ve been asked to write a paper for the board, let’s say, or the decision-making group. Why do they want that from me? What actually do I need to tell them to make progress? This obsession with a 3-page paper, a 6-page paper it’s a useful proxy in a way, but it only goes so far.

It’s interesting. Let me ask you about this because one of the things I think about is. I call it the expert trap, where the tendency is to give them all the details because you know all the details. How does giving a summary or the key information fit into the length of the communication? How do you make use of the communication, giving enough information but not too much?

It’s all about synthesis. ChatGPT and other AI tools can summarize. You give them the data set, and they can extract their ideas from that to say, this is what this information says. That’s fine. What we need to be doing is saying, actually, what does it mean? We have to think about why is it that this particular audience needs to know something about this thing that I’ve spent a lot of time on? Why do they need to know about it? Once you start to get a very precise direction, if you like, find your North Star for that communication.

Once you start to get a very precise direction, find your north star for that communication. Share on X

Make it about them and what they need to know.

Yes, so that you can achieve something together. You’re in an organization for a purpose. It’s, what do they need to know, and why? There are two ways to make something shorter. One is to polish it so that you get your sentences really beautiful and really tight and just remove clutter and make it nice. The other one is to say, “I’ve got all this stuff. How do I get rid of three-quarters of it?” It’s just not relevant anymore. You’ve got to work out what’s relevant. You work out how to tell your story.

Very good. I call that strategic empathy putting yourself in the shoes of your listeners.

Which would be the hardest thing a human has to do.

It’s rule number one for any presentation or report to make it about them, what they need to know, and why they need to know it. I love that. You’ve talked a little bit about the trap of forgetting how brains work. You forget about how the brain works. That’s a trap that we can fall into. What do you mean by that? I was very intrigued.

Imagine yourself opening up an email that comes from one of your experts. How do you feel? You open up a big slab of text. You take a second to look at it. How do you feel?

Overwhelmed. I’m going to put it away and look at it later. Of course, I never will.

Exactly. That’s your biology getting into that because what’s happening is you look at it and you think very quickly, did that come from someone who really matters to me? Essentially, in a human sense, is that a bear? I live in Seattle. I’m very interested in bears.

Is that a bear?

Is that a bear? Am I safe? Is this dangerous? Is there some burning reason that I need to read that? If the answer is not sure or no, then you don’t because your biology just gets in the way and says, no, don’t bother. The reason it does that is because our brains are 2% of our body weight and use 20% of our calories. It’s self-preservation.

Your body intervenes and just says, it’s not a bear or a snake or something big and scary or something really big and exciting that I need to know about. No, move on. When you go to actually force yourself to think, you have to really focus hard on something. We fight that, too, because it’s the same thing. It’s that disconnect coming into play again. I always laugh about, “I need coffee and chocolate for this one because it’s hard.” There was a time when my colleague and I were teaching lawyers how to get to the point and write their legal advice so that the audience, the client, could read their advice and get the message within 30 seconds.

It absolutely can be done. There’s no question about that. There are interesting things that go around besides that. When we were creating our case studies for the training to prove to the lawyers that non-lawyers, not lawyers, could do something useful with their material, we described it as actually putting a head in a vice. We’d have 2 to 3 days to do each one.

It was just head down, solid focus, untangling all of these really valuable legal ideas and the analysis that had gone on that typically worked towards the conclusion at the end of fourteen pages or something. We had to craft it. We had to take it all apart, deconstruct it, and then put it back together again. We described it as being like putting our heads in a vice. It was like there was pressure on the sides of our heads because we were thinking so hard, and that’s the same thing. We have to push ourselves to actually do it and structure our thinking, which is hard.

I think it also has to do with, nowadays, we are used to consuming information in shorter and shorter pieces. This whole TLDR, too long, didn’t read, which I find really annoying because I like to go on, but I always think, oh, they’re talking about me. I’m talking too much, but getting to the point of what you need to say. I find it interesting. I talk a lot about single-focus thinkers and multi-focus thinkers, and the expert trap falls in the middle between the two.

For the multi-focus thinkers, if you see the world in a whole web of relationships, then context is everything. The single-focus thinkers don’t care. They just want to know, what am I supposed to do? How do I solve the problem? In a way, what you’re saying is it’s really the brain of the single-focus person you’re writing for.

I think that’s, look, that’s very true, and I really enjoyed listening to a couple of podcasts, actually, where you unpacked those ideas, and I came to that conclusion. I suspect in many professional settings, business, government, and white-collar settings, that people become single-focused as an audience because there’s so much going on. If you can capture the nuance into that single sentence and a small number of supporting points, you can convey the subtlety and the context and so on, but in a way that it’s received by someone who’s just really busy.

Exactly.

I think, too, one of the challenges for the single-focus people who do receive, people who perhaps, let’s call them natively single-focus, as I’m understanding, sometimes they need that context and that nuance, and they want to just go, go, go, but there’s something about, hang on, is that the right place to go? That’s where the nuance comes in that’s just so very important, but you’ve got to get their attention.

It’s why you need both, and this is where I think stories and metaphors, short ones, will help because then that gives the brain something to hook onto. You had another communication trap you mentioned about tracking change.

Not your friend.

Not your friend. Boy, do I believe this, but please tell us about this.

What I see happening, and we’ll talk Word or Google Docs, those tools that actually have this very useful functionality built into them, is that people dive straight in and write, and then they pass it off to a colleague who gets track changes out, and they edit it. You see all the comments coming along the side of the document. It’s like, “Nice word, but Mary would think of that as jargon.” “Should we just move that paragraph up a bit?” You get caught in this minutia. You end up in this quagmire of editing, which means that you have all of these hands on the one document, usually sequentially, sometimes all at once, and I’m not convinced all at once is actually any better.

All you end up with is just a verbal scramble rather than the comments along the side. I think both are really faulty. I think what they do is they’re jumping to their reflex of, “Okay, let’s get it done,” rather than, “What do we really need to say here?” If you step back and have a really structured way to work on your own, but also to collaborate around, I call it surfacing, finding the message you need to convey, you can get there in a radically shorter time. It’s sometimes hard, particularly for the doers, because they’ve got to sit on their hands for a little while and actually think and talk. If they trust the process, they get there so much more quickly, and they don’t spend as many nights and weekends rewriting other people’s papers and doing their jobs for them.

You’ve talked, I’ve heard you talk about this, where the problem is that the team sends something to the manager, and then the manager spends all weekend rewriting it. What’s the reason for that? What could they do? What should they do instead?

Perhaps let’s just briefly capture what happens as to what leads to this.

Tell the story.

I’m telling the story. It’ll help people put themselves in the moment. If we think about you opening that email from the expert, and it’s a whole lot of just stuff, you look at it and you’re the manager, and it’s your expert writing for you. You look at it and you think, “That’s going to take me some time. I’m back-to-back in meetings. It’s not urgent yet. It’s not due. Kudos to them for getting a draft to me so quickly.”

“That’s great. It’s not due for two weeks. I’m just going to pop that, flag it, and I’m going to get to that when I’ve got a bit of time to think about it because I need to do it justice.” It’s for all the right reasons. What happens is life and they get busy and they’re back-to-back in meetings and priorities, and suddenly, eventually, it does become urgent.

When it’s urgent, it’s 9:00 at night. They’ve had dinner and they’ve sat down to knock out the last few things for the evening. It’s 9:00, and oh gosh, that paper, I’ve got to get that to the CEO for review tomorrow. I better have a look. Guess what? They’re stuck. They have no choice but to rewrite it because they’ve cornered themselves. The team member don’t feel they can go and contact them at 9:00 at night to get their help or at the weekend because that feels rude and inappropriate.

They’re left doing their team members’ jobs for them. What happens is that this happens a few times, and the team member goes, well, there’s no point in me really doing something amazing with this. I’m going to give them all the stuff because they’re going to rewrite it anyway. I don’t really know what’s required here. They’re just going to do it. That’s fine. It becomes a habit. That’s what happens a lot.

Leaders just think, it’s just my job. That’s where I add value. They get stuck on this hamster wheel. Instead, if we unpack the steps we need to take and talk about tracks, I think there are two tracks. You’ve got your leader, and you’ve got the people doing the writing, and there might be several on the one document. You’ve got the two tracks, and you think of time. You want everybody to get their heads around what needs to be communicated, to whom, and why, early. Really early.

Sometimes, that briefing doesn’t happen because the leader hasn’t yet gotten their head into it. You need both the team and the leader to be in sync that it needs to happen, but also the team needs to be ready to ask some good questions, pull it all out, and help the leader early on. It’s two-way. It should be two-way. You do that. We use a very specific statement that describes the outcome we want from our communication. Within that, there’ll be an action, a verb. I want them to know, understand, decide, agree, or endorse something.

You need both the team and the leader to be in sync early on for effective communication. Share on X

If you take that, you can then find a pattern. You’ve got a framework to help you pick a pattern for the high-level structure of your story. The team can say, okay, that’s our statement. One of these might work. Let’s try that one. Maybe not that one. Let’s try another one. They hack it out to get a one-page structured message.

An outline?

Exactly, an outline. With some very specific elements to it. A short introduction with two elements, one main message, and then a short number of supporting points that are organized in a logical way. You have that. You can fit stories in it, too. It’s okay. There is logic to the outline.

Sounds like the way I build a script.

Exactly. You start high, start at the high level. You say, okay, now that we’ve got that, let’s peer review that. Let’s check it with our colleagues to see if we’ve missed anything. Have we got the right words that Mary would like? Have we really landed the sentiment? Send that up to the manager. The manager says, “Good. Okay, tonight I can look at that.”

Even maybe during the day, I can look at that. They look at the strategy piece that just confirms that that’s still right. Look at the one page and go, yes, here, no, there. Tweak, tweak. It’s great. Go write the document. That structure has a one-for-one match in how you craft your PowerPoint or prose paper. It sets it out in such a way that there’s a hierarchy in the messaging. You match the hierarchy of the idea with the hierarchy of the formatting. Bigger idea, bigger font, more white space around it, for example. When somebody opens it, they go, “That’s the thing.” That’s why you can read legal advice in 30 seconds and get the main message out and the supporting logic, actually, or anything.

Books

This brings me to my final question, which is you’ve written two books about how to do this. I think, okay, I immediately want to go and see a piece of paper that does this. You’ve written two books at once. I’m amazed you’re still sane.

I’m not.

One’s called Elevate: How to Lift the Quality of Thinking in Your Team’s Board Papers Without Rewriting Them Yourself and one’s called Engage: How to Engage Senior Leaders and Boards Without Burning Nights and Weekends Iterating on Your Papers.

Correct.

Why two at once and what are they for?

I started out writing one. I started out writing Elevate and I did that because I wanted to help leaders, my clients, but also others who are sick of this quagmire, who want to be able to set their teams up to operationalize this method that we’re talking about. I’ve been using the techniques with leaders, helping them do it in their organizations. I wanted something to leave them with to say here’s what we’ve done, go do this. Whether you’re coming from having worked with me or from ground zero. I work with a method called the Pyramid Principle, which comes out of McKinsey, and it’s baked in there. How do you operationalize that inside a company to give people their nights and weekends back?

That’s where I started, with one book, which was a much more sane ambition. I thought it would be a really good companion for another book that I wrote with a colleague of mine. As I went through it, I just realized that the original book was written for, let’s call it, mid-level problems and challenges, whereas this work that I was doing in Elevate was for more complex stories, for bigger stories. The examples we have in that first book are very useful, but there were gaps in them, and I’d been bumping into them over the last six years or so when using them, going, oh, let me just show you how we tweak that. Let me just show you how we adjust that.

Yes, I know this one isn’t in that collection, but actually here’s what it would look like. I had these things that I thought actually were necessary when you’re communicating the more complex things, those bigger decisions. I thought, I think I have to write another one, so I did.

The second one is Engage: How to Engage Senior Leaders and Boards Without Burning Nights and Weekends Iterating on Your Papers.

Yes, so elevate the quality of your thinking so you can engage your audience. Elevate is for the leaders, and Engage is for the person who might be writing the paper. It’s deeper on how you do this as you’re self-crafting a piece of communication. It’s deeper on that. Whereas Elevate has more of the leadership questions and so on, as well as the methodology that’s necessary too.

I particularly love that the whole point of this is to give you your nights and your weekends back, so you don’t have to spend all your spare time writing that report.

I love that, too. For me, it’s the human aspect of what I do in what I call the quagmire of corporate life, just as the wheels are turning and we’re doing things, busy, busy, busy. I think it’s unsatisfying when you’re not feeling like you’re getting the outcomes that you want and working unnecessarily hard. We all want to work hard. I think that’s satisfying too. However, when you feel like it’s an unsatisfying process, I think everybody who has things they’d like to do outside work wants their weekends back.

We all want to work hard. That's satisfying, but it's unsatisfying when you're not feeling like you're getting the outcomes that you want and working unnecessarily hard. Share on X

Yes, I agree. Everybody does. We shouldn’t have to be working these terrible hours. Davina Stanley, this is really marvelous. If you were reading this and said, “I need to apply some of this information right now,” where could somebody start?

Come to my website, which is called ClarityFirstProgram.com. I’ve got a ten-minute How to Write Better Emails course and that will get you started in ten minutes.

I love it. Great. That’s very helpful. Davina Stanley, thank you so much for joining us. It was really very interesting. I think I have to buy those books because everything you say sounds fascinating. Thank you for being dedicated to getting us our nights and weekends back.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me on. I’ve loved speaking with you.

It’s been a delight. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to us. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and tell your friends so we can get more wonderful guests like Davina Stanley here. Especially, leaving us a good review on Apple Podcasts will help us be found better. I’ll see you on the next one.

 

Important Links

• Davina Stanley
• 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
• Clarity First Program
• YouTube – Speakers Who Get Results
• Apple Podcasts – Speakers Who Get Results

 

About Davina Stanley

I have had the pleasure of helping executives all over the world clarify and communicate complex ideas for the past 25+ years. I first learned structured thinking when working at McKinsey in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s and was approved to teach the Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto in 2009. My approach helps people in almost every discipline. It offers a universal thinking process that enables you to articulate the breakthrough lurking beneath the surface of your communication. Recent clients include HSBC, KPMG, Meta, Marsh, Toyota, and Woolworths Australia.