536. Davina Stanley, Elevating the Quality of Business Presentations

Show Notes

Davina Stanley, a consultant and author, has recently published the book Elevate: How to Lift the Quality of Thinking in Your Team's Board Papers without Rewriting them yourself. She spent 15 years at McKinsey and coached consultants for 15 years. Her core work involves understanding the stakeholder environment and structuring messages based on the Minto pyramid principle. She brings her public relations and communications background, McKinsey Consulting experience, and her original background as a kindergarten teacher together to help people engage senior leaders and boards.

ClarityFirst Communication Program

Davina works with mid to senior level executives, often one-on-one or in small groups. She typically works with groups of 15 to 25 people. She helps build skills by giving them homework to do and working through the process together. She talks about how she works with senior executives and how she offers a structured program that can be tailored to budgets and ambitions. For groups with technical backgrounds with a fairly modest project, she might offer a three-hour workshop where they work through the process together and think through summarizing and synthesizing data and context. For groups with deep technical backgrounds, she might offer a six-week workshop with learning in advance. This allows the group to practice and learn, ask questions, and interact with the material. She explains how she structures the courses, why she adopted the drip model,  and why she started teaching online. Davina currently offers books and online courses as preparatory work for people to use in their own work.

Rise. Ready.  Iterate. Settle Embed.

Davina identifies key points that people should take away from her sessions. She focuses on two streams of work: collaborating to get the final messaging and document right, and getting the actual messaging right itself. She emphasizes the importance of clarity and quality of insight in structuring messages, beginning with understanding who this is for and what the core message is. Davina suggests that one message per slide should be embedded in the title of the slide, and other key lessons to be learned include understanding the stakeholder environment, getting ready to understand the communication strategy, iterating around the message as a one-pager to nail it with stakeholders, settling the document, and embedding learnings form both the process and outcome

Clear Communication Skills for Leaders

Davina’s book, Elevate, helps leaders build their own foundations in understanding the importance of clear communication. She suggests that leaders should build their own foundations by thinking differently about their communication, lifting their own skills, and elevating the team. She talks about the importance of leadership involvement in building quality communication. She states that leaders should first lay foundations by understanding why it matters and learning their own approach to building clear communication. Davina defines the skills that she’d like participants to take away from her course, and how she helps them through the course.

Davina talks about the design of her book. She wanted to create a visually appealing book that reflected her teaching principles and was designed with a clear vision in mind. Her goal was to create a book that was user-friendly, with plenty of whitespace and a mix of slide design, PowerPoint design, and book design. The book's shape was designed to be both visually appealing and easy to read. The book's layout was a mix of slide design, PowerPoint design, and book design, with a focus on illustrating concepts and making them relatable to readers. The portability of online books is important for the visceral experience of having a book, but she also believes that physical books are wonderful for having something on their desk as a reference. She talks about the difference between typesetting and book design. Her first book, The SoWhat Strategy, was written with Jared Castles and is targeted at senior leaders and boards, focusing on more complex stories. 

Davina has built a list of 10,000 email addresses through her marketing coach, who helped her learn Facebook techniques. She has kept building this list and has been sending out weekly emails to help people with their communication. She talks about the emailing system and tools she uses to link systems together and create online modules. 

For listeners interested in learning more about her practice, Devina suggests visiting clarityfirstprogram.com, which offers various resources, such as her podcast, Cutting Through, and her free course, Emails Basic. To subscribe to her thinking, visitors can visit the website and sign up. 

Timestamps:

01:53 Working with leaders

02:22 How Davina’s coaching business serves executives

06:51 The process of preparing for a coaching session

11:26 The structure of a good communication plan

16:43 Embedding the operating rhythm

21:37 How the book was designed with the user in mind

31:49 Davina’s email marketing strategy

Links:

Website: https://clarityfirstprogram.com/

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