Structured Thinking 101: Clarity Through Storylines (PowerPoint PPTX)

Clarity is critical in business communication of all kinds, yet difficult to achieve.

To add insult, clarity is necessary, but not sufficient.

Powerful professional communication must also deliver an insightful message, while often prepared in collaboration with others and under great pressure.

How do you do that?

This deck offers five clear steps to help you clarify and convey complex ideas in any format for any audience. It explains how to:

1 / Flush out your communication strategy, so your message achieves a clear purpose. This needs to be done in collaboration with your leader who has commissioned the paper to ensure it is on point.

2 / Frame your messaging using time-worn patterns. I offer my 10 favourite structures, or 'patterns' to stimulate your own thinking.

3 / Firm up your messaging using a highly structured one pager. A dot-dash outline isn't enough. These show a hierarchy of ideas, but still allow you to wander. You need something structured to keep you on track, and force you to distil your thinking.

4 / Finalise your document, whether that be a paper, presentation or something else. It's the thinking that matters. It doesn't matter what format you use, the messaging must be clear and compelling. Once that is clear, the document is easy to create.

5 / Feed back and feed forward to apply any learnings from this communication to the next. It is a shame to move so quickly that you don't capture what you learned from a communication so you can feed it into the next one. Understanding stakeholders happens over time, and this can be a useful thing to reflect upon. As can optimising your paper-writing process to gain maximum efficiency and minimise rework.

Informed by the Minto Pyramid Principle and decades of communication consulting experience, these steps have proven to work in a wide range of consulting and business settings.

This deck was prepared by Davina Stanley of Clarity First. Davina specialises in helping executives get to the point, using the Pyramid Principle. She learned the techniques at McKinsey. Barbara Minto reviewed and approved her training in 2009 and she has used them to help executives globally ever since.