Adam Torres and Davina Stanley discuss finding breakthrough ideas.
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Show Notes:
What does it take to break through the fluff to get to the gold? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Davina Stanley, Founder of Clarity First Program, explore the Clarity First Program and how it’s helping businesses thrive.
About Davina Stanley
Davina Stanley draws on more than 25 years’ experience when helping leaders and teams to clarify their thinking so they can communicate complex ideas Davina work helps experts deliver the right message to the right people in the right way regardless of the context or content.
Davina is an entrepreneurial leader who loves designing and delivering engaging skill-building programs. She blends her experience as an educator and in top-tier consulting environments to design and deliver innovative programs for a wide range of clients. Highly relational and genuinely curious, she builds long-lasting relationships with clients across a wide range of sectors. She laughs a lot.
Davina was previously a Communication Specialist at McKinsey & Company, working in the Hong Kong and Melbourne offices, where she was ranked as one of the top performers of her era. She has a bachelor’s degree in communication management, and a diploma of teaching. She is also an expert at using and teaching the Minto Pyramid Principle Ⓡ.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Davina Stanley, and she is the founder over at Clarity First Program.
Davina, welcome to the show. Hi, Adam. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. All right. Well great to have you on this show. And let’s have some fun. Let’s dive right in. So first off before we get into, you know, Clarity First program, which I see the name founder here, whenever I see the name founder, I’m always curious.
So how’d you get into entrepreneurship? Like, where does that begin for you? Well, it began a long time ago. I first was freelancing when I was in my early 20s, where I wanted to study full time and work part time. And the deal was with my husband that so long as I earned enough to pay the mortgage, all was well.
So. Yeah, exactly. It’s like one of these early marital deals, right? Yeah, I like it. Yeah, he wanted to move to Hong Kong and that was great. I said, sure, but I’ve got to finish my study first. We did it that way. And so I went, started in a very easy place where I was freelancing from my previous employer.
And since then I’ve just had a number of circumstances, but particularly once I had children where it just made to be the obvious way for me to work. And it’s allowed me to move from country to country and serve clients. And typically I’ve been able to start out on a period of entrepreneurship, if you like by freelancing back to my previous employer.
So the, I’ve been on my own now for Very long time, like 20 something years. And so I started this time by freelancing back to McKinsey, the management consulting firm that were my sort of last substantial employer. I just built practices on the back of that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. What do you think has kept you in the game and has made you successful?
What do you think is, a lot of people kind of go down that route, but what’s made you successful in this? Because it’s not easy. No, I suppose it’s not, but nothing is. And I think for me, I really enjoy the work I do. I love people, helping people clarify and convey complex ideas. I’ve got, I use the method I learned at McKinsey.
So first of all, I really enjoy what I do. I love helping people. I started as a kindergarten teacher originally, Which is why I needed to go back to study. So I bring together all of those things. So that sense of satisfaction of helping people do a hard thing. It’s just really satisfying. I also like the freedom of finding something that works and getting better and better and better at it.
So I think that’s helped me stay in the game too, because I just enjoy getting better at it. particular way. I guess too, it would seem I’m able to sell. And in the past, I’ve had teams of up to 10 people working with me. And one of the reasons I found people joined with me was that perhaps I could help sell them as well.
So I think there’s something in that. I love the enthusiasm of finding a new client and, you know, finding how can I help them and design something that really suits their needs. So I think there’s satisfaction that in general, in, Doing the thing there’s enjoyment that comes from helping people get better at something There’s maybe just some pleasure that comes with I seem to have been able to sell enough.
There’s flexibility In being a mom living in many countries and so on and my kids my boys are adult now. They’ve grown So it, it has, you know, enabled me to build something that I can keep on doing and having been doing it for so long now, I don’t know if anyone would hire me, like as an employee.
Unemployable is what we call that, Devin. Well, I know, and I think, I don’t know if I ever got to a spot where I didn’t have enough work to do. I think, crikey, what would I do? So, look, I really enjoy it. And that’s amazing. Yeah. How do you work? Yeah, go on. No, no, no. So one of the things that I see as I kind of review things is , you’re, you know, you’re helping clients kind of find these breakthrough ideas, whether you’re working through with senior leadership or leadership or otherwise, like, and to kind of get through all the fluff to push, you know, to move the needle, so to speak, like, how do you tell me a little bit about your process, like, and how you’re able to accomplish that?
I mean, how do you do that? Great question. So I’ve got five steps that I take people through, and these are the anchor for my two new books. I wrote two in parallel, which I know is crazy, but I’ll explain why in a minute. And so the five steps are these. So they all start with F. So firstly, flush out your strategies.
So I work with them to say, okay, what’s the purpose for this communication? What outcome do you need from it? Does it matter if it’s an email or if it’s a formal presentation to the board or anything in between? It doesn’t matter. But what do you need to achieve with this communication? I’ve got a framework for helping people do that.
And then the next step is to frame the messaging, and that’s about getting an outline, a high level skeleton, if you like, of what the story might look like. And I use patterns for that. I’ve got 10 patterns, which I think cover the gamut of almost all business communication. So once we have that strategy sorted out, we say, okay, what, you know, what’s the outcome?
And then we use that to pick a pattern. And once that’s clear, we fill it in. And we map out that one page so that we can firm up the messaging as a single letter size or A4 page. And we do that so that that page has got some really key elements to it. A super short introduction that introduces what we’re talking about and why.
One single overarching message and then a structured set of supporting points. There might be two to five supporting points. But ultimately we’re ordering the ideas into a hierarchy so they all back up that one main message. So you might imagine getting just to a wall or a whiteboard, getting a whole lot of sticky notes out, putting each idea on a sticky note and mapping them out into a tree.
And there’s some rules around what idea you put where. So you get that messaging really, really tight. On that one pager and then you test it, you iterate it and you iterate that with your stakeholders and because it’s on a page and the font is somewhat bigger than two point, right? We’re not just jamming everything in there.
We’re keeping the font at a sensible size. It’s really quick and easy for your stakeholders to open up that 1 page and say, okay, do I agree with this? Do I not? Do I like it? And they can respond really fast, which is a big problem. The people because often they’ll send things for review and people come back at the very last minute because it’s just too hard to find the messaging.
They haven’t got time. So we set them up to provide a really clear and crisp message that a stakeholder can review and respond to really fast. And so that’s that. They’ve got the response. Maybe they go back a couple of times to fine tune it. Maybe they say, the stakeholders come back and say, oh, there’s just a few little things I’d change here.
And so then once that’s locked in, then you flip it into a document format, whatever that is, whether that’s, you know, a lengthy email or it’s in maybe a template in a Word document or a PowerPoint or whatever it is. It doesn’t matter the structure, the messaging is locked down. And so it’s really easy to create the document.
And then, you know, you present it and that’s all great, and then at the end you do something that’s really important that’s very rarely done, and that is feedback and feed forward, because you want to take out of that journey between you and your stakeholders, just briefly, say what worked really well there, what didn’t, what was it about our process that meant we were all scrambling up till three in the morning finishing that presentation, or Bye Oh, wow, we got that done in a heartbeat.
Or, you know, today, I just finished a coaching session this morning and a CEO for a healthcare startup said to me, okay, well, I was really thrilled about last week was I tried what we did myself. And instead of having 15 pages for the pitch for the client, we had two. So we had a really quick discussion at the beginning where I could present our ideas and then we had this awesome discussion.
So we didn’t spend the whole time with me talking them through 15 pages of stuff. We got to the point really quickly and actually had a great discussion. So I really feel like we moved the needle on that sales discussion today because we actually got to what we needed to get to. You know, so the five steps, if I just recap on them, flush out the strategy, which is the most important thing of all frame the message as a skeleton using a pattern so it’s quick.
Firm up that messaging so that you can focus your energy on the stuff that really matters. What is the messaging? What do we really need to say here? And then flip it into a document format, whatever that is. And then after you’ve presented it, feed back and feed forward. Hmm. What are the type of clients that you find get the most value out of working through this process?
And I mean, it could be size of the company, it could be like how big of a leadership team need to be or for small business enterprise only, like give me a flavor for that. Oh, I work with a whole range. So the one I just mentioned, they’ve got about 35 people in their team, but then I also work for global brands and work with, you know, the Australian region, let’s say would be a recent, a recent one of a global retailer.
You know, they’ve got several thousand people in their business. And so I worked there with the senior few hundred, if you like. So I think, and I’ve worked with much bigger organizations than that too, right? Hundreds of thousands of people. So I don’t think it’s industry. I don’t think it’s size of company.
What I think it is, is appetite. And I think if you have the people who get the most out of it where the leadership is really aligned and really wants this, right. They’re committed to making a difference in the way they communicate because they really appreciate the business value around the quality of the decision making, the velocity of the decision making, those kinds of things.
And they’ll actually make decisions. So to me, if I look at the different clients that I have I have a global client network network. I have a mix of client size. I work across many different industries. So to me, it’s really about, are the leaders going to get their sleeves rolled up here and get involved?
And, you know, are they really going to really require people to invest and do this work? Well enough. I don’t want to say properly. I just mean, you know, really try. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. And hold them to account, because I mentioned that I just wrote two books, which is, I’m sure, a sign of madness. But I did it.
One is hard enough. Two is like, that is a little bit of a sign. Go ahead. Isn’t it? Isn’t it crazy? And I started writing one for leaders to, to document the method that I’ve been using with to say here’s how you set your teams up for success. Here’s the basic methodology. Here’s how you can help them yourself.
Right, so that once I leave, I’m here for a short time and a good time, not forever. So here’s how, once I’ve set them up, or if you choose to go it alone, you set them up. And then, You know, you need another tool, which is for your people. And I started writing one to be a companion for another book I wrote seven or eight years ago.
And I realized that my thinking had moved on a long way since I’d written that. Interesting. So I thought, actually, I’ve got to suck this up and write another one because I need one that is, you know, matches, you know, neatly with the leader’s book. So there’s a leader’s handbook and then let’s call it a contributor’s handbook where you have something for the leader to drive the change in their team.
And then something for the members of the team so that they can know how to structure a message. And I go a lot deeper for them on things like how to clarify the strategy. Here are a whole lot of case studies and examples around the 10 patterns. To help them bring, come to life. I go deeper on things like, well, what is the leadership group need from you?
What is the board need from you? You know, what sort of things do just leaders need from you? So that you know, they can really execute on it. This is great, Devin. I can see it. And I can see that and you’ve been doing this for a long time. So you, I, I always think it’s interesting bringing in individuals like yourself that are consultants or coaches or that really can help move the needle because you’ve worked with so many clients in so many different industries.
I feel like there’s also this, this overlapping of knowledge that you have from working with so many people. Like, am I off on that? Like, like you get to, you get to explore and solve problems all day long. It’s super interesting. You know, that’s also coming back to your question, why I keep doing what I do, you know, I love helping people, but it’s just really interesting.
And, you know, the sorts of problems that clients are solving now with the advent of AI and, you know, cool, really cool technologies and the way I teach now. So often online it requires me to be dynamic, but it’s just interesting. And what I think is fun, I mentioned that I have 10 patterns. For telling business stories, and you know, the first time I realized I was doing this using patterns was when I was working with a finance team, and they needed to persuade their leader to upgrade some software.
They needed some new compliance software. I think it was. And they had a bit of a delicate thing to handle because their leader, who would be signing off on the budget to get the new tool, had actually designed and actually written the code for the thing that they thought was way out of date and no longer very useful.
And so you say, okay, well, that’s a really common problem in general to get. Money and support to invest. And so I just said to them, okay, I’ve, I’ve heard you talk for about 10 minutes. Here are three options for the way you could tell that story at a high level. Here you go. One, two, three. And because I’ve done it for so long using the same core structured communication toolkit, I can just see the patterns.
So I think what I’ve been able to do is draw the threads out of those to hopefully Make it easier for people across a wide range of situations to take full advantage of that because, you know, I’ve been doing the one thing, as you say, for, I don’t know, 25 years or more. And, yeah, I see so many different stories, but there are common threads to it.
So it’s kind of fun. Yeah. Okay. Here’s a new one. This, this seems really hard. How do I, or how do I untangle that? Yeah. Amazing. Well, well, Devon, this has been so much fun having you on the show today and learning more about Clarity First program. I know there’s much more to offer and I know you can go much deeper into the methodology and logic behind it.
That being said, if my audience is listening or tuning in and they want to follow up and they want to learn more, how do they do that? Oh, brilliant. Come to my website, clarityfirstprogram. com and add a slash emails onto the end of that. And what I’ve got there is a 10 minutes to better emails course.
It’ll give you a quick snapshot of the way I think and work and help you apply the ideas straight within 10 minutes to the thing that you probably do most. So, clarityfirstprogram. com slash emails will give you a really great start. Fantastic. And just so you know, we’ll the audience everybody listening in, we’ll put the links to that in the show notes so that you can just click on the link and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow and Devin, again, thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Adam.