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Hello reader,

My first reaction when I went to review a client’s doc earlier this week was … wow.

There is nothing for me to do.

‘Fred’ nailed this.

But, as we talked through it, we realized his one-pager was beautifully written but not that helpful.

After the coming quick updates, I share two ideas to help you avoid the bear trap that we discovered.

• Today is the last day you can purchase my Engage course for its legacy USD 190 price. I will remove it from sale tomorrow to add some finishing touches. Students will have access to all the new features and material, regardless of the price you paid.
  

• Bonuses are available for anyone who has bought Engage or Elevate. Apologies to anyone who struggled to claim them over the last week or so. The automation had some glitches during our system migration, which are now fixed. Grab them here.
  

• Don’t miss the opportunity to learn how to influence unpopular decisions while minimising political damage. Russell King is an expert in this area and shared a number of excellent insights in last week’s podcast. Listen here, on your favourite player, eg Spotify, YouTube.

Good docs don’t always get good decisions

Fred’s beautifully structured and elegantly written one-pager was only a teeny part of the story.

Had we left it alone, he would have fallen into a bear trap that cost him the decision he needed.

That bear trap meant …

• The strategic thinking behind his genuinely great idea would have been lost

• The leadership conversation would have dived down all sorts of rabbit holes as they evaluated the words on the page

• His team would not have received the support they needed

The question becomes, then, how to get the right words on the page.

Fred is an experienced technology Product Manager. He is new to his role and had been working with his team to understand the current state of play as they together formed their future strategy.

The problem came in trying to be expedient.

How to minimise the need to create new charts when they already had so many?

The solution was to mentally separate out the problem-solving and the communication.

The fifty or so slides the team had prepared were very helpful for them.

The slides helped the team consolidate their thinking on the current state of play and explore how to proceed.

The decision-makers didn’t need all of that background.

If the strategy was clearly articulated, then they would trust that this work had taken place.

The decision-makers needed to know why this action plan was the right one.

And that required a different story with only a few of the original slides.

I hope that helps.

More next week.

Davina

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