ENERGY AUSTRALIA members only
RECORDINGSRecordings of Energy Australia Member's Sessions will be saved here soon after they takes place.
Click here for suggestions to help you find what you need.
What if stakeholders are wedded to out of date views?
I had a fabulous conversation this week with a client who is head of technology strategy for an insurance company. He has come to a roadblock in his efforts to shepherd a major technology decision through the ExCo that I thought might interest you. A dominant decision...
Thinking harder about the context
You will I hope be familiar with the Ten Point Test by now, and may have even used it to check whether your storyline is robust.As much as I think this is a robust tool, the question for testing the context has been niggling me as incomplete.Having 'noodled on it', I...
A ‘hack’ for helping you synthesise your so what
It’s not often in a working session that we are reflecting on hospital entrances! This morning we were helping one of our new members craft her manifesto as an architect. It was fascinating on two fronts. We learned more about the nexus between architecture and...
Another idea for engaging tricky stakeholders
It always amazes me how these emails naturally follow a theme. The last two weeks I have written about techniques for influencing difficult stakeholders.Today I had a coaching session with a consultant from a management consulting firm and he shared a terrific...
More on nudging indecisive stakeholders
Last week I shared some ideas for engaging indecisive stakeholders by redefining your proposal. I suggested three steps: make it matter, make it easy and make it a win for them.Given the often great difficulty of nudging stakeholders over the line, I wanted to share...
How to handle indecisive stakeholders
Has this happened to you?You put your case multiple times to the decision-making team. They like your proposal but aren't ready to commit.Yet, they all know your proposal is important. Nobody disagrees with that but even after multiple presentations to answer their...
EXERCISE: Strengthen your ‘synthesis muscles'
Synthesis is at the core of everything we do at Clarity First, and so when I saw an example come across my desk this week I couldn't resist turning it into an exercise. This email is laid out nicely and yet there are a couple of areas where synthesis can be...
EXERCISE: Rewrite this invitation so your grandma could understand it
This week we worked on an email and ended up discussing another truism that can be very hard to execute on. This morning’s one was: ‘Write it so your grandmother could understand it’. As an idea it is both good and infuriatingly difficult to execute on. How to do...
EXERCISE: Email Rewrite (procurement example)
Notes As with many customer emails, this one focused far too much on the author than on the audience. In some ways, they could have kept it even shorter, saying something like: Given we have recently identified that you are a small business supplier, from now...
Patterns vs Structures
Do you wonder if every story you need to convey 'fits' within one of our seven patterns?It may shock you that I don't think they will!I do think the patterns are a fabulous guide, but encourage you to use them as a starting point that enables you to finesse them using...