The work
Wide comes in. Narrow goes out.
Every job is the same shape. A brief arrives wide, full of caveats and competing claims. A single line leaves. What changes is only the distance between the two.
What gets distilled
The whole job is this one move, repeated until the page becomes a line.
Before
In order to facilitate optimal stakeholder alignment, we endeavour to leverage a holistic, value-driven framework that empowers teams to action a portfolio of strategic outcomes at scale.
After
We help teams agree.
The words on the left are not wrong. They are just doing the writer’s thinking out loud. My job is to keep the one idea hiding inside them and let the rest fall away.
The shape of it
A few numbers that hold across every job.
Words in, word out
Passes, every time
Reply, no funnels
Three things I distil
Different inputs, the same gesture. Wide to narrow, at three scales.
- Wide
Positioning
A page of strategy reduced to the one sentence the whole business can stand behind without flinching.
- Standard
Messaging
The full story cut to a handful of lines your whole team can repeat without the deck in front of them.
- Macro
The line itself
The headline, the subject line, the tagline. The single surface where all the distillation has to land at once.
What I keep, what comes down
Distillation is not deletion. It is knowing which words are holding the roof up.
Keep
Load-bearing words
The words the meaning would collapse without. Nothing else earns a place on the page.
Cut
Scaffolding
Everything that helped you write it but the reader does not need to see. Scaffolding comes down.
Keep
The one idea
Most documents are one idea wearing forty sentences. The idea stays, the costume goes.
Cut
Hedging
If a qualifier is doing the work, the sentence is not finished yet. Finish it, then drop the hedge.
How a job runs
Three short moves, left to right, every time.
Send the wide thing
The deck, the page, the draft you cannot quite shorten yourself.
I run the passes
Read for the idea, cut to the load-bearing words, pressure-test the line.
You get the line
One sentence, with the working shown, so you trust why it survived.
A page of words is a question. The single line is the answer it was always asking.
Wide in. Narrow out.
Start