employees is a selling point to clients. Clients need to know that the staff
keeps up with changes in the laws.
“Suddenly, I realized I’d identified a benefit that was likely to be compelling
to my Producer boss: attracting and retaining clients.”
The Hub & Spokes model is a way of getting what’s in your head on
paper. The trick is not to edit yourself. As you work with it, you’ll find that
sometimes silly or unrelated comments occur to you. Write them down.
You’ll bring yourself back to the project at hand. Don’t edit! Editing
some comments may result in unintentionally editing others. So if “Oops!
I forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer!” pops into your head, write
“chicken” and “freezer” and move on. You’ll bring yourself back on track.
Note that after writing your objective and a summary of your readers
in the hub, your next step is to draw a few spokes. There’s no specific
number to draw or complete. When you run out of ideas, stop. Pick
whichever spoke interests you, draw a circle around it, draw some spokes
from it, and repeat the process. You keep going until you’ve jotted down
all the relevant ideas that occur to you.
Charlie explains, “I didn’t draw spokes out of any point except for
‘Professional Development’ because other points had already occurred to
me, and I knew what I wanted to say about them.”
Once you’ve completed the Hub & Spokes model to whatever level
of detail you think is appropriate, decide which is your best point. That’s
usually where you want to start.
Notice that the first level of spokes represents your broad categories:
paragraphs within a letter or report, for example, or sections within a
proposal.
“Given my boss’s orientation, I decided to start with the point about
professional development. My memo began as follows:
Given that clients demand that we be up-to-date with our
knowledge of all relevant laws, attending a seminar to learn
what documents must be retained on our clients’ behalf is not
an employee perk; it’s critical to our firm’s ability to maintain
its leadership position.
“I went on to mention other benefits, for example, that we’d save
money by not having to store unnecessary documents. And I ended
with this:
Create a Draft on Paper (or on Your Computer)
49