Wes Kao on Executive Communication, MOO, and the CEDAF Delegation Framework
Wes Kao‘s second Lenny’s Podcast appearance. She had recently left Maven to launch a standalone executive communication course. This episode is dense with named frameworks, each addressing a common failure mode in professional communication. The through-line: most communication failures are not the audience’s failure to understand but the speaker’s failure to prepare.
Key ideas
- Play like it’s game day with everyone. Operators who save their best communication for executives are not getting the reps needed to improve. Execs see you a few times a quarter; your cross-functional partners, direct reports, and manager see you daily. Treating every stakeholder as if their time matters trains the habit; saving it for formal reviews means the habit never forms.
- Sales before logistics. A common failure mode: jumping straight to the how (logistics, process details) before the audience has decided whether they want the thing at all. The fix is always a brief sales note first — why we’re doing this, why it matters now, what problem it solves — then the logistics. Even 30 seconds of selling at the start of a meeting buys buy-in that logistics alone cannot. Wes: “You can do this in 30 seconds.”
- Concise ≠ brief. Concision is economy of words and density of insight. A 1,000-word memo can be tighter than a 300-word one. The bottleneck to concision is not editing skill — it is knowing your own main point. Most rambling happens because the speaker is processing their position in real time. Preparation, even one minute before a meeting, is the most reliable fix.
- MOO — Most Obvious Objection. Before every communication — a Slack message, a meeting, a strategy doc — identify the most obvious objection you will face. Not every objection; the obvious one. Anticipating it in advance lets you address it proactively or frame the communication to reduce the likelihood it arises. Wes uses this as a mental filter on everything she writes or says.
- Right confidence level. Two failure modes: overconfidence (stating a hypothesis as a fact, overpromising on an uncertain recommendation) and underconfidence (hedging so heavily that valid recommendations lose force). The goal is accurate confidence — say what you actually believe, at the certainty you actually hold it.
- Single-minded martyr anti-pattern. A communicator who has their recommendation and presents a growing stack of evidence in its support, growing frustrated when stakeholders stay sceptical. The fix: connect the recommendation to the company’s current priorities (strategy, not self-expression). If stakeholders do not care, it is usually because the recommendation is not framed against what they already care about.
- CEDAF — the delegation framework. Five checks before delegating a task: (1) Comprehension — does the person have everything they need to understand what success looks like? (2) Excitement — have I connected this to a why that matters to them? (3) De-risk — have I identified and named the most likely failure mode upfront? (4) Align — have I given them a chance to ask questions and confirm they are picking up what I’m putting down? (5) Feedback — have I shortened the feedback loop as much as possible, ideally getting a first checkpoint within the current conversation? Running CEDAF reliably eliminates most delegation failures at source.