The NC Chamber's Environmental Compliance Conference is on February 4, 2026, in Raleigh, NC.
JD Solomon will be a featured speaker at the NC Chamber’s annual Environmental Compliance Conference on February 4, 2026. The event will explore pressing regulatory issues, legislation, and policy decisions currently impacting the air, water, waste, and natural resource arenas.
JD will be speaking in his role as chair of the NC Environmental Management Commission.
Other speakers include USEPA Region 4 Regional Administrator Kevin J. McOmber, NC DEQ Secretary Reid Wilson, NCDEQ Air Quality Division Director Mike Abraczinskas, NCDEQ Division of Water Resources Director Richard Rogers, and others.
The NC Chamber is the leading business advocacy organization in North Carolina. The Chamber works in the legislative, regulatory, and political arenas to proactively drive positive change, ensuring that North Carolina is one of the best places in the world to do business.
JD Solomon is an engineer, planner, and environmental leader with more than 30 years of experience integrating environmental policy, infrastructure planning, and regulatory decision making. JD is in his third term as EMC chair, having served previously under Governors McCrory and Cooper (2016 - 2018) and most recently from 2023 to 2025. He was re-elected as chair in November 2025 for a two-year term.
Structure in reports and presentations isn’t about decoration, formatting, or slide order. It is the difference between a message that lands and one that evaporates.
I recently watched a seasoned colleague—smart, experienced, and deeply respected—fall into this exact trap. She delivered 50 content slides in 40 minutes. The “money slide,” the one that tied everything together, appeared at minute 39. The opening lacked a clear takeaway. The closing lacked a punch. The only thing the decision makers remembered was how much information they were given, not what they were supposed to do with it.
This is why the first S in FINESSE—Structure—matters so much.
Structure isn’t about decoration, formatting, or slide order. It is the backbone of accessibility, inclusion, and comprehension—the difference between a message that lands and one that evaporates.
As part of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram®, Structure is a powerful tool for communicating issues with high complexity and uncertainty.
Why Structure Matters in FINESSE
The bottom fin of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram®—Empathy, Structure, and Synergy—is all about the audience. Structure is the part that ensures your message is received the way you intend. Decision makers do not have the time—or the need—to ascend the mountain of knowledge you climbed. They want the time, not the watch.
Structure solves that problem by forcing you to start with the conclusions, layer the details, and make the communication accessible to everyone in the room—including the 8 to 25 percent who may have visual or hearing impairments or who speak a different first language. JD’s Rule of 12 reminds us that accessibility is not a niche concern; it is a structural requirement.
Three Ways to Use Structure with the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram
1. Start with the Opening and Closing—Not the Middle
Technical professionals spend most of their time on the main body because that is where the analysis lives. But decision makers form their impressions in the first 90 seconds and make their decisions in the last 90 seconds.
The FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® reinforces this discipline. The Structure bone reminds you to:
Open with the key takeaways.
Close with the same takeaways, reinforced through Q&A
Keep the middle lean and layered.
This is the three‑act structure that has stood the test of time.
2. Choose a Presentation Sequence That Serves the Audience
Most professionals default to a chronological sequence because that is how they learned in school and how the scientific method unfolds. But chronological sequences rarely serve decision makers.
Instead, choose a sequence that aligns with the FINESSE principle of clarity:
Spatial (where things are)
Paired (advantages vs. disadvantages, costs vs. benefits)
Three‑Act (opening, main body, closing)
The FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® helps you visualize these options and select the one that best supports your message.
3. Use Structure to Make Your Communication Accessible and Inclusive
Structure is not just about logic. It is about inclusion. The three Vs—visual, vocal, and verbal—sit under Structure in FINESSE because they determine whether your message reaches everyone in the room.
Simple structural choices make a big difference:
High‑contrast visuals
Clear verbal summaries
Logical sequencing
Layered detail
Predictable transitions
When you use the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® to plan your structure, you naturally build communication that includes everyone.
The Bottom Line
Structure is the first S in FINESSE for a reason. It is the foundation that makes every other part of the framework work. Without Structure, your Frame collapses, your Illustrations lose impact, and your Empathy never reaches the audience.
The FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® gives you a visual anchor to build that structure—one that keeps you focused on what decision makers need, not what analysts prefer.
If you want your communication to be understood, remembered, and acted upon, start with Structure. That is how you communicate with FINESSE.
The elements of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® are Frame, Illustrate, Noise reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics.
JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment.
JD Solomon writes and consults on decision-making, reliability, risk, and communication for leaders and technical professionals. His work connects technical disciplines with human understanding to help people make better decisions and build stronger systems. Learn more at www.jdsolomonsolutions.com and www.communicatingwithfinesse.com
Project managers need an approach for reducing noise in their messages. The burden of effective communication is on the sender, not the receiver.
FINESSE is a linear communication approach that places the burden of an effective message on the sender, not the receiver. Most project managers, like any technically trained professional, do a below-average job of ensuring that their message is clear. Here are a few tips on how to be brief and make sure the message is clear.
Typical Approaches
Most technically trained professionals simply do a spell check and grammar check of their Word documents. Some do a similar spelling and grammar check of their Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Few technical professionals fully leverage the editing tools or consistently apply the techniques to Google, Adobe, or social media applications.
The good news is that the tools are similar across all platforms. Our biggest challenges are awareness, creating a practical methodology, and consistently applying it.
Get Your Method Established Using Word
In Microsoft Word, we are all aware of the Review | Editor sequence that allows us to check our spelling and grammar. Make sure you use the full Editor toolbar (usually on the far left of the Review menu bar) and make the recommended refinements for clarity, conciseness, punctuation, and vocabulary.
Microsoft Office Suite includes the tools that project managers need to reduce noise in their reports and presentations.
Make the spelling and grammar changes because Microsoft is rarely wrong. I recommend making all of the refinement changes, too. These are suggestions, but Microsoft is usually correct here, too.
Remember that a disagreement between you and Microsoft is not really the point. The point is what makes the communication most clear for the receiver. Microsoft has the edge when it comes to the number of people who created the tool and the range of audiences that were used in the tool's development.
Word Count
The number of words can be viewed under Review | Word Count (normally just to the right of the Editor button) or can be seen continually on the bottom left of your Word screen when a document is open.
Documents that are between 500 and 1000 words are universally considered scannable. This is a normal range that I prefer to use for executive summaries, brief articles with a couple of key messages, and most blog posts.
Between 1500 and 2000 words, it is certainly time to take a look at the structure. Some key questions to ask include
Am I trying to make too many points?
Am I using too many examples?
Do I need a main body and an executive summary?
I do not worry about reading time as long as I am under 1500 words. There are many applications and algorithms that estimate reading time, and most will come up in the range of 1 minute for 400 to 500 words and something closer to 4 or 5 minutes in the 1500 to 2000 words range.
Word Count and Spoken Words
Great communicators focus on the correlation of word count to speaking time. This is probably the most important aspect of writing your remarks before you make an oral presentation, regardless of how good a natural speaker you happen to be.
My rule of thumb is that 1200 words correlate to 10 minutes of speaking time.
This heuristic means that if I give a summary to a board or commission, I will try to limit my remarks to 10 minutes or 1200 words of text. For a 30-minute presentation at a conference, I will target 2500 words of text because I want to talk for no more than 20 minutes and allow for 10 minutes of questions.
For questions (of all types and all forums), I target between 150 and 250 words (or 1 to 2 minutes). It is amazing how effective your answers to questions are with this approach. And with practice, you will develop an internal clock for knowing whether your answer is starting to get too long.
Readability and Insights
The word count discussion is also related to readability. In Word, go to the Insights button located in the Editor summary. Here you will find things like the number of words per sentence, sentences per paragraph, Flesch–Kincaid (F–K) reading grade level, and Flesch readability.
Editing tools such as Grammarly and other applications offer a wealth of resources to reduce noise. Awareness, a specific approach, and discipline are needed for consistent implementation.
Reducing the noise now becomes an integrated exercise. Target keeping your words per paragraph in the 2 to 3 range and under 20 words per sentence. Flesch readability of 50 is a good target, but 35 is not a bad score for technical presentations with a highly educated audience. A reading grade level of 8 is about right for most presentations with technical information.
I use the number of syllables per word as the most effective parameter for pulling the readability insights into a targeted range. You can calculate the number of syllables per word from the Flesch readability score, but you will need a different application to see this parameter directly. My target is 80 percent of the words having less than three syllables.
Applying It with FINESSE
I am over 800 words now, so it is time to wrap it up. The burden of effective communication is on the sender, not the receiver. The good news for project managers and other technically trained professionals is that there are many default tools for reducing the noise in your reports and verbal presentations.
These are a few ways I ensure my message is clear. Hopefully, they will inspire you to develop your own or modify your current approach. Are you Communicating with FINESSE?
The elements of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® are Frame, Illustrate, Noise reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics.
The N in FINESSE stands for Noise reduction.
JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for facilitation, asset management, and program development at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment.
