Two capable people given the same week produce different updates, and leadership calibrates on the variance without knowing it is there.
For today’s theme, I’m back to The Odyssey (the movie, The Gift That Keeps On Giving 😊). Penelope, our hero Odysseus’ wife, had a whole lot of suitors, all camped out at back. She told them that she’d choose one of them once she had finished weaving a burial shroud. She wove by day and unpicked her work by night — and she did that for three whole years. So every day, the suitors got a status update. And not one of them thought to ask: “Hey, yesterday you had 3.5 square pous (yep, that’s a real Ancient Greek measure) done. How come it’s still at that today?” Three years of accurate status updates and not one of them carried the only fact that mattered. Well played, right?
Sadly, we can’t get away with that kind of status update — or, we shouldn’t be able to. And when we’re talking Executive Update, we need to be doubly careful. A number of times, updates are written from memory — scroll back on your Slack messages, find that one thing you remember someone said and it stuck with you and then frame a bullet around that. And for a section you don’t have any info for, no problem — just kill the section.
Funny thing is, give the same week to two capable people and ask each for the update and you’ll get materially different documents (maybe because their Slack histories are different?) Different projects mentioned, different framing of the same risk, even different numbers for the same thing. And leadership then calibrates on that variance without knowing it exists.
The confusion starts with what the document is for: A status report describes the state of things, while an executive update directs a small amount of very expensive attention at the things that need a decision. So the Exec Update has a narrower and more useful job, meant specifically for the people reading it. Which means the real work is selection, not prose. The content is not “everything that happened last week”; the few things that deserve leadership attention out of everything that happened is what we need. And selection is a decision, so it needs rules — the same way triage needs rules before a ticket queue can be automated. Without them, what gets included is whatever the author remembered, whatever they feel (or don’t feel) defensive about, and whatever happened most recently.
Let’s look at three disciplines that turn the assembly of an update from an act of memory into an act of evidence.
Most updates report state — green / amber / red; on track / at risk; maybe a percentage complete. All of it is accurate and precise. And all of it is useless, since the reader needs to hold last week’s version in their head to extract anything useful from this week’s. If a project was amber last week and is amber this week, that could mean nothing has changed, or that it deteriorated and recovered, or that nobody looked. What we really need to document is the movement of a project/task/whatever. So write that delta. For example: “Amber, unchanged for three weeks, and the cause is still the integration sign-off we flagged on the 3rd”. And if you have a project moving from green to amber, yay! Give it more room than just a green — cause to celebrate!
Of course, there’s one not-so-minor thing to remember: Movement is much harder to fake than State. Anyone can call a project green; saying what changed since the last update requires actually knowing.
The second discipline is a fixed format. Decide the sections once and then include every one of them every time, including the ones with nothing in them. An omitted section is terribly confusing. If the Collections section is absent this week, the reader cannot tell if nothing was outstanding, or nobody checked, or the person who knew was on leave, or it was dropped for space. Writing “Collections: Nothing outstanding this week”, OTOH, costs you a single line and removes the ambiguity permanently. The good thing is, if that line is wrong, somebody can say so; an absent section can’t support that.
Here’s a possible standing set for a Services business:
These six may not be the right six for you. Find whatever list that works, settle on it in advance and apply it unchanged every time, so what appears in the update is determined by the format rather than by who wrote it.
The third discipline is the one almost nobody does — the one that would have saved Penelope’s suitors three years. Every update contains commitments, stated or implied. Someone will speak to the customer this week. The integration sign-off will be chased. The staffing gap will be resolved by the 20th. Those commitments are the most checkable content in the whole document, but they’re rarely checked, because next week’s update opens with next week’s news. So open with last week instead. Take every (major?) commitment from the previous update and give it an explicit answer: done, not done, or changed (and if changed, why). It takes a short paragraph and it changes what the document is. An update that only looks forward can never be wrong, only because you don’t go back and look. But an update that answers for itself each week accumulates credibility because the reader can watch the mechanism working.
One related factor to think about: An update rarely has a single reader. The same week’s evidence legitimately becomes different documents: a short note for the executive team, a fuller brief for the COO, an action list for project managers, something else again for a customer. Changing the emphasis, the depth and the framing for each of those is not spin, it is the job. But: You can change what you emphasise, you should not change what is true. If the executive note says the delivery date holds while the PM action list says it slips, you don’t have two versions of the doc, you have two versions of the business. And somewhere along the line, someone will be sitting in both rooms.
Take the update your team sent most recently and put it next to the one before it.
Question two is usually the uncomfortable one. If most of last week’s commitments can’t be found in this week’s update, your reporting is as good as Penelope’s. And we all know what Odysseus did to them.
Bring your last two updates, side by side, and the commitments in the older one.