NOTE: This document outlines some effective strategies you can use to up-level your executive document powers. It’s not a recipe. There is no “follow these five steps to success”.
Writing is the process by which you put ideas and images into another person’s head. It’s magic. Done well, you transmit what you want and everyone understands what you meant. Done poorly, and bad things happen. Miscommunications. People run off and do the wrong things. Lots of wasted effort. Executives hate wasted effort. They hate it more than no effort.
Coherent writing separates the fully-baked ideas from the fuzzy ones. A good document is the product of 5 key inputs. Writing to your audience, a great hook, a sound scaffolding, clear writing, and a compelling narrative. Get these right, and the probability is high you’ll end up with a good doc. If you’re lucky, it will sort of write itself.
Write To Your Audience
Executives running large organizations have the attention span of small woodland creatures. Their calendars look like quadruple-parked cars on a busy street. If they operate like a wartime CEO, all they have is time and you’re wasting it. That’s your audience. You’re writing for them. Do yourself a favor by doing them a favor. Keep on task. On target. On mission.
Executives are starved for insight. They don’t have time to get into the weeds. The whole reason executive documents exist is to convey credible insights and ideas to people with three spare brain cells to rub together. If you are producing a document, you are likely writing about an insight, or describing a problem. You are doing knowledge worker’s work. Produce knowledge. Be interested in the subject matter. If you are not interested, your reader won’t be, either. If you can’t become interested, it’s possible you’re writing about the wrong thing.
The Hook
Your opening paragraph or section must do 2 things: establish the document’s context and your credibility as its author. It’s like the first page of an action novel. A reader will know within two seconds if they want to learn what happens next.
Context
Executives are extremely busy. Chances are good that they won’t remember your topic, even if you just met about it last week. You must remind them in one or two sentences. Set the stage. Show them why this topic is the most important thing they should be focusing on right now. There are loads of other things they could be doing. Why is this a good use of their time?
Credibility
Nothing says “no insight on the horizon” like a wordy document. Nothing clobbers your credibility faster than over-complication. Complicated = you do not understand your topic. You have a few sentences — a paragraph at most — to convey that you, the author, understand the problem you’re writing about, and establish your credibility in speaking to it. To be fair, you are establishing your credibility throughout your document. With every word, with every insight and point, you are demonstrating that you know what you are talking about. You’re interested. Invested. You’re the person to write this because you know it inside and out.
Any keen reader can sniff out BS. Executives have finely-tuned BS radar. Don’t waste their time — or yours putting in fluff. Nothing will disintegrate your credibility faster than hand-wavy adjectives and buzzword babble. Credibility is like trust. Trust takes years to build and seconds to lose. Author credibility is the same. You can build it with a strong start and destroy it in an instant by losing the plot halfway through.
Sound Scaffolding
Great docs are often just book reports on science experiments performed on the business.
- Hypothesis (how it started)
- Test (what we did)
- Conclusion (how it’s going)
- Next Steps (where we’re headed)
Insights and data must make sense and must be readable. Don’t make the reader work to consume it.
Clear Writing
During the investigation into the Challenger Shuttle disaster, physicist Richard Feynman famously demonstrated the O-ring failure to the U.S. Senate using a rubber band and a glass of ice water. You’ve achieved the highest level if you can convey complex nuance with a simple demonstration or simple language.
Einstein’s ascending levels of intelligence:
- LEVEL 5: SMART
- LEVEL 4: INTELLIGENT
- LEVEL 3: BRILLIANT
- LEVEL 2: GENIUS
- LEVEL 1: SIMPLE
Simple is the best. Drop the formality and say what you really mean. No fluff. No buzzwords, corpo-babble, and/or long sentences constructed from words with more than four syllables. If it sounds complicated, it probably is, and nobody will understand it. They’ll bounce off and it’s your fault. Not theirs. Tangents are treasure maps to nowhere. Stay on point. On task. No wandering. The best example I’ve ever seen of stripped-down writing is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The topic is brutal but the technique is incredible.
Everything in your document must have a purpose. If you can’t figure out what something’s purpose is, take it out.
A Compelling Narrative
Humans tell each other stories. We’ve been doing it since before we knew how to write. It’s how we best communicate. The best movies tell an engaging story. The best ads tell a story. The best anything tells a story. Why? We remember stories.
Every document needs a narrative. It ties the whole thing together. What story are you trying to tell? What insight have you gained that is worthy of someone reading your words? How are you going to make learning this insight interesting? Be subtle. The story isn’t front and center. It’s just the delivery method. It’s scaffolding to hang your document on.
There’s a concept in screenwriting called the “Hero’s Two Journeys”. The journeys are of transformation and achievement. The achievement is the journey we see. The transformation is the journey underneath. This is the one we care about. Here’s how it goes: The hero is confronted with The Problem. They think they know how to solve it. It’s going to be easy. They fail. Often spectacularly. Huge mess. They fall off the Cliff of Despair, muddle through the Trough of Disillusionment, and eventually have an Epiphany of Self. They transform into something new. They take what they learned and go back to The Problem. They overcome. They Transform and Achieve. Big success! This is the plot scaffolding for every superhero movie.
Stories where this transformation doesn’t happen, or there’s no big epiphany, are capital-B Boring. This doesn’t mean you write a screenplay’s worth of emotion and adventure into an executive-level document. Remember, all they have is time, and you’re already wasting it. What it does mean is you need to know the story you’re telling. And you tell it in the smallest space that story needs. Need a graph? Show the graph. Don’t add a graph that says too much, or too little, or because you think you need graphs. Everything has a purpose. Some documents show the path to discovery. Some are explaining a concept. Some are reporting a bunch of numbers. Which one you choose depends on the story you’re telling. But tell a story.
A note on editing: Leave your ego at the door. Don’t get attached to your words. First drafts are always garbage. It’s perfect when everything is easy to understand. It’s perfect when there’s nothing left to remove.
Writing good documents takes practice. It takes time. It takes focus. The reward is opportunities to work on gnarly problems. Solving gnarly problems is a skill, and that skill is in short supply at any company. Deliver knowledge, deliver insight, and do it fast. “Be brief, be brilliant, be gone.”
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I’m Cy Tidd. I work in the cloud computing industry and write dark fantasy fiction. Thanks for reading!
