> a lot of colleagues don't know how to give good situation reports.
Another thing that can help, both written and in face-to-face communication, is using the Inverted Pyramid. Let's say the person in your 1-1 has an emergency and you have to cut it short after 5 minutes. In those first 5 minutes you want to get the most important information across. In the next 10 minutes, you give supporting details, and in the final 15 you can geek-out on the nitty-gritty.
Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya (who I am)
You killed my father (why I'm reaching out)
Prepare to die (my ask / expectation)
1. prepare to die (gets their attention)
2. because you killed my father (explanation)
3. I am Inigo Montoya (background info)
Beware of things that "work" in movies. I've been led astray by that too many times.
BTW, ever wonder why movies start out with an action sequence that often has little to do with the rest of the movie? It's to get your attention. Let's face it, you and I watch the first couple minutes of a movie to decide if we want to invest more time in it or click to the next Netflix movie. (Do we care who the director is? Nope.)
Much in life works the same way.
But for other people, one's name is the least important thing, because of course what it most important to them is what affects them.
Once one realizes this principle, you'll see it in action everywhere.
To your point, though, you'd of course tailor this to your audience. For example: you might say "marketing" or "the engineering team" instead of "Tom, Dick and Harry".
If someone is coming to me with a question, it is extremely helpful to know up front who they are (with respect to their role, not so much their name) in order to immediately start narrowing down the relevant contextual parameters that will be framing my understanding of their problem and my response. I don't want to read a wall of text while thinking of how to respond from an engineering perspective, only to discover at the end that the person lacks technical aptitude.
1. Greeting, of course 2. The ask or most important detail, standing on its own line. (The exec can rapidly say yes or offer feedback if they agree on the face of it, or read on for more detail.) 3. Then do the I see, I'm doing, I want, etc in more detail.
I think execs managing a tremendous workload appreciate if you can invert to this "thesis first before anything else" style—it took me a while to learn this, and I also appreciate it when partner teams who send stuff to me for review follow this style. I think boils down to time management, triage, and giving rapid yes/nos, but you still need to show your work, but if you make your email harder to action it'll get delayed in processing or even forgotten.
Of course, relationship management matters too.
So to your point, yes, this is typically how I would write an email. In fact, the "I am" part of an email is often adequately covered by the 'From' address.
On the radio, in contrast, I would explicitly say something like "This is four-two, actual" before proceeding with the rest.
Execs only care about the proof. They're not asking out of curiosity.
So it’s good to recognize that this is a cognitive habit and it might require practicing a different approach, or preparation.
Another military term I’ve heard for written comms is “Bottom Line Up Front” (BLUF) which translates to a proactive TLDR. Similarly, this is a very useful tool for helping people consume your written comms; it allows readers to figure out if the content is something they need to deeply engage with or skim, rather than forcing them to skim the whole thing to figure that out for themselves.
The common theme here is that there is lots of value in providing a concise summary, so that recipients have to do the minimum amount of work to extract the first level of detail of information. This allows the first level of detail to travel further in the org and means the org is going to be better equipped to make good decisions.
Yup! I've also heard this phrased as "start with the punchline, then explain the joke".
And if your email includes an ask of any sort from the recipient, be sure to make the ask in the very first line (and summarize it in the subject line).
Then spend the rest of the email with the details around the ask.
Here's how I learned to give a situation report during my brief stint in the armed forces:
1. "I am" (identify yourself & other parties involved; give location where appilcable)
2. "I see" (What is on your radar? What's the problem? What situation is developing? Which milestone have you reached?)
3. "I'm doing" (How are you responding to what you see?)
4. "I want" (How can your interlocutor help? What resources do you need?)
The mnemonic for this is rather funny: "I'm lost. I can't see shit. I'm doing fuck all. I want to go home."
I think it works rather well in civilian life, too: "I'm working on $FEATURE. I'm noticing that page load times have doubled. I'm caching the results to try to reduce that a bit. Could Bob have a look at the database indexes?"