By the time it got to the exec team, it was a different finding.
Nuance gets squeezed out
A finding travels up or across the organization, and each summary drops a little more. The headline facts usually survive. The conditions, caveats, and exceptions that explain when they apply are what disappear.
- Summaries turn "it depends" into "it works."
- Slides reduce a finding to a single number or color.
- The person who did the work doesn't recognize the version leaders heard.
Who: the person who produced one recent finding in this workflow. Look at: their original next to the summary two levels up. Count: conditions, caveats, or exceptions that were dropped. You're probably looking at this pattern if the summary would lead to a different decision than the original. Probably not if the summary is shorter but would lead to the same decision.
What the front line sees arrives late, softened, or not at all. That pattern is about warnings and bad news. This pattern is about any finding losing its conditions.
Ask for the next big decision as a page of full sentences instead of slides.
Have one person step out and describe how the work lands from a user's perspective.
The board that investigated the loss of the shuttle Columbia faulted a briefing slide that buried the key caveat about the foam-strike data under its headline. Established pattern.