Strategic Thinking: The 7 Questions to Create Report Shrinkage

Here is a prediction for 2014: bosses and client will want even shorter reports and presentations than last year because everyone will be busier and have even shorter attention spans. (In fact, I also predicted on Twitter last night that 2014 will be the global year of even "crazier and busier.")

But what if the report you are writing is destined to be way longer than your audience’s short attention span will tolerate?

How are you going to make the right decisions about cutting content to experience report shrinkage?

The first step, if it is at all possible, is printing the report you are developing. By printing the report, you can easily change the order of the content and compare alternative versions with and without specific content. This preference for printing and working with hard copy may reflect my age and thinking biases, but I find it much more efficient (and personally satisfying) to turn cutting content into a physical experience.

7 Questions to Experience Report Shrinkage

Beyond readying a physical or virtual version of your report, these seven questions will help you make decisions to achieve report shrinkage:

1. Based on your previous history of positive and negative reactions to content with this audience, what can you get away with removing?
2. If you don't have previous experience with this audience, are there other comparable situations you can reference to identify what to eliminate?
3. Can you create a reference or link to content you're not including so if there's interest in it, you can reference it on the fly?
4. Does each piece of content you're planning to keep disproportionately contribute to the short list of information the client needs to know, understand, or believe to take the desired actions?
5. Can you combine content that's similar but not exactly the same to create higher impact in the presentation?
6. Have you duplicated content as the deck has moved through multiple authors and iterations?
7. Are you to the point of cutting things that make you wince when you cut them? If not, you definitely have more content to cut.

We used these questions recently to get a forty-page report down to fourteen pages, just under the fifteen pages the client could reportedly handle!

Are you predicting more report shrinkage in 2014?

Do you buy our report shrinkage prediction for 2014? And if you do, what strategic thinking and actions are you going to do about it?  – Mike Brown

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