Summarizing up-front is hard because it works the opposite of how many peoples’ brain works; if you don’t have a summary drafted, one good way is to run through

Summarizing up-front is hard because it works the opposite of how many peoples’ brain works; if you don’t have a summary drafted, one good way is to run through everything verbally and then summarize at the end. This also plays into the natural narrative-creating tendencies. 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.