by Serguey Shinder
Every Monday at nine our senior managers met to review the previous week, and every Monday the meeting started with the operations report. By 2024 it had grown to sixty four charts across thirty one pages: sales by branch, by region and by product group, deliveries on time, stock levels, returns, staff hours, call answering times, website visits. It took a team of two most of Friday to produce. I received it on Sunday evening and read it, or believed I read it, before the meeting.
In April our finance director asked a simple question at the end of one of those meetings. What had changed this week that we should do something about? Nine of us had read the report. Nobody could answer with any confidence. We each had a few charts we liked, and we had looked at those. Three weeks later we found out that delivery failures in one region had risen for five weeks in a row. It was on page nineteen, in a chart I had scrolled past every Sunday.
I had thought of the report as a way of paying attention to everything. In practice it made sure we paid attention to nothing in particular. Sixty four charts that mostly looked like last week trained me to skim, and skimming was the right response to almost all of them, which is exactly why it failed on the one that mattered. The report could not tell me where to look, so my habits decided for me.
We rebuilt it over a quarter, and most of the work was arguing about what to remove. The report now opens with one page listing anything that has moved outside a range we agreed in advance, with a name next to each, and nothing else on that page. If nothing has moved, the page says so in one line, and on those weeks the meeting is shorter. Behind it sit eight measures, chosen because somebody would act differently if they changed. The other charts still exist, on a dashboard anyone can open, and are not sent to anyone.
The two people who produced the old report now spend their Fridays looking into whatever the first page flagged, so the meeting starts with an explanation rather than a chart.
The region's delivery problem, for the record, was one subcontracted carrier. It would have been on the first page in week one.
A report that shows everything leaves the reader to decide what matters, and on a Sunday evening the reader decides badly.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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