Executive communication techniques: rewriting a draft update one sentence at a time

A technique is only useful when it changes a draft. This walk-through takes one weak update, two weeks behind schedule, and edits it in five passes, one kind of sentence at a time. Each pass fixes a single moment where the wrong sentence costs something specific.

What to take away

The draft before editing

Here is the draft, written the careful way. Nothing in it is false, and nothing in it can be acted on. It is the running example, and each pass below changes one kind of sentence in it.

Broadly on track, with some challenges. There are a number of considerations here. There is a risk to the timeline. The team has worked extremely hard on this. Five options are set out below.

The style is not incompetent writing. It is careful writing aimed at not being wrong, and the cost of that aim is that nobody can act on it. The five passes replace each careful sentence with one that carries a decision.

Pass 1: decide what the message is

Name the message type before writing a line. Federal plain-language training starts a content audit with one question: what do you want people to do after reading? The answer picks the opening, and the opening does the triage for the reader.

A senior reader is answering three questions in the first seconds: what you want from me, what it will cost, and what happens if I do nothing. A note that leaves one unanswered gets filed rather than read. How a senior reader triages is covered in its own piece.

For the draft, the type is bad news, so the opening becomes the sentence from the table. Options with no recommendation ask the reader to do your analysis, so the five options will shrink later in the edit.

Advance warning is often skipped and it is the cheapest opening in the table. It gives the reader time to think, so the real request, when it lands, is not a surprise.

Pass 2: say how sure you are

Add one sentence to every estimate that separates the firm part from the loose part. Here is one: "The cost is settled. The date depends on one hire we have not made, and if that slips past the middle of the month, the date slips with it."

That sentence lets a senior reader plan against the firm half and watch the loose half. Delivering everything at one level of certainty forces them to discount it all equally, so reliable numbers are treated as guesses.

Both errors have a price: overstating is caught once and applied retroactively to everything you have said. Understating is quieter: your recommendation gets adopted later by someone else, in a worse form.

Naming the weak part of your own case works the same way. A recommendation that says which leg is least firm reads as more reliable than one delivered at uniform confidence.

Pass 3: give each risk a size, a trigger and a date

A risk without these three fields gets acknowledged and dropped. A risk without a size cannot be acted on, and if it lands, you are the person who mentioned it, which protects you and helped nobody.

In the draft, "There is a risk to the timeline" becomes: "If the supplier misses the second milestone we lose about three weeks, we would see it in their weekly report, and I would need a decision on the fallback by the tenth." Somebody can act on that sentence.

Size, trigger, date and the decision needed are the four fields. A risk register is this discipline written down at scale, and the sentence above is one row of it in prose.

Pass 4: reorder the news

Put the load-bearing sentence first and the supporting material underneath it. Detail placed after a conclusion is thoroughness. The identical detail placed before it is an obstacle, and a reader who stops halfway has not read a shorter version of your message; they have read a different one.

Bad news is time-sensitive, and the CDC's crisis communication principles open with be first: crises are time-sensitive, so information needs to be communicated quickly. Waiting for the full picture usually means waiting for a solution, and by then the useful moment has passed.

Send it short, in this order:

The damage from late bad news is rarely the news itself. It is that everything else you have sent turns provisional. A reader who learns you knew for two weeks does not revise one project. They revise their estimate of how much of your reporting is filtered.

A correction follows the same order and the same speed. Send it without ceremony, even if nobody has noticed the error. One that arrives after somebody has planned on the wrong number costs the credibility of everything else in that message and several after it.

Pass 5: strike the careful phrases

Search the draft for sentences written to avoid being wrong. The table pairs seven of them with how a senior reader hears them and a version that works. Replace each careful sentence with one that carries a decision.

Run the five passes over the draft and the update that goes out is short. It answers the reader's three questions in order and leaves nothing to decode.

We are behind by two weeks, and the cause is the supplier, not the team. The cost is settled. The date depends on one hire we have not made. If the supplier misses the second milestone we lose about three weeks, we would see it in their weekly report, and I need a decision on the fallback by the tenth. Two options. I recommend the second.

Before you send

Check the finished note against two habits that sit under the sentences. Send on change rather than on schedule, and write for the forward, because whatever you send is repeated by somebody else, from memory, in one sentence.

When the message is really a request to somebody who does not have to say yes, prepare it as one; see influence without authority.

Common questions

Which passes matter most if I only have a few minutes?

Run the opening pass and the ordering pass. They decide whether the message is read at all, and the other passes only matter once it is. Then add the firmness sentence if the note carries an estimate.

Is opening with the request rude?

It reads as abrupt to the writer and as considerate to the reader. If it still feels blunt, put one clause of context inside the same sentence rather than a paragraph before it: "To hold the quarter, I need a decision on the second phase by Thursday."

How do I give a risk a size when I honestly do not have one?

Give a range and say it is a range. "Between one and four weeks, and I would know which by the tenth" is actionable and honest. "There is a risk" is neither, and it is not more cautious.

What do I do when the honest state is bad and I do not know the cause?

Say exactly that, with a date attached. "We are behind, I do not yet know why, and I will know by Thursday" is a complete message. Waiting until Thursday means three days of somebody planning against a state that no longer exists.