FACT, NOTE, HIGHLIGHT, CONCERN

Be succinct in your comms, speed up your decision making, improve your precision.

Each quarter we prepare a board pack for our board members. Our team puts a lot of effort into it, crafting all the data, double checking that the figures resolve. Towards the end of that process, I then write a page that gives a summary of what’s going on.

Each quarter we review how we did performance-wise, but we also look back at how we did communicating our results. To me that’s important, the more that our board can see the same charts, dashboards, metrics that we use on a weekly basis to run the business, the better. In fact, many of the charts that we share in our board pack are also shared each month during our company all-hands. We run very transparently and nearly all Rocketeers are also (or have the choice to be) shareholders.

Some time ago, I got frustrated with the narrative that was added to the board pack. Not because it was wrong, but because it was long, confusing and different sections look like they’d been written by different people - because they had been. I had to unpack it all to understand it and rewrite it. So in true ServiceRocket style, we built a simple protocol for it.

That protocol is simple -

1. Use succinct bullet points

2. Each bullet point to explain one concept (don’t try and combine 13 metrics in one sentence!)

3. Most importantly, each bullet point is prepended with one of the following

   1. FACT - here’s a number, a statement that is just a fact

   2. NOTE - there’s something here that we should be aware of.

   3. HIGHLIGHT - GOOD NEWS!!! 🙌

   4. CONCERN - We should focus on this, potentially bad news or lead indicator/flag going the wrong way.

The nice thing is that this framework not only made it easier for me to digest, it also made it infinitely easier for the team to produce! As they no longer had to try and make things sound how they thought they needed to be presented and instead focused on the core message.

We also use this in prompts, instructing our skills and Rovo agents to communicate in the same protocol.

So try this, reduce the cognitive load that it takes to communicate up and down the chain and speed up your team!