Our industry is obsessed with reports.
We have field reports, expert reports, and investigation reports. Contractors report on materials used and manpower. There are reports from material manufacturers documenting test results.
“When can we expect to see your report?” is a common question.
What is a report, though? People call lots of things reports.
Some reports are 79 pages long, dense with paragraph after paragraph of text, endless charts, and pages of photos. You could stare at it for an hour and still not know what it says.
Others are a page or two and look like they were written on Microsoft Word from 1985… the one with the blue background that you had to load from a literal 5-1/4 inch floppy disk. (IYKYK)
What most of these reports have in common is that no one reads them.
I know this because I’ve written a whole lot of reports—a few of which I think are actually pretty good—and here’s the most common follow-up request from the supposed reader:
“Can we meet to discuss your report?”
…and then in the meeting…
“OK, so can you just run through the report?”
i.e. they have no idea what it actually says because they didn’t read it.
After “going through the report” together (me just verbally telling them what the main substance of the report is) they conclude the meeting, thanking me for the helpful report.
What can we learn from this exercise?
Reports don’t really work.
They may be helpful CYA, research fodder for some future forensic expert pouring over a case file. But reports don’t help now, in the moment, to clearly convey the information they’re meant to communicate.
So what would a rational, problem-solving AEC professional do in a situation like this?
Obviously, keep writing reports exactly the same way for decades on end.
Wait, what? That doesn’t make sense.
…but it’s reality.
We can do better.
Knowing that traditional reports typically fail at their most fundamental job, my firm and I are constantly experimenting with different approaches to report on our work and communicate our findings.
Here are some things we’ve done that seem to help:
- Most of our written, narrative-style reports are “backwards”. The report itself is a couple of pages with just the essential take-aways (like “Your roof is deteriorated and you should plan on replacement in 2-5 years at a cost of approximately $400,000). Then, following the report, is an appendix with all the boring details in case anyone cares to read it, now or in the future.
- We often don’t do a narrative-style report at all. We prepare a variety of schematic visuals like annotated photos, sketches, or drawings and tell the story of our work in a more engaging way. We find this helps the audience grasp the main points much more quickly.
- We typically prepare a video walkthrough of major deliverables, including the above documents. For this we use a tool called Loom to record our camera and screen as we talk through the main points—essentially preempting that meeting I described earlier.
Getting beyond “paper”, whether actual paper or electronic paper PDFs, seems like a worthwhile avenue for improving communication in reporting (since no one reads anything). Our Loom walkthroughs are a first baby step in this direction.
I’ve thought about other approaches too, like hiring a videographer to follow us around a job site as we work, interview us, and prepare a documentary-style film presenting the findings.
Another tack could be building an interactive website. The site could feature opportunities for the audience to engage with the content, perhaps through dynamic visualizations and direct communication with the authors via a commenting system.
Maybe we could record a podcast discussion between the project team members, highlighting the process and results in a conversational way.
Increasingly powerful technology makes some of these ideas, which may have been cost-prohibitive before, a little more plausible. But still the challenge remains of actually delivering value.
The whole point of reporting is to communicate valuable information.
Here’s to continuing to innovate and finding ever-better ways to do that.
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