Chapter 6: Writing for Decision-Makers
James Firth looked at Marcus's forty pages of architecture evidence and said: "Three pages or fewer." The board's consent agenda had fourteen items. By item nine, they were scanning. If the recommendation was not at the bottom of page one, the board would approve whatever the executive committee recommended and move on. That constraint changed how Marcus wrote. He could not start with the methodology or build from the data up. He had to start with the decision and work backward: what does the board need to decide, what evidence makes the case, what are the options, what happens if they do nothing? This chapter teaches that discipline. Decision briefs. Investment cases. Multi-altitude documents that serve three different readers in a single package. And the editing rigour that makes three pages more effective than forty.
What You'll Be Able To Do
By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to:
- Write a decision brief that gets to the recommendation within the first page, structured for the reader who has twelve other items on the agenda.
- Translate an architecture finding into an investment case that quantifies the cost of doing nothing.
- Layer a single document so the executive summary stands alone, the body adds detail, and the appendix contains the evidence, with clean navigation between all three.
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