Devoted to how insight is developed, shared and acted on

Share this article :

Other articles you may be interested in:

Give Your Summaries a Lift

Anyone involved in Insight will know that one of the most frequent requests you’re likely to receive is for a short, sharp summary of the results of a project or investigation. You therefore need to develop the skills required to produce quick summaries of presentations, or perhaps one page summaries of whole projects.

Going up in the world?
One of the best ways of doing this is to produce an ‘elevator speech’. Imagine that you get into a lift and you’re joined by the Chief Executive, who is going up four floors, and says: “So what have you learnt recently that I should know about?” Could you give a concise summary in the time it takes for the lift to reach the Chief Executive’s floor?
 
This is a really powerful discipline because it forces you to focus on what are the most important things you need to say. A lift going up four floors takes less than 30 seconds. Therefore, you need to get your points across in less than 75 words.
 
To do this well, you need to boil everything down to just two or three points:
  • What the issue was
  • What you learnt
  • And (optionally) what actions have been taken as a result
Try it out
Why not try this out on a project you’ve recently completed? Produce a ‘chatty’ summary in less than 75 words. An example might be:
 
“Well, we’ve just been looking at why some of our older customers have been switching their accounts to Competitor X. It turns out that they are mostly golf players and our competitor has been offering them free golf weekends through golf clubs. This has made us realise that we could provide a whole range of similar offers through various sports clubs that we’ve already established close relationships with.”
 
The key is to be clear about the answer in terms of its business value, and not just to regurgitate a bunch of facts that will leave the Chief Executive thinking “Yes, but so what?”
 
Even if you need to provide someone with a more detailed summary (for example, an A4 page), the elevator speech is still an excellent starting point. It will make sure that the real essentials don’t get missed out, even though your one page summary should have room for more details.
 
One final tip – always leave the door open for further information sharing. Try to end with something like: “If you want to know more, would you like me to send you the executive summary or the key slides from my presentation?”
Leave a comment on this article Your Name:
Your Email:
Your Message: