Why Nobody Reads the Report

The weekly operations report was 34 pages long.

It took two people a full day to compile. It was distributed every Monday to a list of 28 recipients. It had a table of contents.

The average time anyone spent reading it was under ninety seconds. I know because someone finally thought to check the email analytics.

Ninety seconds. For 34 pages. That's roughly the reading speed you'd need if you were only looking at the subject line and the first chart.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what everyone was doing.

The Archaeology

The report had started life as a single page. A few key metrics, a short summary, sent to five people. That was four years ago.

Since then, every new stakeholder had added "just one more section." Every audit had produced "just one more compliance table." Every leadership transition had introduced "just one more KPI."

Nobody had ever removed anything. The report was a geological record of every anxiety the organization had ever experienced, compressed into a weekly PDF that nobody read.

The Experiment

We killed the report for two weeks. Nobody noticed for eleven days. On day twelve, one person asked -- not because they missed the data, but because they needed a number for a presentation and couldn't remember where else to find it.

That told us everything. The report wasn't information. It was insurance. People didn't read it. They just wanted to know it existed.

We replaced it with a one-page summary and a link to a live dashboard. The two people who used to compile it got a full day back every week. And the 28 recipients got ninety seconds back that they were never really spending anyway.