TL;DR — The most overlooked concept in business communication

TL;DR - Keep most important information as executive summary, You can always link to "further reading" but make an effort in summarizing your data / information / insights.

Why should we only summarize for executives? Yes, they are busy people! Arent we all ?

Boldly put: We need to start writing business communications and reports as though the readers are a attention-deficient product of the social media generation.

Do you have knowledge that is important for the company? And like to write long confluence documents?

Or are you a consultant that delivers knowledge and insights in long PDFs

You will be surprised at how often these documents never get read.

Often, these papers are put "in a folder" somewhere, never to be opened. because people simply don't have time or because it seems like too big of a burden to overcome. And this behavior will only get worse with GenZ entering the office space.

Way too often, these documents are offloaded. written for the author to be able to get them off their mind.

It is also a part of the culture of academia, where long written documents are often the output, with little regard to the recipient's time and attention.

Have you ever gotten an assignment in an educational setting where part of the description for the delivery was to conform the format to a person that was X, Y and Z and also had to manage A, B, and C during his daily routine? Have you ever received a persona you needed to write for?

This culture produces individuals who write without consideration for who they are writing for, how much time the reader has for this, or how the recipient is managing their daily responsibilities.

I have seen companies have paid consultants 100K DKK or more for knowledge or documentation that was never opened internally.

I have seen way too many documents written like they were for an academic research paper. but to be received in a busy office environment.

Do your readers a favor and make the executive summary visually interesting. understand your recipient's time and attention level. Before you make your own brain dump.

This is a heavily overlooked issue that internal user experience designers will start talking about in a few years. How the social media generation does not read documentation. We can laugh about it until we realize it's true...

Essentially every team member that holds knowledge should convey it in quick, understandable documents that respect the recipients' time. I usually say the content should be able to be understood from the coffee machine to your table.

This is why recipient focused jobs like User Experience draws user journey maps and uses visual expression when telling stories that is essential business information. because we know our users and try to respect their attention space.

Sometimes story videos would actually be the best format for certain business situations, or at least video in general, not for the sake of the information but the sake of the recipients and their attention span.

I will not try to draw any conclusions about your company, but if possible, start by keeping an eye out for these problems. before we get analytics for our Confluence pages.

As a reference, a study in 2016 suggested that 70% of the time people shared articles on LinkedIn, the sender only read the headlines.

Quillbot, which is a text-summing AI, is a very popular tool for getting a fast overview of long texts. This is only a product of this problem. And it seems to be very popular.