Executive summary guide: the report most people will read

For many people, a report's executive summary is all they will read. This guide will help you make it the most useful summary that it can be. By David Walker.

Imagine you have just three minutes with each reader of your report. What do you want to tell them?

You want to tell them about the important stuff you found out. You want to tell them how it will change the organisation’s results, You want to tell them how it can make them better off. You want to tell the people in charge what they should do.

That’s what should be in the executive summary, stated briefly and clearly.

Example: A report's executive summary, summarised

This page guides you towards an effective executive summary for your report. Your summary should:

• be short, memorable and easily-absorbed
• state your key messages
• speak directly and vividly to the audience
• reflect the structure of your report.

If you stop reading right here, this is what we want you to take away. (But please, read on.)

The job of the executive summary: short, memorable, easily-absorbed

More often not, the person who opens the report will take in just the executive summary. Even those who look further will often employ the executive summary as a guide to belief. For many people, then, the executive summary pretty much is the report.

So our executive summary should be a concise, easily-absorbed and memorable summary of the report’s most important takeaways. It should be produced for busy people. It should be the sharpest statement of our ideas.

The summary should provide five types of information:

• Purpose:why the report has been done
• Context: why it matters
• Key data: information vital to the findings
• Key findings: the things readers/viewers most need to know
• Key recommendations: the actions people most need to take.

The word “key” here is ... well, key. The summary should hit the big points only. So to create an executive summary, you have to know what the big points are, and why they’re important. Then you must limit yourself to making those points only. Almost everything else can go in the main body. (You may need to include one or more points that diplomacy requires be made, though they are not vital to understanding.)

Your summary should do two more things:

• It should link to relevant detail deeper in the report. These let more detail-hungry electronic and print readers use the summary like a table of contents. These readers may like detail, but most will still read the executive summary first.
• It should flag that you can give them distinctive solutions and insights.

Put in term of audience needs, the executive summary should contain:

• an overview of problems and solutions for people who want to understand the overall
• pointers to key sections for people who want to drill down on points (the table of contents can help here too)
• pitches for key actions that readers might want to take.

We aim to do all this in the shortest possible time, with the greatest possible impact. A longer summary is a worse summary; as it grows, each point within it grows weaker. So it should be ruthlessly edited. Where editing resources are limited, concentrate them here.

The executive summary should act as more than merely a tool to help readers minimise the time spent on the report. It should also act as a tool for people who want to know more, if possible using hyperlinks, in much the same way as the Table of Contents.

Note that while the primary format for executive summaries is text, they can also be produced in audio or audiovisual formats. And such multimedia summaries should follow all the rules set out above.

Key messages vs executive summary

The executive summary will, to a large extent, reflect the key messages document. Those key messages should provide the key context, data and findings. (If they're not in the key messages, you probably need to build out the key messages.) 

That will take time. Together with the key messages document, the content of the executive summary should take up a disproportionate amount of any authoring effort. These two documents are closely related. 

But they are not identical:

• The key messages document will spend more time on stories, examples, and content with strong emotional impact.
• The executive summary:
  • will prefer more analytical and descriptive language
  • will contain more detail
  • may flow more logically from point to point, with gentler transitions
  • will link to other parts of the document of which it is a part.

If you are not creating a separate key messages document, then be aware that our warning about key messages authoring applies here too: don't make the summary an afterthought. Work out your key points while you are still writing the body of the report. Let those key points shape your writing.

How many words should an executive summary have?

Executive summaries should be short. From CEOs to ministers, busy people want to get the gist quickly. But even people with time on their hands want a message they can digest without too much work.

So we generally recommend the summary should be:

• no more than five per cent of the length of the report, and sometimes as little as two per cent – so 400 to 1000 words for a 20,000-word report
• rarely more than 2500 words, even in a 60,0000-word report.

(The summary at the top of this page is contains about 3.5 per cent of the words on this page, which fits this rule.)

What tone should an executive summary have?

The summary's tone should be appropriate for the audiences that will read the document. Consider how much of your audience will understand technical language, and try to eliminate those that many target readers may not know.

At the same time the summary should be vivid. It should aim to present the most important points so that they will be remembered and drilled down on with the report’s body, so dryness and lack of engaging style are your enemies. The summary needs to stick in busy people’s minds. And because those people are busy, your summary will have a lot of competition.

So use the key tricks of good writing. Get rid of jargon, passive voice and weasel words. Show, don’t just tell. Prefer the specific to the general. Consider making generous use of first-person pronouns such as “we” and “our”. You want readers to buy in, to grow more interested, to read more deeply – and then to act.

Above all, use direct language. Short sentences, familiar words, and clean syntax help readers understand your meaning. Plain prose persuades.

A dull summary just won’t be read. Few organisations these days are willing to employ someone to hold a gun to each stakeholder’s head while they read key reports.

How should I organise an executive summary?

The summary should be organised around the key messages. These may be in the chapter headings, or the recommendations, or something else. The summary may be based on the key messages document that will form the basis for a campaign.

Beyond that, it should reflect the structure of the report itself.

Value brevity. Be sceptical of anyone who says that each and every one of the report’s 57 main points is important.

Key elements of an executive summary

• Introduction: Tell the core of the story – the stuff that really, really counts – in the first two sentences. Then explain the report’s purpose and set your theme.
• Problems we are solving: Set out the background, very briefly, and situations that needs fixing, perhaps at a little more length.
• Analysis of those problems: The first of two elements that make up the guts of any summary. Keep it very short. Include the most important data that shapes the analysis.
• Findings: The second element of the guts of the report, and the one that most space should be reserved for. We may have a few findings of fact, but most of the findings will be recommendations, We’re not writing a PhD thesis; we're writing an action list.
• Conclusion: Reiterate your theme, and then summarise in one or two sentences what all your suggested fixes will do to make things better.

Why am I having trouble writing the executive summary?

By far the biggest blockage in writing an executive summary is that you don't know what the report says that's important. This may be because of two different problems:

1. The report is unclear about what really matters. The topic experts and other writers need to simplify and rework the report to give it a clear hierarchy. You may want to start with a key messages document.
2. The report doesn't say enough that's important. This is more common that most people think. If your report isn't saying enough that will be worth your audience's time to read, then you need to take action to fix that before writing the executive summary. Again, you may want to start with a key messages document.

Other tips

Use subheadings, naturally. If possible, these should tell the core of the story by themselves.

Use section and page links wherever you can, to ease the reader’s interaction with the main body of text. For print, MS Word makes it easy to build links into a report which tools like Adobe InDesign will translate into your final PDF. Word users can link very easily particular subsections whose headings can be easily accessed.

Proofread your summary expertly. Because more people will read and pay attention to it, errors in the executive summary hurt ten times as much.

Check that your summary contains all your key messages. If you have a separate key messages document, check it against that. Someone should be able to write a good five-minute spoken presentation from the executive summary alone.

Don’t over-dramatise or overstate in an attempt to make points look stronger. Hyperbole is easily spotted, will devalue the over-dramatised points, and can make the organisation look foolish.