Executive communication needs to be short and crisp. You compress the information as much as possible without losing the key message. The summary would typically translate to “Tell me what’s important?”.
Summary involves the aggregation of the current state by identifying and condensing the key elements of our analysis or observation. Often, this alone may not be enough. While it gives a good understanding of the current situation, it doesn’t give any insights on observation. We need to synthesize to get more insights.
So, how do we synthesize the summary ?. All you have to do is, ask “So What” over the summary. Here is an example below. Lets say, an organization did a massive hiring in the last year, having nearly 60% of the engineers are juniors. They neither know the technology nor have spent good time within the company.
“So What” is a powerful question you would ask at each layer of the problem analysis. It helps us to keep the focus on the primary problem we want to solve. This technique is widely used in the McKinsey, Bains, and BCG firms.