When drafting documents for your clients, you want to make sure you are answering client requests and questions as directly as possible. Your clients are busy and you do not want them searching for the answers to their questions in your reports. You want to make sure client questions stand out as much as possible, and are clear and direct.
A couple of tips for ensuring key client responses are not buried in your product include:
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Answer their questions as directly as possible. If they want a specific answer, do your best to provide it.
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If you don’t know, or if you don’t have any evidence to support their line of thinking, tell them that. You can say “Based on available information, we assess there is no linkage between x, y, and z.” Or “Based on our analysis of available reporting, we did not find any evidence to support x, y, and z.”
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Make sure your responses are clear and concise. Again, we do not want our clients guessing or wondering what you really mean. Particularly if your answer might go against their line of thinking.
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Put yourself in the mind of your client and ask yourself, what exactly do I need to find out when answering these questions? What is my primary concern? How does this impact my executive or the company? What are my key interests?
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Put your most important details first, don’t tease or delay your main points. Make sure your key pieces of evidence are up front to help support your arguments.
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Continue to make sure your bottom line up front (BLUF) sentences and key analytic sentences stand out and are easy to find.
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You can also do this with your client’s key questions–make sure those stand out in your document as well.
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If it is proving difficult to organize your document based on your client’s questions you can put your piece together in a question and answer format. Put their question in bold/italics, and right next to it or right under it, answer the question directly. Another way you could do this is to say something like “In response to your questions regarding x, y, and z” and then answer their questions in the preceding paragraphs.
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Don’t be shy in asking your client if you need clarifications. If a request does not make sense or if a client’s question(s) seem vague or tough to answer, go back to the client and ask them for more information.
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For example, if your client asks if a rival company which has expressed little interest in working with them in the past is open to future engagement, you could say something like “Company X might be open to engagement if you present them with the following opportunities…”
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When using these terms it is always helpful to add a bit more context if you can and let your reader know what might shift the “could” or “might” to a more favorable outcome. This also allows your client to track the accuracy of your assessment over time, monitoring the situation to see if the judgment is growing stronger or weaker based on new information.
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Avoid using two probabilistic phrases in the same sentence.
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For example, by saying something “might happen because the following conditions are likely to occur.” This is confusing for your reader. Instead, you could say it “might happen because the following conditions are present.”
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Another example: A presidential election might occur because the National Assembly is likely to approve a new vote. Again, which is it? It seems like a pretty good chance the election will occur if the National Assembly is likely to approve a new vote (if that is a condition for a new election). Instead you could say, “A presidential election likely will occur because the National Assembly is set to approve a new vote.”
If you are in a situation where you are struggling between two judgments–do you think something probably will happen or is likely to happen–you can think in percentages to help you make a determination.
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But remember, analytic judgments do not convey a solid degree of mathematical precision. Analytic judgments are exactly that–judgments. Judgments which are based on solid evidence and facts, your expertise, and past history and examples.
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Another helpful way to convey uncertainty in our judgments is to list up front the key assumptions that underpin your analysis. Letting your client know the key assumptions which guide your interpretation of evidence and reasoning about the particular problem at hand, is a helpful way to demonstrate why you think what you think and if something changes, the impact it could have on your analysis.
And always remember…your client is paying for your analysis. As long as you have the research to back up your arguments and judgments, you are on solid ground!
Reference: Critical Thinking for Strategic Intelligence Analysis” by Katherine and Randolph Pherson.
