The art of writing a report
More specifically, a bureaucratic one.
Beginning this year, I was offered to take part in annual report, or so I thought.
The report consisted of 2 large blocks; one entailed all the administrative side of the company, another all the details of the "actual" work. I was entrusted with a third of the latter. Soon it turned out that I was snared into a big, endless wormhole of bureaucratic writing.
What baffled me the most was the writing process itself. The logical structure of the report didn't match the actual decision-making process of the company. As such, it was impossible to write according to the requirement. So the whole process wasn't writing the document from start to finish, but rather starting from the end-point and reverse-engineering up till the starting point. Writing results without knowing what exactly caused that result and which factor was crucial in the process was excruciating. What we needed was a central vision which encompasses, or at least some guidance in the process of creating such logic retrospectively, and we had none.
Furthermore, I couldn’t find adequate scope while writing each subsequent block in the report. Not until the half way through did I know that I had to find substantial, quantifiable achievement, in lieu of value-based, qualitative results. These were considered as mere declarations, and I already built half my report full of meaningless statements. Editing those report was even worse since they were now suddenly telling me to narrow it down to more specific, micro level issues and my whole brain was fixed on macro level analysis.
Achievements with long term value were cut off and only simple short term achievements were left with my futile efforts to make amends with my internal frustration that something was not quite right. AND WE WERE ALREADY HALF WAY! In time, the whole document turned into a battleground where many un-categorized ideas fought each other for my attention.
Finally, there was an universal issue that every document faces; making it simple enough for even dummies to understand. This report was supposed to be evaluated by the council which includes the members not familiar with the stuff we do. We had to make our point plain and clear.
So there I was, without any specific guidance, battling my inner turmoil between abstract and concrete, between macro and micro. Whilst breaking all the industry jargon into everyday words.
