Executive Summary Template: Situation, Complication, Resolution

Page one of forty

Picture a 40-page market review, six weeks of work, landing in a chief executive's inbox at 7:40 on a Thursday. She opens it on her phone between two meetings. Page one is headed Executive Summary. It begins: “This document examines the competitive position of our contractor business and sets out a number of options for consideration.”

She closes it. Not because she does not care, but because nothing on that page tells her what she is being asked to do, or why now. The team's best thinking sits on page 31. She will not get there this week.

An executive summary is the first page of a longer document, written so that a busy decision maker can act on it without reading the rest. A reliable template has four parts: the situation the reader already accepts, the complication that changed it, the resolution you recommend, and the ask, meaning the decision you need, from whom, by when.

Most people write an executive summary as a smaller copy of the report: a sentence per chapter, in the same order. That is a summary. An executive summary is something else. It is the decision, written first, with just enough of the argument to make it safe to say yes.

If they stop reading here, can they decide?

Write for the reader who stops

Every executive summary has two readers. One reads the whole document. The other reads the first paragraph and stops. Write for the second one, because the first will be fine either way.

Journalists solved this long ago with the inverted pyramid. Nielsen Norman Group, which studies how people use written content, describes it as putting the most important information, “or what might even be considered the conclusion,” first ⁴. Its case is practical: the structure serves every kind of reader, including one who takes in only a sentence or a paragraph ⁴.

The harder problem is the writer. After six weeks inside the analysis, you know which numbers matter and why the obvious answer is wrong. Your reader knows none of it. Chip and Dan Heath call this the curse of knowledge: people steeped in a subject speak in abstractions, and their audience hears “only opaque phrases” ³. A summary written from inside the work reads like a table of contents to everyone outside it.

The fix is to start from the reader's question rather than your findings. Barbara Minto, whose pyramid course is based on one she developed and taught at McKinsey, built her approach around working out the question in the reader's mind before writing the answer ¹. The full method is on the Pyramid Principle page; this page applies it to one page.

The template

Seven fields, in this order. The word budgets assume a one-page summary of a document up to about 40 pages. If a field will not fit its budget, the thinking behind it is not finished.

A note on names. Strategy teams usually call this structure SCR: situation, complication, resolution. Minto's own name for it is the Situation, Complication, Question framework, which she presents as a way to identify the question in the reader's mind ². The question is the one the complication raises, and the rest of the document is the answer. The two describe the same move. SCR simply writes the answer down next to the question.

How to write it

1. Write the ask firstBefore anything else, write field 7: the decision, the decider and the date. If you cannot, you are writing an update, not an executive summary, and should label it that way.
2. Write the headline as a sentenceA topic (“Contractor channel review”) is not a headline. A recommendation with a verb is (“Approve a $3 million first phase of contractor self-ordering”). Minto's rule is that the ideas sit in a pyramid under a single point ²; the headline is that point.
3. Make the situation boringThe situation should produce nods. Its only job is to establish common ground. If a reader could argue with it, it is part of your case and belongs in field 5.
4. Find the complication that forces the questionAsk what changed. A competitor move, a cost that crossed a threshold, a contract that expires, a number that broke trend. The complication is what makes the reader ask the question your resolution answers.
5. Pick three reasons and cut the restYou found eleven things. Keep the three a skeptic most needs, each with one number. The other eight go in the body.
6. Name the strongest objection yourselfField 6 is where trust is built. A summary that raises its own best counterargument is believed more than one that hides it, because the reader no longer has to wonder what you left out.
7. Run the stop testGive the page to someone who has not seen the work. Ask them to read only the headline and the first paragraph, then tell you what you want and why. If they cannot, rewrite before you send.

A before-and-after example

The company below is invented. The before version is typical of what lands in executive inboxes. The after version uses the template.

Count what changed. The after version is longer, but a reader who stops after the headline knows what to approve, and a reader who stops after the complication knows why it cannot wait. The before version, read in full, still asks for nothing.

Good and bad, field by field

The most common failure is in the resolution field: a recommendation to do more work. Sometimes that is honest. If so, make the further work the decision. “Approve six weeks and $80,000 to test pricing in two regions before we decide on a national change” is a resolution. “More analysis is needed” is a shrug.

The second most common is hedging. Every “may,” “potentially” and “could be considered” moves a judgment from you to the reader, who has less information than you do. If you are uncertain, say how uncertain, once, in field 6. Do not spread the doubt across every sentence.

The case for building up to the answer

The strongest objection to answer-first writing is political. Lead with an unwelcome recommendation, the argument goes, and a skeptical executive stops reading at the headline, already composing the rebuttal. Walk them through the evidence first and they arrive at the answer with you. Bad news, in particular, seems to need a runway.

There is something to this. A recommendation that lands cold on a hostile reader can be dismissed in one line. But burying it does not solve that problem; it postpones it to page 31, where the reader arrives irritated at having been made to search, or never arrives at all. The answer to a hostile reader is not structure. It is preparation.

• Pre-wire the summary. Walk the key reader through the headline before it is sent, so the page confirms a conversation rather than starting one. The managing up page covers how to learn the question an executive is actually asking.
• Let the situation carry the empathy. If the news is bad, the situation can acknowledge what the reader cares about and what has been tried. That is common ground, and it costs one sentence.
• Put the strongest objection in field 6. A skeptic who finds their own argument already answered on page one has less to compose.

One real exception: when the reader must choose between options you have deliberately not ranked, because the choice turns on values only they can weigh. Then the headline is the choice itself (“Decide whether to protect margin or share in the contractor channel; the two options below cost the same”). That still answers the stop test. The reader knows exactly what is being asked.

When you review other people's summaries

If you run a strategy team, the executive summary is the cheapest quality control you have. You cannot check every model, but you can check every first page, and a weak first page almost always means weak thinking underneath. A team that cannot write the headline usually has not decided what it believes.

Three habits change the standard quickly. Return any summary whose headline is a topic. Ask the author to say the complication out loud in one breath. And for documents going to the board or the executive committee, read the first page before the team builds the rest; a page agreed in week one saves a deck rebuilt in week five. For longer arguments, the narrative memo applies the same discipline to six pages.

The second-order problem is volume. When every document opens with a crisp recommendation, executives start to see the summaries as competing for the same budget and attention, which they are. That is healthy. It makes the trade-offs visible on page one instead of in a hallway after the meeting.

Before you send it

• The headline is a full sentence with a verb, and it is the recommendation.
• The situation contains nothing the reader would dispute.
• The complication names a change, with a date and a size.
• The resolution can be approved as written, with a cost and a start date.
• Each of the three reasons carries one number, and the number is in the body with its source.
• The strongest objection and the best rejected option are on the page.
• The ask names a decision, a decider and a date.
• Someone outside the work passed the stop test.

Monday morning: open the last document your team sent upward. Cover everything below its first paragraph. Ask what the reader was supposed to do. If the answer is “read the rest,” rewrite that page before the next one goes out.

A report proves you did the work. The executive summary is where the work becomes a decision, and it only gets one paragraph to do it. Write that paragraph for the reader who stops.

Questions

What should an executive summary include?

A headline that states the recommendation; the situation the reader already accepts; the complication that changed it; the resolution you recommend, with cost and timing; three reasons with their key numbers; the main risk and the best rejected alternative; and the ask, meaning the decision, the decider and the date. For a document up to about 40 pages, all of it should fit on one page.

What is situation, complication, resolution (SCR)?

SCR is a way to open a business document. The situation states what the reader already knows and agrees with. The complication names what changed and forces a choice. The resolution gives the recommended answer. It is the consulting shorthand for Barbara Minto's Situation, Complication, Question framework, in which the complication raises a question the document then answers.

How long should an executive summary be?

For most internal documents, one page. A useful test is not length but whether a reader who stops after the first paragraph knows what you want them to decide and why it cannot wait. If the summary passes that test, extra length is supporting detail; if it fails, a shorter version will not help.

What is the difference between a summary and an executive summary?

A summary shrinks the document, usually in its own order: a sentence or two per section. An executive summary is written for someone who must act. It leads with the recommendation and the decision required, gives only the reasons a skeptic needs, and is designed to be usable on its own, without the rest of the document.

Where to go next

• The Pyramid Principle for Strategists
• The Narrative Memo: Template and Method
• Managing Up: Selling a Recommendation to a Skeptical Executive
• The One-Page Decision Memo (free PDF)
• Change Communication Strategy