Proven, likely or unknown: a weekly report your CEO can trust
Most status reports mix facts, hopes and guesses in the same tone. Three labels fix that. How we write the weekly report on every engagement.
Three weeks into our current engagement, the weekly report has kept the same shape every week. It is the part of our work clients mention first, so here is how it is built.
The problem with status reports
A typical update reads: “Traffic is recovering after the fixes.” Is that measured? Over how long? Compared with what? Is it the fixes, or the season? The sentence sounds the same whether it is a fact or a hope, and the reader has no way to tell.
Three labels
- Proven: measured, re-checked at the source, and we can show how. “Weekly visits from Google rose from X to Y, first week against third, from Search Console.”
- Likely: the evidence points one way, but something could still change the picture. We say what would change our mind.
- Unknown: we do not know yet, and we say what it would take to find out.
Every claim in the report carries one of the three. No exceptions, including the good news.
Four sections, every week
- What changed: every release and decision, in plain language.
- What it did: the measured effect, labelled.
- What is still unproven: open questions, and what we are doing about them.
- Next week: the plan, with how each item will be judged.
Why it works
It protects decisions. When a report says “likely”, nobody commits the budget on the strength of it. It protects trust: if we are wrong about something marked likely, we said so up front. And it protects us from ourselves, because writing “proven” forces a check we might otherwise skip.
Try it
Take your last status update and label every sentence. Most teams find that much of what reads as fact is actually likely, or unknown.
The examples in this article come from real engagements. Client details withheld; every figure comes from the client’s own data.
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