When the Numbers Are Bad: Reporting a Poor Month Honestly

Monday, 08:30, the first working day of the month, at Oakhurst College. Fiona, who runs the three-person desk, has the monthly page open and the five numbers typed in. She has been looking at them for ten minutes without writing a sentence. The backlog is 170, up from 90. The median time to resolve is thirteen business hours, up from six. Satisfaction is 31 good of 52 replies, down from 50 of 58. The biggest interruption is the student records system, down for a day and a half in enrolment week, with about sixty staff unable to enrol anyone. One number held: first response time, which the desk kept at under an hour all month by answering everything and fixing less. Fiona's cursor is in the first of the three sentences, and the sentence she has half typed begins "Despite a challenging month, first response time remained". She knows exactly what she is doing. She deletes it.

A bad month is one in which the numbers moved the wrong way by enough that the reader will notice, or should. Handling it well means four things, in order. Say the bad number first, in the subject line and the first sentence. Say the cause honestly, including when it was the desk. Say the plan, with a date and what the reader will see next month. And leave out every word of spin, because the reader can hear spin and will remember it longer than the number. This article is part of our Reporting to Leadership series. It is about the month when the one-page report is hardest to write and matters most. It is also about the credibility a desk earns by writing it straight.

It covers the three temptations, saying it first, naming the cause, and the plan with a date. Then come the words that give spin away and separating the incident from the month. Next it covers the bad month that follows a decision made above you and the credibility a bad month earns. A short war story and the bad-month message to copy follow, in that order.

The Three Temptations

The first temptation is to bury it. That means leading with the number that held, putting the bad numbers in their usual slots without comment, and letting the reader find them. Fiona's deleted sentence was this one. It feels like balance and it is concealment with a good opening. A reader who has to find the bad number themselves learns that the desk's pages have to be searched. A page that has to be searched is a page the reader stops trusting at the first sentence. The bad number is the month's news. It goes where the news goes, which is first.

The second is to delay. That means holding the report a week until the backlog is down a bit and the median has recovered. The delayed report goes out with better numbers and no mention of the gap. The reader will not notice the week. They will notice, months later, that the one late report was the one with the worst numbers in it, and draw the conclusion anyone would. A report that arrives on the first working day every month, including this one, has a timing that says nothing. And that silence is worth more than the week.

The third is to decorate: surround the bad number with context until it looks smaller. The decoration might be a paragraph about how the records system upgrade was always going to be difficult. Or a note might say other colleges had the same problem. Or it might be a reminder that the desk is three people, or a comparison with a worse month two years ago. Each sentence is true and the paragraph is an excuse, and the reader can tell, because excuses have a rhythm that explanations do not. The explanation is one sentence and it is in the next section. The decoration is everything after it, and it comes off. (There is a fourth temptation, which is to blame someone, and it is dealt with under cause, because it is usually dressed as one.)

Say It First

The bad number goes in the subject line of the e-mail, because the subject line is the part of the report every reader reads. "Help desk, September: backlog up to 170 and median wait doubled; records system outage; one ask." A reader who reads only that knows the month, knows the desk knows, and knows there is something to decide. The alternative subject line, "Help desk, September report", tells the same reader nothing. The page that follows eventually mentions the backlog and surprises them. And a surprised reader is a reader who wonders what else they were not told.

The first of the three sentences on the page is the bad number in plain words, with last month beside it and no adjective. "The backlog rose from 90 to 170 and the median time to resolve doubled to thirteen business hours." Not "increased significantly", not "was higher than we would have liked". The number, the direction, the comparison. Adjectives in a bad-news sentence are read as either minimising or dramatising, and the reader cannot tell which, so they distrust both. The number alone cannot be distrusted; it sits in the same slot as every other month.

The test for whether the bad news has been said first is simple: would the reader be surprised to hear it from someone else? If a department head mentions at lunch that the desk had a terrible month and the reader already knows, from the page, the desk has done its job. If the reader hears it first at lunch, the page has failed, however accurate it was, and the reader will remember who told them. Bad news travels on its own. The only thing the report decides is whether it arrives from the desk or from the corridor.

Naming the Cause

The cause is one sentence, and the first thing it says is which of three kinds it is. Those are inside the desk, inside the organisation but outside the desk, or outside the organisation altogether. "Because Sam left on the ninth and his replacement starts next month, so two people carried three people's queue" is inside the desk. "Because the records system upgrade on the sixteenth failed and took a day and a half to roll back" is inside the organisation. "Because the records system's supplier took eleven days to answer the ticket about the rollback" is outside it. The kind matters more than the detail, because each kind leads to a different decision, and the reader is reading for the decision. A cause without its kind is a story; a cause with its kind is the first half of an ask.

When the cause is the desk's own decision or mistake, say so in one sentence and without ceremony. "I chose to protect first response time at the cost of resolution time, and in hindsight the balance was wrong." No apology paragraph, no defence, no list of mitigating factors; one sentence of ownership, and then the plan. Readers forgive a desk that made a wrong call and said so far more readily than one that made a right call and explained it at length. The first one has told them what kind of person writes the report. Owning a mistake in one sentence is the single cheapest piece of credibility a desk can buy, and it is remarkable how few desks buy it.

When the cause is not known, say that, and say when it will be. "Satisfaction fell from 50 good of 58 to 31 of 52; about half of the poor ratings mention waiting and the rest I have not yet read; I will have the pattern by the fifteenth." A reader can live with "I don't know yet" attached to a date. They cannot live with a guess presented as a cause. The guess will be remembered as the cause and next month's correction will read as a change of story. Speculation in a bad-month report is a loan taken out against next month's credibility, at a poor rate.

Never let the cause be a person, inside or outside the desk, by name or by implication. "Because the records team pushed the upgrade through without testing" is a sentence about people. It starts an argument in which the desk's numbers are forgotten and the desk is remembered as the department that blames. "Because the upgrade failed and the rollback took a day and a half" is a sentence about a system. It points, for anyone who wants to follow it, at the same place. If you run QuerySolv, the event history on each ticket holds the whole sequence. It records when Sam's tickets went unclaimed, when the upgrade ticket was raised, when the supplier last replied. So the cause is reconstructed from the record rather than from anyone's memory of a bad fortnight. In any tool, write the cause from the tickets, not from the mood.

The Plan, With a Date

The third sentence is what the desk is doing about it, in three parts. Those are what is already being done, what the reader will see on next month's page, and what, if anything, the desk needs from them. "We are working the backlog oldest-first with the two people we have, the replacement starts on the third, and I expect the backlog below 120 and the median back under eight hours by the next report; I need nothing from you this month beyond knowing that the records system's supplier has been slow to answer." A plan with a date on it can be checked next month, which is the point; a plan without one is a hope with better grammar.

The plan is proportionate to the cause, and it is specific. "Work harder" is not a plan; the desk was working as hard as it could in the bad month. "Clear the thirty tickets over thirty days first, two hours each morning, before the queue opens" is a plan. So is "pause the knowledge base work for three weeks and put those hours into the backlog". Where the bad month is a backlog, the one-time dig-out, with its triage and its daily target, is the subject of The Dig-Out Plan. In that case, the report's third sentence is that plan's first line and its finish date. The reader does not need the plan. They need to know there is one and when it ends.

Separate the plan the desk can deliver alone from the plan that needs the ask, and put the ask in its box. If the backlog can be cleared with two people and the new starter by next month, say so and tick "nothing to decide". Suppose the honest estimate is three months of a growing queue unless someone's time is borrowed. In that case, the ask is "approve ten days of borrowed time from the network team over the next month", with the number it would move. The plan says what happens if that ask is declined. A desk that promises to cope and does not will be asked, next time, why it did not say.

Next month's page carries the result against the promise, whatever it was. "Backlog 118, against the 120 promised; median 7.5 hours, against the eight promised." Or "backlog 140, against the 120 promised, because the supplier's answer took a further three weeks; the revised date is the end of next month." The second is harder to write and worth more, because a reader who sees a desk correct its own forecast in public knows the forecasts are real. A plan that is reported against is a plan. A plan never mentioned again was a sentence.

The Words That Give Spin Away

Spin has a vocabulary, and readers of reports learn it quickly, because every bad report they have ever received used it. "Challenging" means bad. "Despite" means the good number is about to be used as cover for the bad one. "In context" means the number is about to be made smaller by comparison with something chosen for the purpose. "Only" before a number means the number is bad. "Stabilising" and "trending in the right direction" mean the number is still bad but the writer would like credit for the direction. None of these words is dishonest on its own. Together they are a signal, and the signal says that the writer does not trust the reader with the number.

The quieter spin is in what is chosen rather than what is written. The average quoted instead of the median, because the average happened to be kinder this month. The comparison with the same month two years ago, when it was worse, instead of with last month, when it was better. The definition quietly changed so that tickets waiting on the supplier no longer count as open. The number left off the page altogether, with the slot filled by a sentence about something else. Each is a choice the reader cannot see being made and will see, eventually, when they compare two pages. A page whose numbers sit in the same slots, by the same definitions, with the same comparison as every other month, cannot spin. That is the strongest argument for the fixed format in The Monthly Report They Will Actually Read. The format keeps you honest on the morning when honesty is expensive.

The table below lists the common phrases, what a reader hears, and the plain sentence to write instead. Read a bad-month page against it before sending. Most writers find at least one, usually in the sentence they were proudest of.

Separating the Incident From the Month

A bad month has one of two shapes and the page must say which, because they need different sentences and different decisions. The first shape is one event. It might be an outage, a failed upgrade, a week of absence. That event pushed every number the wrong way for a fortnight and then stopped. The second is a drift: the third month in a row that the backlog has grown, with no single event to point at. Oakhurst's September was mostly the first shape with a little of the second underneath. A page that reported only the outage would have missed the part that mattered next quarter.

The one-event month is reported as an event. The incident has its own review, with its timeline, cause and fixes. And the shape of that review is in Closing the Incident and the Review; the monthly page does not repeat it. The page says in the first sentence that the month's numbers were driven by one event. The second says what the event was in the organisation's units: sixty staff unable to enrol for a day and a half. The third says that the review is done and what the one fix is. Then it says, separately, what the numbers were without the event. For example: "without the outage week, the backlog would have ended the month at about 110, still up from 90". That sentence stops a one-off becoming a crisis narrative, and stops a drift hiding behind an incident, which is the more common failure.

The drift month is reported as a trend, and it is the harder message because there is no villain. "This is the third month the backlog has grown, by about twenty each month, and nothing happened in any of them; the desk is receiving about a fifth more requests than a year ago with the same three people." The reader will ask why, and the answer is on the quarterly page, where twelve months are drawn as a line beside the organisation's growth. A drift reported as a one-off three months running, with a different explanation each time, is what makes a reader stop believing explanations. Say "third month" in the first sentence, and the page has told the truth about its shape.

When the Bad Month Follows a Decision Made Above You

Some bad months are the consequence of a decision the reader made. Examples are the hire that was declined in the spring, the upgrade that was brought forward to fit a budget year. Another is the supplier contract that was renewed on price. Reporting those months is a particular kind of hard, because the honest cause points at the person reading the page. Every instinct says to soften it. Do not soften it and do not sharpen it. State the connection as a fact, in the same calm sentence as any other cause, with no "as I warned" and no "unfortunately". "The backlog has grown for three months since the capacity request was declined in April; demand has risen a further tenth since then." The reader can draw the line from the decision to the number without being led to it, and will respect the page more for not being led.

Separate the decision from its consequence, because the decision may still have been right. A hire declined because the budget did not exist was a reasonable decision with a cost. And the page's job is to report the cost, not to re-argue the decision. "The decision was yours and I understand why; this is what it is costing in waiting, in hours, this month" is the whole of the tone. The aim after a refused ask is to make the cost a number rather than a grievance. What to measure, and how to bring the ask back with the cost attached, is the subject of After the Decision. The bad-month page is where that measurement first appears in front of the person who decided.

Resist the satisfaction of being right, in the page and in the room. A desk lead who was refused a hire and has now been proved correct is in the strongest position they will ever be in. And it is thrown away the moment it is enjoyed. The page reports the number and the cause and renews the ask with the new evidence, in the same voice as a month in which nothing happened. The reader knows. Making them say so is a small victory that costs the next three asks.

The Credibility a Bad Month Earns

A reader remembers two things about a desk's reporting: whether the numbers turned out to be true, and who told them the bad ones. A desk that reports a bad month straight, and then reports the result against the plan the following month, has given the reader both at once. The reader's trust in every later page, good months included, rests on it. Anyone can report a good month. The bad month is the only one in which the reader learns what the report is worth.

The credibility is practical, not sentimental. The desk that handled September honestly gets its October ask approved faster, because the reader has stopped discounting its numbers. It gets believed when it says a number is a one-off, because it has shown it will say when a number is not. And when a target is missed, as targets are, the lesson the breach teaches is received as a lesson rather than an excuse. That lesson is the subject of SLA Breaches and What They Teach. It is received that way because the desk has never offered an excuse before.

There is a paradox in it that is worth knowing in advance. The bad month, honestly reported, is often the month the desk gets what it has been asking for. A reader who has read eleven good pages and one honest bad one understands the desk's capacity better than one who has read twelve good ones. And the bad page is often the first time the ask has had a number behind it that the reader could feel. Fiona's September page, with the backlog at 170 and the median doubled, got the replacement's start date brought forward by a fortnight. It also got ten days of borrowed time from the network team. Eleven good months had managed neither. Nobody enjoys writing that page. It is the one that works.

A Short War Story: The Ninth Line at Hollins Print

At Hollins Print, a commercial printer with two sites, a desk lead called Dev had a month in which the print scheduling server failed. It failed in the busiest fortnight of the year and took two days to rebuild. During that time the presses at the main site ran from paper schedules. About twenty operators spent most of two shifts waiting for work to be allocated. Dev's monthly report that month led with "First response time held at target throughout the month". It put the outage on the ninth line as "one priority-one incident, resolved within two days", and said nothing about the presses. The managing director learned what the two days had actually cost: somewhere between two and three hundred operator hours by the production manager's count. He learned that from the production manager, over dinner at a trade event, three weeks later. He asked Dev the next morning why the report had not said so, and Dev said, truthfully, that it had, on line nine. For the following year the managing director checked every number the desk reported against the production manager's own. Dev's long-standing request for a second scheduling server had become unarguable because of the outage. It was deferred for six months "until we understand the desk's numbers better". The bad news had reached the managing director anyway; the report had only decided who he heard it from.

The Bad-Month Message

The template below is the covering message for a bad month, written to sit above the unchanged one-page report in the body of the e-mail. The subject line carries the bad number. The blocks run in order, starting with the number and the cause with its kind. Next come what has been done and what the reader will see next month, with dates. Then come the ask or the words "nothing to decide", and what the desk does not yet know and when it will. The page beneath is the same page as every other month, with the same five numbers in the same slots. Nothing in the message is softened or dramatised; it is the three sentences of the monthly page given room to breathe.

THE BAD-MONTH MESSAGE — ABOVE THE UNCHANGED ONE-PAGE REPORT
Subject: Help desk, [month]: [bad number, with direction]; [cause in three words]; [one ask / no ask]

1. WHAT HAPPENED (the number, the comparison, no adjective)
   [Number] went from ____ to ____.  [Second number, if any] went from ____ to ____.
   The month's biggest interruption: ____ people could not ____ for ____ hours.

2. WHY (one sentence; say which kind)
   [ ] Inside the desk:       ______________________________________________
   [ ] Inside the organisation, outside the desk: ____________________________
   [ ] Outside the organisation: ____________________________________________
   [ ] Not yet known; I will know by ________ and will say.
   My part in it, if any, in one sentence: ____________________________________

3. WHAT IS BEING DONE, AND WHAT YOU WILL SEE NEXT MONTH
   Already under way: ________________________________________________________
   By the next report I expect: ____ at about ____ and ____ at about ____.
   If that does not happen, the reason will be on the next page.
   Without the event, the month would have shown: ____________________________

4. WHAT I NEED FROM YOU
   [ ] Nothing to decide this month
   [ ] Approve: _______________________________ by ________; it would move ____ by about ____
   [ ] A conversation with ______________ about ______________
   If declined, the plan above becomes: ______________________________________

5. WHAT I DO NOT YET KNOW
   ______________________________________________  I will know by ________.

The one-page report for the month follows, unchanged in format.

Fiona's message that Monday had "backlog up to 170 and median doubled; one technician short and a records outage; one ask" in the subject line. It had two kinds of cause ticked. A sentence read "I chose to protect first response time at the cost of resolution time, and the balance was wrong". Patrick, the bursar, replied before nine: "Thank you for the straight answer. Start date brought forward if HR can do it; take the network team's time. What do you need from me on the supplier?" The October page reported 118 against the 120 promised. Nobody at Oakhurst has ever mentioned September again, except Patrick. He uses it as an example of what he wants from every department, which is a thing Fiona pretends not to know.

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