By Joseph Mas
This artifact documents a failure mode that appears repeatedly inside growing organizations.
Reporting exists to support decision making. In practice, it often creates distance from action.
As organizations scale, reports tend to grow in size and complexity. Metrics accumulate. Slides multiply. What starts as an attempt to be thorough quietly becomes a barrier between leadership and momentum.
The issue is prioritization
Short reports force clarity. Long reports dilute it.
In real operating environments, decision makers need to understand what changed, why it changed, and where attention should move next. When reports exceed that purpose, meetings shift from decisions to interpretation.
The cost is measurable.
- Executive time moves toward reading instead of deciding
- Meetings extend without resolution
- Teams optimize for presentation over outcomes
- Accountability spreads thin as signal disappears into volume
Time spent producing oversized reports comes directly out of time that could be used to correct issues, improve systems, and move the business forward.
This breakdown compounds at scale. When multiple teams deliver oversized reports, leadership spends time reconciling narratives instead of steering the business. Momentum slows because decisions fail to fully form.
There is a second cost that is harder to quantify
When teams invest weeks producing reports that never lead to action, confidence erodes. High performers feel their work vanish into documents that drive no movement. Over time, reporting becomes an exercise in self preservation rather than clarity.
In real organizations, this pattern has damaged working relationships, broken trust between teams and leadership, and triggered avoidable breakdowns that escalated into major organizational failures.
Effective reporting has a narrow job.
- Identify what is working
- Surface what is failing
- Highlight where attention should move next
Any report that cannot support those outcomes clearly and quickly has missed its purpose, regardless of how complete it appears.
- This is a tooling issue.
- This is a dashboard issue.
- This is a leadership alignment issue.
Reports exist to enable decisions. When they fail to do that, they lose their value and can become detrimental.