As the pace of business continues to accelerate, we’re also seeing the volume of data expand. The amount of data generated worldwide is expected to grow from 181 zettabytes in 2025 to 221 zettabytes in 2026 (a 22 percent increase). Many business leaders are struggling to keep track of all the data in front of them—let alone more data with each passing quarter. More than ever, they are demanding executive summaries to cope with this tsunami of data and inform their decision-making.

Traditionally, detailed business plans and proposals featured a summary section that acted as a preface only. Leaders could quickly get a sense of the main highlights before diving into the full report. Over time, the executive summary has transformed into a standalone document, replacing the need for an underlying detailed report. When the full report is no longer being read or even produced, the executive summary is assuming a heavier role that it was never designed to do alone.

Today, with the emergence of AI , anyone can easily generate a summary on anything with a simple prompt. Both leaders and those tasked with generating reports are enthusiastically celebrating AI’s ability to summarize information easily and quickly. While it may sound like a resounding win, summaries are now becoming the de facto informational fix for time-deprived executives. As a result, organizations are at risk of having smart leaders make bad decisions because they don’t deeply understand what’s happening and what course of action is required.

The “Just Give Me The Numbers” Culture

Time is a scarce resource for most decision-makers, so it’s natural most organizations foster cultures that prioritize speed to insight. A Harvard study found CEOs spent 72 percent of their work time in meetings. A McKinsey study found on average leaders spend “37 percent of their time making decisions, and more than half of this time was thought to be spent ineffectively.” Week after week, most leaders face busy daily schedules full of back-to-back meetings that require constant context shifting. Within this environment, we see how the need for brevity in executive communication is warranted.

Consequently, executive summaries have become the preferred approach for all leadership communications. Business schools worldwide have engrained in students to not “bury the lede,” which is a journalism practice of not hiding the most important information within the main body of a news article. Barbara Minto who worked as a McKinsey consultant further cemented this top-down approach when she introduced her well-known Pyramid Principle model in the mid-1970s.

Following her model, you state your conclusions upfront and then provide key arguments and supporting evidence. The goal of this top-down framework is to counter the tendency that people naturally have to share information in a tedious, bottom-up manner, explaining their methodology, reviewing all their analysis findings and slowly building up to a conclusion. Her top-down, more efficient approach has resonated with busy executives who just want the key numbers quickly. While it supports many decision-making scenarios, this conclusions-first approach has been applied universally to all situations—even ones where it ultimately fails.

When Stakes Are High, The Format Matters

In January 2003, NASA knew it had a problem. During the launch of the orbiter’s 28 th and final flight to space, a large chunk of insulation foam struck Space Shuttle Columbia’s left wing damaging several protective panels. NASA managers had 16 days to assess what to do before the crew would attempt re-entry. Their engineers had data on previous foam strikes from other missions. However, the critical finding was that the foam that struck Columbia was nearly 640 times larger than anything they had tested before, meaning the existing data model was essentially useless to determine its impact.

Unfortunately, when they reduced their technical findings down to 28 slides for NASA management, this critical finding ended up being buried in a sub-bullet in a dense slide. The managers left the meeting feeling the engineers were uncertain, but the risk still appeared acceptable. On the other hand, the engineers felt they had communicated the serious dangers of the return trip. Tragically, the Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, killing all seven crew members aboard.

In the years since the accident, surprisingly, PowerPoint has received an inordinate amount of blame for this communication mistake. Everyone seems to forget PowerPoint is just a tool. The real culprit was NASA’s organizational culture that expected highly complex material to be condensed and summarized into brief summaries for management consumption. When NASA investigated the accident, they concluded the following in their report :

“As information gets passed up an organization hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information is filtered out. In this context, it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.”

Brevity was the standard for management communication within NASA, and the engineers complied—never questioning whether the format was appropriate for such a high stakes situation.

What You Actually Sacrifice When You Summarize

When critical findings are consolidated and condensed into summaries, you lose something you may not realize you actually need. For example, if you don’t have time to watch a movie, you could just read a summary of the entire film. In fact, you could do that for every new movie. From an efficiency perspective, it would save you approximately two hours of time each film you didn’t have to watch, but you would miss out on the deeper experience that each cinematic journey has to offer. You’re not getting a shorter version of the movie; it is a “spoiler” that robs you of a unique entertainment experience.

In the Columbia example, complex technical information about a potential safety issue was summarized for NASA managers. In that process, they lost the synthesis that connected all the dots together. Without that supporting evidence and contextual scaffolding, the managers couldn’t deepen their understanding of the serious situation at hand. For any high stakes decisions like this one, an executive summary can lead to a confident but misguided and costly decision.

Many organizations are experiencing something similar to NASA that I call Summarization Spiral , where each layer demands a shorter summary than the previous one. As the information flows up through an organizational hierarchy, it gets filtered, condensed, and re-packaged at each stage. With the emergence of AI, this behavior will only be amplified. By the time leadership receives the final summary, it bears little resemblance to the original analysis. It ends up like a corporate version of the childhood telephone game, where critical information degrades at each step. When this occurs, leadership ends up basing its decisions on distilled conclusions with none of the underlying reasoning or context.

The Real Problem: Applying The Same Tool To Every Job

My intent is not to disparage the executive summary as it is a useful communication format. Unfortunately, it has become the default hammer for all leadership communication. Every executive interaction is viewed as yet another nail. Time pressures and the need for brevity often outweigh all other factors, such as decision complexity, audience receptivity and high stakes. While time will always play a role in shaping leadership communications, it should be balanced with these other considerations to better determine what is necessary under different circumstances. Rather than treating time purely as a constraint, it is being misused as a rigid gatekeeper that forces all communication into a format that may not always serve leadership’s best interests.

Many are familiar with the well-known Project Management Triangle , which helps convey the tradeoffs between scope , time and cost that shape project quality. You can optimize for any two corners, but you always sacrifice the third. Similarly, to illustrate the tradeoffs that influence impactful communications, I’ve developed the Data Communication Triangle with three key constraints:

  1. Brevity: How much time and space you have to communicate your findings
  2. Depth: The richness of context and evidence you provide
  3. Comprehension: How well your audience understands the content

The right communication tool depends on your intent for the audience. Are you trying to spark curiosity? Build awareness? Or drive conviction through understanding? Each intent requires a different approach.

An executive summary prioritizes brevity and comprehension . It’s designed to get the point across quickly and clearly, but it sacrifices depth. The primary audience goal of this communication format is awareness. For straightforward, less complex topics, rich details aren’t necessary to make sound decisions.

In contrast, a data story prioritizes depth and comprehension . It guides the audience through all the relevant context and details to foster a clear and complete understanding. Because it helps the audience connect all the dots, it sacrifices brevity. The primary audience goal is conviction. Rather than being purely informative, it will be more persuasive and designed to inspire action.

The story teaser or pitch prioritizes brevity and depth . Unlike the executive summary, it doesn’t provide as complete a picture. Instead, like a movie trailer, it selectively focuses on a couple of targeted deep cuts: a hook that is an intriguing anomaly or unexpected pattern in the data and the main insight or finding. It deliberately leaves out everything else. Its primary goal is to spark curiosity and interest, positioning audiences to want to hear the full data story. Like a movie trailer and film are paired together, so too is a story teaser with a data story.

Let’s examine how these formats differ from each other using a key finding that rising customer churn is being driven by a support delay rather than a price increase. Notice how the same insight produces awareness, curiosity or conviction depending on which format is used.

Today, businesses are making many decisions based on highly summarized information. They’re essentially using one tool for every job, even the ones it’s ill-suited for. In the customer churn scenario, the best communication format will depend on the unique circumstances surrounding the decision. If the issue is viewed as straightforward with low stakes, the executive summary is sufficient. But when the stakes demand the audience fully understand what’s happening, they will benefit from hearing the data story. Sometimes, you aren’t given enough time to tell the whole story, and you need to seek permission to go deeper. In that case, a teaser may be the ideal starting point.

Before we move on to the consequences this has for leadership, a data story may sound daunting if it’s loaded with added detail. However, unlike a comprehensive, full report, a data story is intentionally selective—it focuses on the details that matter, not everything. Because it is built around a specific narrative, you will only see what’s necessary to understand the underlying insight and how to act on it.

What This Means For Leaders

To break the cycle of addiction to executive summaries, leaders will need to acknowledge they’re not the silver bullet for all leadership communications. This can be difficult when, on the surface, summarization looks like a highly efficient and productive format. For many routine, low-stakes scenarios, they work exceptionally well. Analysts deliver concise, scannable deliverables, and leaders get the key information quickly. Going forward, AI will only expand each organization's ability to rapidly produce summaries—making this dependency easier to feed, not easier to break.

The danger lies in the situations where you have a complex or high stakes decision that requires you to slow down and really process the information carefully. If leaders routinely demand brevity without asking whether brevity serves the decision at hand, they will be without the depth and comprehension needed to successfully navigate their hardest decisions.

That means for some of your biggest, most impactful decisions, you’ll be handicapped with insufficient context and supporting evidence to make the best decision possible. Rather than defaulting to everything must be a summary, it’s essential to recognize when you need context and nuance to make the right decision.

My greatest fear is that the Summarization Spiral becomes the unspoken standard at most organizations, especially as they embrace AI to summarize business performance. It ends up calcifying into a permanent “Just give me the numbers” culture where brevity always wins over understanding. Once an organization accepts that summaries of summaries are normal, decision-making suffers silently. Leaders fail to realize they’re making critical choices based on conclusions stripped of context and meaning. It's this kind of culture the Columbia Accident Investigation Board identified as a contributing factor in NASA management missing the engineers' safety warnings.

It’s understandable that most leaders are facing serious demands for their time. A skilled data communicator will meet you where you are. They can start with the story teaser if that's all you have time for. But they need you to recognize when the teaser isn't enough and to say so before you make the decision.

By sharing the Data Communication Triangle , my hope is that it helps clarify which format is most suitable for diverse circumstances and unique decisions. With this knowledge, organizations can ensure their executive communications are both efficient and effective, designed to optimize the best decision-making outcomes possible. As AI plays a larger role in organizations, we must ensure its summarization capability becomes a springboard for better decisions in the right situations, not a stumbling block in others.