More SUCCESS in business communication with IBCS
With the SUCCESS formula, communicating successfully in management reports and presentations is no longer a matter of luck. Professor Rolf Hichert has defined guidelines for conveying information across departments, companies and countries and established a set of universal principles for business communication.
The acronym SUCCESS stands for S(ay), U(nify), C(ondense), C(heck), E(xpress), S(implify), S(tructure). But what exactly do these terms mean, and what significance does this have for your reporting? While SAY, UNIFY and CONDENSE were explained in the first part of this article, here you will learn how CHECK, EXPRESS, SIMPLIFY and STRUCTURE will help to increase the comprehensibility of your reports and presentations.
CHECK – Ensure visual integrity
CHECK requires you to use the same scale for all objects on a page and to indicate any objects with a different scale clearly. Why is this necessary?
Imagine two columns of the same height shown side by side, the first representing the year-to-date sales and the second representing the profit. If both columns are of the same height, the impression is given that the company's profit is equal to its sales. The riddle is only solved by the unit of measurement in small print: the sales being shown in millions of euros and the profit in thousands. The different scales result in a distorted view. This inconsistency may lead to bad decisions with far-reaching consequences.
EXPRESS – Choose proper visualisation
Each cultural sphere has its own conventions. For instance, we read letters and numbers from left to right. The EXPRESS rule picks up on this convention as well as on others that are less obvious. It assigns widespread and therefore particularly suitable forms of visualisation to specific kinds of information. Thus, time series should be displayed from left to right in column or line charts, while structural comparisons – such as between regions – should be made from top to bottom in bar charts.
The benefit becomes especially clear in combination, such as when showing regions over time. For this, EXPRESS recommends three different display formats from which you, as the report designer, can choose, bearing in mind the key message you wish to convey.
SIMPLIFY – Avoid clutter
Has this ever happened to you? On the train you hear an announcement that you cannot make out over the background noise. If you're lucky, the announcement will be repeated at the next station. If it is made at every station, you will naturally switch off – and possibly miss an important new detail when you hear it for the eleventh time.
Unlike train drivers, you have the power simply to switch off the other noises. You can direct your report users' attention by dispensing with redundancies. Follow the SIMPLIFY principle and do away with borders and shading that lack meaning, as well as with garish colours. Only what is needed to convey the message should pass through the filter into your report.
STRUCTURE – Organise content
Let's say you wish to display your worldwide product sales figures. However, since your company has no branch office in Asia, you decide simply to leave out the sales for that continent, which don't add up to very much anyway. Although such an idea may seem justifiable for one report, making this into standard practice would have far-reaching consequences. You would be better advised to apply STRUCTURE – and limit yourself to the relevant region, such as Europe, or else remain global with your world sales and include Asia. How do you decide? Quite simply: according to what your report users want to know. Perhaps this means that one report will then become two: one for the European sales and the other for the worldwide sales. Above all, however, both reports succeed by displaying the chosen region in full.
This last S in the acronym SUCCESS could be put simply as "no gaps, no overlaps", in the sense of an exhaustive display showing information of the same kind, which is to the point and avoids repetition.
SUCCESS
Now that we have resolved the acronym, we'll consider it again in its entirety: each of these aspects depends on the others to function properly. For instance, CONDENSE will only be effective in conjunction with the SIMPLIFY and UNIFY rules.
No more bets!
The SUCCESS formula has started a ball rolling that is now unstoppable. The International Business Communication Standards (IBCS), which are based on these rules, are introducing standardised reporting to companies worldwide. Its implementation, however, often presents companies with a challenge. The IBCS contain around 100 rules in total. It can therefore hardly be expected of the staff in every department to have them all at their fingertips for every report. Cross-departmental acceptance can only be achieved and company-wide deployment of the SUCCESS rules will only be feasible with automated implementation using IBCS-compliant one-click reporting. Once SUCCESS has been automated and established in the company, there's no going back. There are simply too many advantages associated with the reduced effort required for reporting and the increased comprehensibility of the reports.
Are you curious to learn more about IBCS? This web page offers more information and presents a solution for automation.
