How to write reports that will be read, remembered and acted on?

Report-writing for impact – designing and delivering a series of workshops

When this client got in touch, their reports were polished, professional and full of insight. The problem was that hardly anyone was reading them. Important work was disappearing into inboxes. The team wanted to write with influence and help people act on what they had learned, not just admire the effort that had gone into producing it.

They did not need another writing course. They needed a way to change how people think about writing.

What we did together

We began by understanding the audience. Who reads these reports, under what pressure, and with how much time? Once we mapped that, the workshop design almost wrote itself.

Each session combined short bursts of theory with live experimentation. People tested the principles on their own real examples, compared how different versions landed and learned by doing. We explored how cognitive load, attention and memory work in practice and how the human brain decides what to keep and what to skip.

To move ideas from short term to long term memory, we used repetition and retrieval. We revisited key points across sessions, set practical homework between workshops and added a light hearted competition at the end to keep it fun.

Everything was designed to show how the principles worked in real life. By the final session, people were not just writing differently, they were thinking differently. Their reports had rhythm, focus and a clear sense of purpose. They started to be read, remembered and acted on.

Torchbearing takeaways:

1. Write for decisions, not decoration. 
Everything you include should help the reader move forward. If it does not, leave it out.

2. Design the reading experience.
Guide your reader’s attention. Use structure, space and story to make the message easy to follow and hard to forget.

This is what Torchbearing workshops are about. Helping people learn through experience, grounded in behavioural science, so what they discover in the room stays with them long after the day is over.