Tried a fun method this week. My team's documenting a big project—will take weeks. We wrote an overview with 1¶ summaries for each full section (most yet to be written), then asked stakeholders: which ¶s' full sections do you most want to dig into? which sections are missing?
Conversation
Besides their explicit answers, the overview also facilitates conversation about the project more generally—how they conceptualize it, what they're skeptical about, what they find important. It's super valuable to have those insights *before* writing a full draft!
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1. Conversation around a bullet-point outline
is different from
2. Conversation around a first draft of a complete document
is different from
3. Conversation around a three-page prose reduction of a complete document.
Trying #3 has shown me the limitations of #1 and #2 alone.
Replying to
(And all these are different from discussion around a figure visually summarizing key ideas!)
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Outlines can communicate structure and the broad presence or absence of big ideas but don’t have enough meat to portray much about framing, emphasis, explanation. I suspect this makes discussing e.g. areas of skepticism harder: the points are too abstract.