Born in a staff meeting that should have been an email.

The brief that was never ‘brief’

With many years of military experience, I have been in more meetings than I would like to remember. In my most senior leadership position, I was responsible for managing a staff of 250 while running the operations of an overseas base with 5,000 personnel. I lived in staff meetings, day in and day out. They all had one thing in common: they always ran the full scheduled time, which was already too long, and sometimes they ran over.

You have probably seen the pattern: someone briefs an issue that affects only one person at the table, in great detail, at length. Heads automatically nod, eyes stare off into an imaginary distance, attention starts to wane, and frustration starts to rise. I saw two issues: some people didn't truly understand the concept of being ‘brief,’ and some simply enjoyed hearing themselves talk.

Then I noticed my own staff meeting starting to run long. So I put a new rule in place:

Every department head gets two minutes to give me the BLUF.If it is a hot issue that impacts other departments, then we will continue the discussion.

In a meeting with 20 people in the room and 10 department heads at the table, each giving a report, a lot of time gets consumed, and I was not interested in wasting it. The meetings went from one hour to about 20 minutes, and the information was better than before: it was short, direct and to the point, focused on what mattered to the whole team. It was exactly the information I needed as a decision maker. The other 40 minutes of that scheduled hour went back to the staff to work together across departments if needed. Some meetings still needed the full hour, but that became a rarity. The meetings became something people didn't dread, and everyone got part of their calendar back.

BLUF is that rule, applied to the news. Your time is valuable, and you don't need to waste it digging through articles to find the important details of a story.