Why summaries for strategic meetings
As your team and your ambitions grow, so does your strategy model. Since Reports are our window into the state of your organization’s strategy, we wanted a way to payback the time you’ve invested in making great reports. Enter Report Summaries, our answer to the untapped wealth of data accumulating in your reports, distilled to its most crucial insights.
To illustrate this feature, we will use a workspace called Meerkat Health. This is a medium-sized organization composed of 6 hospitals, including many departments and teams distributed across a large geographic area.
As a Meerkat Health report could turn into information overload, below are just some of the ways in which they could leverage Report Summaries.
Cascade prompts
Suggest a plan of attack: Problems emerge everyday, and the bigger the strategy, the greater they are. Perfect for: Creating forward momentum, cutting through analysis paralysis
Highlight key risks: Some reports can contain 1,000s of strategic elements, scale brings knowledge challenges and risks may go unseen. Perfect for: Workspaces with large or complex strategy models
Wins and challenges: Every objective has a story, told through the numbers and your team’s updates. Perfect for: Drawing out the good and the bad during a check-in or to prepare for an all-hands
Write a meeting agenda: Narrows the view to objectives that are falling behind or otherwise incomplete in the report. Perfect for: Sending meeting invitations with agendas for pre-reading or improvised strategic meetings
Custom prompts
Suggest ways to innovate: Generates fresh new content for consideration rather than simply relying on knowns in the strategy model. Perfect for: Ideating meetings where the status quo must be challenged
Highlight goals we should prioritize based on ROI: Orchestrates your goals in any order you want based on a given parameter. Perfect for: Decisioning meetings when tough choices must be made
Identify relationships between disconnected objectives: Highlights the presence of relationships not necessarily explicit in the strategy model. Perfect for: Alignment meetings where different teams can be shown “What’s in it for me”
Create a SWOT analysis: Produces an analysis both for the moment and forward looking. Perfect for: Getting a rough good/bad summary across the report
Getting started
Report Summaries are now available to be added in all Reports and available on all Report Templates. To use a Report Summary, start by editing a report and add it as a new widget from the Add Widget menu.
Once you've added a Report Summary you can further customize it by setting your preferred default, including using a custom question of your choice.
You can also edit the summary manually to inject that human touch it's missing, or revert your changes back to the original default result.
Standards & disclaimers
At Cascade, we believe AI is a breakthrough which will change the way we interact with technology… As long as it meets some of our standards:
- No tolerance for hallucinations, summaries are as useful as they are accurate
- Keep a human in the loop, AI is suggestive and cannot replace accountability
Overall we aim to be practical in our application of the technology, AI is not a silver bullet
Frequently Asked Questions
What data do these summaries have access to
The summary uses Tables and the Objective Summary Widget to determine the scope and intent of the report. Currently this means a pure metrics or measures dashboard won’t be capable of generating a summary. The summaries focus specifically on the filters and horizons that have been selected on the report
Why am I seeing a “No summarizable widgets” error
At the moment the AI is limited to collecting data from objectives in our Objective one pager and our Discovery table widgets. This error can surface if neither widgets are present, or if no objectives exist or have been filtered out. Try adding new widgets or changing your filters
Why won’t it write a longer summary for me
Currently this widget is limited in the length of responses it can produce. We will review feedback around this in future, but it is ultimately designed to be a summary tool, not an essay writing tool. At Cascade we believe the best reports are short, to the point, interactive and highly visual
Why was I given a different answer than I expected
It is possible for the AI to avoid answering directly. Most cases fall under the following categories:
- Limited to no data: Because AI is generative, it will try to fill the blanks regardless of what data is there. To avoid hallucinations, we ask it to state the lack of available data instead.
- Off topic: Because you can ask AI any question through the custom analysis option, we want to make sure it is used in a professional capacity. No asking for recipes or the meaning of life
- Hostile: We guard against AI being used for hostile, malicious or destructive purposes.
How do my permissions/access change the summary
Report summaries take into account your permission scope, this means only the data you have access to makes it into the summary. We considered this a must-have to ensure confidential information stayed confidential
How can I customize the answer
Go to “Edit report” and then hit the edit summary button on the Report Summary widget to customize the response. Please note the edited summary stamps the time it was edited as well as the user for easy auditing
Can I narrow the scope to a specific part of the report
Yes, you can use widget-level filtering from our Discover tables and Objective summaries to narrow down or broaden the scope the Report Summary has access to. However a known constraint is that every Report Summary in a report will have access to the same data scope
Can it generate the same answer for different users?
As long as the users have access to the same goals in product they will see the same response. However, changes in progress, health or a new update will regenerate the response. Saving the summary is the best way to ensure the same response is seen by all report readers.