The brief that gets read is shorter than the one you want to write. That is the whole difficulty, and it is a difficulty about discipline rather than about format — every instinct when assembling a summary is to include the thing that might matter, and each inclusion costs you a fraction of the chance that any of it gets read.
Four lines. One per question. Nothing else on the screen.
Line 1: What changed this week
A comparison, not a count. "Eleven negative reviews" tells an owner nothing without last week's number, and it is the change that carries the information.
Negatives 11, up from 6. Rating 4.1, flat.
Two numbers with their previous values. Not a chart, not a percentage, not a rolling four-week average — an owner reading this on a phone between services needs to know whether things got worse, and the direction is the entire content of the line.
Line 2: What is drifting
The theme that has grown. This is the line with actual analytical content, and it is the reason the brief is worth producing at all.
Wait-time mentions: 7 this week, 2–3 in each of the previous four.
Note the shape. A current number, and enough history to say whether it is unusual. A theme count with no baseline is not a finding — it is the mistake that produces panic about a busy shift, described in the Friday pattern that was not real.
One theme. If two are genuinely moving, say two. Never five; a list of five drifts is a list nobody prioritises.
Line 3: What needs you personally
Named, with the reason.
Table 6 Saturday — guest alleging allergic reaction. Escalated to Priya, not yet replied. Needs you.
The critical word is needs. An owner scanning four lines has to be able to tell instantly whether anything requires them, and if the answer is no, the line should say so explicitly rather than be absent — because a missing line is ambiguous and an owner will re-read the whole brief to check.
Nothing needs you this week.
That sentence is worth more than it looks.
Line 4: What to leave alone
The most unusual line and the one that changes behaviour most.
Two one-stars about parking. Not ours, no action.
Owners read their own reviews. If the brief does not account for the annoying one they saw on Saturday, they will spend the week half-thinking about it. Naming something as deliberately not-actioned closes it, and it also builds trust in the brief — a summary that only ever escalates reads as alarmist, and one that explicitly discards things reads as judged.
The whole thing
Negatives 11, up from 6. Rating 4.1, flat.
Wait-time mentions up: 7 this week against 2–3 in the previous four. Friday and Saturday evenings.
Table 6 Saturday, guest alleging allergic reaction — escalated to Priya, unreplied. Needs you.
Two one-stars about parking, and one about a competitor. No action.
Under a hundred words. Readable at a red light. Everything a weekly review report needs to do.
What deliberately is not in it
No reply statistics. Response rate matters, and it is a monthly number, not a weekly one. Weekly it fluctuates for uninteresting reasons.
No positive highlights. The temptation is strong and it dilutes. Praise belongs at pre-shift with the team, not in the owner's brief — that is a different document for a different audience.
No individual review text, except for the one in line 3. Quoting reviews turns a brief into reading.
No recommendations. Line 2 states the drift; it does not propose the fix. The moment a brief contains proposals it becomes a document requiring a decision, and documents requiring decisions get postponed. The proposal is a conversation on Monday.
Where the format breaks
At scale. Four lines works for one site and up to about three. Past that, line 2 becomes "which of six locations is drifting", which is a different question needing a different structure.
And it depends entirely on somebody having done the counting — the drift in line 2 requires four weeks of theme counts to exist. That is the actual work, and it is invisible in the output, which is why weekly briefs tend to be produced enthusiastically for a month and then quietly become a paste of the latest reviews.
Ours goes out as an email in roughly this shape; the sample report is a real one if you would rather see the format than read a description of it.