A CEO I respect once replied to one of my emails with three short sentences: "Got it. Helpful. Good communication." It remains some of my favorite feedback. The email was brief, but it was not incomplete. The request came first. Three summary points gave him everything he needed to know. The supporting detail was there if he wanted it. Good communication is not about saying less. It is about making the reader work less.
Before I send something important, I try to answer five questions: what does this message need to accomplish, what conditions could interfere with it, such as urgency, complexity, emotion, or trust, who needs to understand it, how many people are involved, and which format creates the best chance of understanding with the least chance of confusion. The goal is not the shortest possible message. It is the shortest message that does the whole job.
I was helping a client prepare a budget request for senior leaders who might give it twenty seconds of attention. We needed one sentence to explain what the team had accomplished and why it mattered. After several versions, we landed on: "We launched pilots testing signal driven outreach to surface the right targets sooner." The word "surface" carried the argument. You do not surface something that was already visible. One verb explained both the problem and the value of solving it. Finding that word took longer than writing the paragraph it replaced.
The same principle applies when communicating with senior leaders in a matrix. They rarely need a guided tour through the work. They need the takeaway, the implication, and the decision. The detail should be available, but it should not stand between them and the point. That is also how trust gets built. First, show that you understand the issue. Then show that you can make it understandable to someone else. People are more likely to bring you into the bigger problems once they know you can do both.
"Got it" meant the message landed. "Helpful" meant it mattered. "Good communication" meant I had respected his time.
Takeaway
A line commonly attributed to Mark Twain says, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." It appears the thought actually belongs to Blaise Pascal, which I appreciate even more. I learned the basics of programming in the language named after him. Long before I understood how much structure matters in communication, Pascal was teaching me structure in another form. That part of the lesson simply took longer to compile. The point is that brevity takes time. Most of us share too much because we are afraid of leaving something out. That transfers the work to the reader, who now has to search through our thinking to find the point. Brevity and completeness are not opposites. Good formatting lets you provide both. Put the takeaway first, organize the evidence beneath it, and let the reader decide how deeply to go.