10 minutes
From a finding to a story The same gap can be written as a fact about a community or a fact about the process that reached them. Both can be true. Only one of them names something the division can change.
What you’ll be able to do Rewrite a finding so the process is the subject of the sentence, and identify the comparison, the causal claim and the audience the original version assumed. Compare the responses to this question and explain your choice: How should the sentence be handled? Document a next step for From a finding to a story: Take one finding your team reported recently and write the process version of the sentence beside the original. Decide which one you would want to read if it were about you. Two true sentences, one of them usable A report shows that people in one group complete a step less often than people in another. What you write next is not determined by the data. There are at least two sentences the same figures support.
The first: this group completes the step less often. True, and it puts a community in the subject position of a problem sentence. Readers supply an explanation for what they read, and the explanation they supply will be about the people, because the people are who the sentence was about.
The second: our process for this step reaches this group less well. Supported by exactly the same figures, and it puts the division in the subject position. It invites the question a reader can act on, which is what about the notice, the hours, the channel, the form or the wait would produce this result.
Neither sentence is spin. The first is the one that gets written by default, and its cost is paid by people who were not in the room when it was drafted. This is also where the program's organizing framework, the Intercultural Development Continuum, becomes visible in ordinary work. Reading a gap as evidence that everyone was treated identically and the difference must therefore belong to them is what Minimization sounds like in a report. Reading the same gap as a question about whose experience the process was designed around is the move toward Acceptance and Adaptation. That describes two readings of a sentence, not a label for the person who wrote it.
Four choices that decide what the chart says The comparison group Rate or count The time window What sits on the line
Every difference is a difference from something. Comparing each community with the largest one quietly makes that group the standard. Comparing each with the overall average makes almost everyone slightly wrong. Comparing a group with itself over time, or with what the program promised, often asks a more useful question and leaves nobody holding the role of the normal case.
A rate can make a difference look minor in a group with a large denominator and dramatic in a small one. A count can make a small community look like a marginal problem when the process is failing nearly everyone in it. Report both, and say which one the decision should rest on.
Start and end points are chosen by somebody. A window that begins after a change shows the change working; one that begins before shows the disruption it caused. Neither is dishonest until the choice goes unstated. Say why the window is what it is.
A chart with a target line invites a judgment about who missed it. A chart with a line marking the process step invites a question about what happens there. Both use the same numbers, and they produce two different meetings.
Process, people, or more than the data can carry? The reminder notice for this step goes out in English only.
Choose a category Describes the process Describes the people Claims more than the data can carry Completion is eighteen points lower in counties with one access point than in counties with four.
Choose a category Describes the process Describes the people Claims more than the data can carry Thirty percent of records for this step have no preferred-language value.
Choose a category Describes the process Describes the people Claims more than the data can carry Average travel time to the nearest office is longest for residents of two regions.
Choose a category Describes the process Describes the people Claims more than the data can carry Households in this community complete the annual review less often than households overall.
Choose a category Describes the process Describes the people Claims more than the data can carry Participants in this group are younger on average than participants overall.
Choose a category Describes the process Describes the people Claims more than the data can carry This community is harder to engage.
Choose a category Describes the process Describes the people Claims more than the data can carry Lower completion here reflects cultural attitudes toward formal services.
Choose a category Describes the process Describes the people Claims more than the data can carry Check matches Reset Put the process sentence first What you can change You control which sentence opens the finding, and whether what the division already knows about that step appears in the same paragraph or in a different report nobody reads alongside it.
What to watch for Do not publish a difference between communities without the operational facts beside it. A gap presented on its own will be explained by whoever reads it, and their explanation will be about the people.
Your next step Before the next finding goes out, write both sentences, lead with the process one, and add the two things you already know about that step.
Before a finding leaves the building Write the process sentence and keep the number Rewriting for the process is not softening. The figure stays exactly as it is, the comparison stays, the size of the gap stays. What changes is the subject of the sentence, and therefore who is being asked to do something next.
Say what the data cannot separate Administrative records rarely allow you to separate one cause from another. Two counties can differ in travel time, staffing, notice practice, referral relationships and population all at once. Name the things that move together, say plainly that the records cannot tell them apart, and resist the sentence that picks one and calls it the reason.
Give it back to the people it is about Share findings with compensated community advisors, people with disabilities and family partners before publication where you can, and after publication where you cannot. Ask what the finding gets wrong, what it leaves out, and how it will read to the people it describes. Then tell them what changed because of what they said.
Say what happens next, with a date A finding published with no change attached teaches the people it describes that being counted produces nothing. If nothing will change yet, say that plainly and say when it will be looked at again. That is a worse answer than action and a far better one than silence.
We were shown a slide about our community at a meeting. Nobody in that room had asked us anything before it was made. The number was probably right. What it said underneath was that we do not engage, and it did not say that the letter came in English or that the office closes before most of us finish work. We could have told them that in one afternoon, and we would have expected to be paid for the afternoon, the way anyone else advising a department would be.
Composite community advisor perspective, illustrative A private reflection, for you only and never collected: a finding I have written or repeated with a community as the subject is... the version with our process as the subject would read... and the person or group who should have seen it before it traveled is... You do not have to have written the original to be the person who changes how it is read next time.
Carry this forward A finding about a difference always has two available sentences: one about the people and one about the process that reached them. The second has an owner, and the data usually supports it at least as well.
The comparison group is an argument, not a neutral choice. Comparing every community with the largest one makes that group the standard and everyone else a shortfall from it, and nobody in the room has to defend a claim they did not notice being made.
Administrative records almost never support a causal claim, and the causal claim is the part that gets quoted. Say what the figures show, say what they cannot separate, and put what the division already knows about that step in the same paragraph.
A chart outlives its footnotes and reaches a third audience: the people it is about. Plan for that reading before publication, share findings back with compensated community partners, and say what will change and by when.
A scenario about a briefing sentence that explains a gap by describing a community, sorting practice on whether a sentence describes the process, the people, or more than the data can carry, and a knowledge check on comparison groups.
Take one finding your team reported recently and write the process version of the sentence beside the original. Decide which one you would want to read if it were about you.
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