In communications, people will often optimize for being comprehensive at the cost of comprehension. This is especially true when presenting to leaders or people higher up in the org chart.

They do this for understandable reasons.

1. They want to show how smart they are. By sending over a 20 page pre read they believe they are showing leaders how thorough and smart they are. “Look at everything we’ve considered”

2. They want to be inclusive. In the past few years, inclusion has become an important quality of teams. In an attempt to be inclusive, teams will try to represent all voices comprehensively in docs and meetings.

3. They want to show how much work they have done - the desire to not just show leaders how smart they are but to demonstrate the sheer amount of work the team has done, leads people to create these comprehensive documents.

But the goal of communications is comprehension not comprehensiveness.

It takes a lot of discipline for teams to create tight docs, presentations, discussions that are comprehensible because it requires editing. Editing means removing and omitting things. This is counter to all three of the forces above.

In the design disciplines I have found User Researchers to be especially susceptible to docs that are comprehensive. In my opinion, this is because many come from academic backgrounds where this is valued over concision. Academic writing is, by its nature, intended to be read by peers who have a baseline of context and domain expertise that allows them to draw conclusions from reams of raw information. When this style is brought to a company it reads as indecisive at best and incomprehensible at worst.