Meeting Done SBAR The Counting

Further to my recent post on the four sentence rule, here's one such template option.

SBAR stands for Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation.

As the structure for each of your four sentences.

This is readily searchable. In essence it suits concise, sharp speech.

Apparently borne of medical and naval environments. Where matey chat is a no-no. Precision language with clear direction essential. We could all do with a bit more of that.

Here's but one explanation for the quartet content.

Situation :: What’s happening now? :: "We have a critical issue of…"
Background :: What led up to it? :: "All was stable until…"
Assessment :: What do I think it is? :: "I believe it’s due to…"
Recommendation :: What should we do? :: "I recommend we…"

I actually found a tech example incident report in such style. As IT and DevOps seem to embrace this method too.

Server cluster in AWS us-east-1 went down at 14:03, impacting 68% of customer transactions.
We scaled instances last week due to traffic spike, no alerts triggered until today, last patch applied 72 hours ago.
Root cause appears to be a failed load balancer node, latency spiked to 12s; failover didn’t trigger.
Fail over to us-west-2 cluster, spin up 3 new nodes, & need your approval to trigger rollback if needed.

It stretches the '4' rule a bit. If not as snappy as the many healthcare examples around, it is at least fact-packed.

Along with this summary of real-world benefits.

Reduces ambiguity: Forces clarity under pressure.
Improves handoffs: Critical in shift changes, escalations, or cross-team updates.
Saves time: Average SBAR delivery = 60–90 seconds.
Evidence-based: Healthcare: Reduced unexpected deaths from 0.99/1000 to 0.34/1000 admissions across 16 Antwerp hospital wards (2012 study).

There are anecdotal claims online too. Such as how SBAR helps airlines cut miscommunications between cockpit and ATC handoffs by 50%. Alongside the generic. With plenty of IT incident response improvements, like uncorroborated Google SRE teams reporting 40% faster MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) with SBAR logs. Both figures if occurring are likely as part of many measures.

We can aim for similar. In sixty seconds we could spout 200 words. There's just seventy-odd in the earlier example. And can we match that forty percent faster time. MTTS, anyone?

Always happy to see an idea built on, you could maybe add a fifth for our Sales purposes. Perhaps Sbaro, with the 'O' explicitly stating the Outcome desired? Or a suffixed A, N, M, or I. For a double hammer explicitly denoting the likes of Aim, Number, Metric or Impact. Other options could suit your process style too for sure.

It can help us with any selling forum - especially the virtual - where you want to get to grips on a prospect or customer issue. Internally or in collab.