BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) hurts communication and hinders innovation
If your reaction to the title is “What?! I disagree—you must not understand BLUF”, then you proved my point about the harms of asking for a summary or TL;DR.1
Similar to how journalists write news articles using the inverted pyramid, BLUF puts key conclusions first, and details later. It works well in the military (where it was originally developed), in an environment where decisions need to be made quickly inside a rigid hierarchy that prizes discipline and authority.
But BLUF backfires when your conclusions are counterintuitive or controversial, especially in a startup where decisions are fluid, roles are open-ended, and creativity is essential.
Military communiqués come from the soldier mindset—BLUF starts with a conclusion, and now I just need to convince you of that conclusion (and not any other conclusions).
But what if you disagree? Then you are automatically “fighting” against me, before you even get to see the supporting evidence.
Imagine you are a busy CEO and you read a report using BLUF, but the conclusion seems completely absurd compared to what you had in mind. You’d probably ignore the conclusion, skip the rest of the report, and move on to the next one, to “save time” because “obviously”, it wasn’t a good idea.
You would then dismiss innovative, nuanced, or counterintuitive ideas—encouraging your team to instead bring you boring, incremental improvements that seem more obviously good at face value.
In contrast, adopting the scout mindset would mean staying curious and open to new evidence, even if it goes against your preconceived beliefs, without necessarily looking for any conclusions. This would allow you to see reality for what it is, instead of only hearing what you want to hear.
To make this shift, you can’t put a conclusion up front, because that will bend the discussion down a specific path before you’ve even decided where you want to go.2
BLUF requires trust between the author and the reader
BLUF works most effectively when readers trust that the author has already carefully considered all evidence from all angles.3
If your longtime financial advisor tells you something extreme like “give me all your money” you’d probably think they must have a worthwhile investment plan with good reasons supporting it, so you do it. But if a random person comes up to you on the street and says the same, you’re definitely getting robbed.
But where does that trust come from? If you’re familiar with the author from their past work, then they’ve already had ample time to convince you of their scruples and diligence. It doesn’t save time to ask for a BLUF if it’s only effective after spending months building trust first!
You don’t have time to establish trust with every random author, especially with large audiences on the Internet, because of context collapse.
Despite all this, even your most trusted author could still let you down. We’re all human and make mistakes, so even a “trusted” author could get lazy or misinterpret their research, and you’ll end up blindly supporting their conclusions if you can’t easily go through the evidence and try to reproduce their results for yourself.
BLUF robs you of the opportunity to discover new ideas
Asking for a BLUF or TL;DR is well-intentioned, it addresses the problem of poor writing (and insufficient time for busy executives).
Most people (myself included!) struggle with concise writing and include unnecessary details. BLUF helps beginner writers get to the point more effectively.
But BLUF expects readers to already have sufficient background knowledge to understand the conclusion without needing further explanation. It misses cases where the point itself is genuinely complex and needs more effort from the reader to understand. I expand on this in my previous essay: Most ideas cannot be explained simply.
In this case, asking for a TL;DR encourages readers to skim rather than training them to read critically and undergo the natural process of discovering insights.
We don’t ask for a BLUF of a fiction novel, because stories are powerful forms of communication that build suspense and keep you engaged as you solve a mystery.
A good argument needs time to develop, letting the reader dig into the details and piece the evidence together. You build a mental model of why the world works as it does, and can generate new insights from these basic building blocks, including parallel or orthogonal conclusions unrelated to the author’s original argument!
In contrast, if you get into the habit of reading only conclusions, skipping the suspense and discovery, you can only memorize and regurgitate what the author told you, like playing back a cassette tape of words put into your brain by what the author4 wants you to say.
Does your answer to a controversial question sound like a sound bite you heard online? Or can you come up with a new perspective that’s uniquely your own?
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Footnotes
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The title of this essay is also too extreme—it shows why putting the conclusion “up front” extinguishes nuance from the opening sentences. But a title like “BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) is well-intentioned but can cause misunderstandings when readers lack sufficient background knowledge or trust of the author”, while less sensational, cannot be easily elocuted and is less compelling to intrigue you into reading it. ↩
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As a specific example, there was a blogger (who I will not name) who published a widely-shared article in March 2020 during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic that told readers in a BLUF format that we should take extreme actions immediately to prevent coronavirus spread, and then shift into mitigation once caseload falls below hospital capacity. The article’s recommendations were subsequently implemented by worldwide policymakers.
I felt the article was ultimately harmful because it sowed the seeds for subsequent political polarization of Covid—it poisoned the discussion and collapsed all debate into an oversimplified “should we lock down or not?” axis, and sidelined alternative ideas like variolation, viral load prophylaxis, mass-daily-rapid testing, vaccine challenge trials, or mass-deployment of air filtration. These alternative solutions could have been more successful at containing Covid with lower economic cost, but these ideas weren’t “obvious” enough to be considered initially. ↩
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A meta-critique “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful points out that readers doubt the depth of analysis in a “considered harmful” essay, as they’ve grown overly simplistic and sensational. ↩
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Or worse, by a “freethinker” or by a propagandist. ↩