Main idea

A summary of customer feedback travels better than a transcript: it is readable, short, quotable in a meeting. That is its job, and an organization that never summarized anything would drown its teams.

But a summary freezes one reading, and that reading was made for a given question, at a given moment. When the question changes — a new segment, a regulatory constraint that has appeared since, a different product hypothesis — what needs rereading is not the summary but what it set aside: the full verbatim, the entire sales call, the support ticket with its details.

Circulating the summary while keeping the raw material reachable and circulating the summary in place of the raw material look alike at the moment of sending. They only separate at the moment someone wants to read it differently, and by then it is too late to choose.

Why it matters

This gives a design rule for how customer knowledge circulates: the summary is what you push, the raw material is what you keep reachable — and breaking that pairing impoverishes the material at the precise moment you share it.

It also explains certain disagreements between functions that appear to be about facts: two teams arguing from two summaries have no way back to what would settle the matter.

Nuances and limits

Access to the raw material carries its own cost and its own limits: confidentiality of the exchanges, personal data in a transcript, unmanageable volume. Not everything can stay open to everyone.

And accessible raw material that nobody ever reopens serves no purpose: the possibility of reinterpreting is only worth something if someone exercises it.

Open questions

• What, inside a summary, should signal what it left out, so a reader knows there is reason to go back to the source?