Save “visibility” for traffic and weather reports

Before

[These examples are from three different companies]

The oversight responsibility of the Board and its Committees is enabled by management reporting processes that are designed to provide visibility to the Board about the identification, assessment and management of critical risks and management’s risk mitigation strategies and enable informed decision-making and intelligent risk-taking.

Our business success depends upon our ability to respond to fluctuations in product demand, but doing so may require us to incur costs despite limited visibility toward future business declines.

We were in a better position to establish performance criteria at the beginning of 2010 than we had been at the beginning of 2009, when the economic situation was more volatile and there was less visibility, necessitating more flexibility in setting the performance goals.

Before, with commentary

[My object was to show bad uses of “visibility,” but these examples have other problems as well.]

The oversight responsibility of the Board and its Committees is enabled by management reporting processes [passive voice; see this tip] that are designed to provide visibility to the Board [to give the Board some insight? to help the Board understand?] about the identification, assessment and management [these should all be verbs, not nouns made out of verbs; see this tip] of critical risks and management’s risk mitigation strategies and enable [we already “enabled” once in this sentence] informed decision-making and intelligent risk-taking.

Our business success depends upon our ability to respond to fluctuations in product demand, but doing so [vague] may require us to incur costs despite limited visibility toward future business declines [when we aren’t sure we will succeed?].

We were in a better position to establish performance criteria at the beginning of 2010 than we had been at the beginning of 2009, when the economic situation was more volatile and there was less visibility [we could not predict the future?] necessitating more flexibility in setting the performance goals.

After

To oversee ABC Company’s risk, the Board and its Committees rely on management reporting processes that explain management’s risk mitigation strategies and help the Board understand how we identify, assess, and manage critical risks. These reports enable the Board to make informed decisions and promote intelligent risk-taking.

Our business success depends upon our ability to respond to fluctuations in product demand, but our responses may require us to incur costs even when we are not certain the investment will be fruitful.

We were in a better position to establish performance criteria at the beginning of 2010 than we had been at the beginning of 2009, when the volatile economic situation demanded more flexibility.