The report to leadership has four sentences. Position: how many items are waived with evidence, how many conditional, how many refused. Residual risk: what the refused and conditional items can do in the field, stated as boot-sequence failures on named variants, never as "low risk". What you need: the milestone decision, recorded, with the open items carried explicitly rather than silently dropped. And the follow-up: intent refresh, variant re-analysis, and the fixes scheduled with owners before the next gate.
Refusals fail when they sound like caution and succeed when they sound like accounting. "I cannot sign item 14 because its reset intent predates the ECO and no reset-aware test covers the variant's release order; signing it means accepting an unquantified boot risk on that variant, which I am recording as open." No adjectives, no predictions of doom, no blame: each clause names a missing check the programme can choose to fund. Programmes overrule engineers sometimes; the written record is what makes an overrule a decision instead of an accident.
Whether your communication changes anyone's behaviour: does leadership leave knowing exactly which variants carry which risk and what each fix costs? Candidates who report counts without consequences score 2; candidates who attach field behaviour, owners, and dates to every open item score 4. The dashboard discipline behind this report is Signoff Readiness.
"On the checked variants for the waived items, yes, with this evidence. On the refused items and the unchecked variant, the risk is an unquantified boot failure, carried open with owners and dates. The decision is yours; my sign covers only the evidenced items."