A board that is not in the business day to day has one job your report has to serve.
Not to be informed. Informed is a means. Their job, at the point they read your pack, is to decide whether to intervene, and if so where.
Almost every weakness in board reporting follows from not writing for that decision. The report that arrives as a status update leaves the board to work out what is being asked of them. The report that reads as a defence invites the interrogation it was designed to prevent. And the report that is complete does not get read, which produces the worst outcome of all: a board that is nominally informed and actually not.
The ordering problem, which is most of it
A board pack is usually assembled in the order the business is organised. Division by division, function by function, each contributing its section.
Read it as a non-executive director with forty minutes on a Sunday. You are looking for the things that are not fine, and you are finding them distributed through twenty pages at a density of about one per four, each surrounded by context written by the person responsible for it.
Invert it. Exceptions first, together, on the first page. Everything on track becomes a list of names with no commentary at all, which is not a demotion: naming what is on track is how a board calibrates the exceptions, and it takes three lines rather than eleven pages.
The effect of this single change is larger than anything else here. A director who reaches the end of page one knowing which four things are off track, and that nothing else is, arrives at the meeting able to spend the time on judgement rather than on orientation.
What each exception needs
Four things, in this order, and nothing else.
What changed. The measure, where it should be today, where it is, and the direction of travel. Not a narrative. A number against a target against a date.
What is being done. The specific intervention, with an owner and a date. "We are monitoring it closely" is not an intervention and every board knows it.
When you will know. This is the line that is almost always missing and it is the one that most changes the tone of a meeting. "We will know by the second week of November whether the pricing change moved it." It converts an open worry into a scheduled checkpoint, and it is the difference between a board that trusts the executive and a board that keeps asking.
What you need from them. Often nothing, and saying so explicitly is valuable. When it is something, name it: a decision, an introduction, an approval, more time.
The three failures worth naming
The status update. Describes what happened and asks for nothing. It feels safe and it transfers the whole burden of working out what matters onto people with the least context.
The defence. Every exception arrives pre-explained, with the reasons it is not as bad as it looks. Boards read this accurately as advocacy, and the response is to probe harder, which is how a forty-minute agenda item becomes ninety.
The completeness. Everything, in case somebody asks. The appendix is the right home for this and a board pack with a large appendix and a one-page front is a well-designed document. A board pack that is all appendix is a filing cabinet.
Where the preparation time actually goes
Ask anyone who assembles a board pack where the hours go and they will not say writing.
They go on reconciliation. The finance figure and the operations figure disagree. The plan says one thing, the dashboard says another, and last month's pack says a third, because each was built by a different person from a different extract on a different day. Somebody then spends an evening deciding which number is true, and documents nothing about that decision, so next month it happens again.
That is the expensive part, and it is also the part that adds nothing a board values. By the time the reconciliation is finished the judgement, which is the only thing the board cannot produce for itself, gets written last and fastest.
Two things reduce it, and neither is a template.
One source for the plan and its measures. If the objectives, the targets and the current values live in one place and are updated by the people who own them, the reconciliation disappears rather than getting faster. The pack becomes an extract plus the judgement, and the judgement gets the attention.
A reporting rhythm that matches the update rhythm. A monthly report built from data people update weekly is accurate. A monthly report built from data people update monthly, the week it is due, is a reconstruction, and reconstructions are where the disagreements come from in the first place.
In Empiraa GPS the board reporting is written from live plan data, with six report types, which exists for exactly this reason: not to save the writing, which was never the cost, but to remove the argument about which number is right.
A one-page shape you can use next month
- Four lines on the quarter. Where the plan stands overall, and whether your view of the year-end has changed since last month. If it changed, say what changed it.
- Exceptions. Each with: what changed, what is being done, when you will know, what you need.
- On track. A list of names. No commentary.
- Decisions requested. Numbered, each with your recommendation. A board that is asked for a decision without a recommendation will usually ask for one, and the asking takes the meeting.
- Appendix. Everything else, clearly labelled as reference.
The test
Before it goes out, read your own pack and ask: if a director read only page one, would they know whether to be worried, and what we want from them?
If yes, the rest of the document is reference material and that is the correct role for it. If no, no amount of additional detail further in will fix it, because the people you are writing for will not reach it.
