1. Directors are drowning in information and not sufficiently prepared for board meetings.
Fuel directors with concise, timely, and relevant insight.
The average board meets 8 times a year in full, with a further 5 meetings per committee. The board pack is a vital ingredient in helping these meetings to run smoothly — ensuring directors are fully briefed on the issues at hand and prepared to exercise their steering and supervising responsibilities to a high standard. When boards are composed of predominantly non-executive members, who aren’t working in the business full-time and who often sit on multiple boards and committees at once, it becomes even more important that directors receive timely, accurate, and insightful pre-reads.
“A high-quality performance pack is a really powerful tool that helps the board be much more effective, both as providers for shareholders and as supporters and constructive challengers of the strategy.”
Charles Gurassa, Chair, Channel 4
Despite the important role that board packs play in an effective board, our research suggests that too often they fail to deliver what directors need — being poorly written, badly structured, and over-long. When board packs don’t hit the mark, they not only waste valuable preparation time, but they also make it hard for directors to navigate the discussions and decisions on the agenda with confidence.
The average board pack for a £500m+ turnover business is now 294 pages long, up from 267 pages in 2023. Add in committee packs, and the directors of the largest companies are now wading through nearly 600 pages of reading material every month.
Directors are smart, but they’re not superhuman. The average director can read up to 30 pages of board pack content per hour, meaning he or she would need to read solidly for two working days every month just to get through the meeting materials — an unrealistic expectation considering directors log between 1.5 and 3.5 days of work per board per month. What’s more, we know from our advisory work that directors spend 3 to 4 hours reading each board pack, which suggests that a lot of pre-reads are too long to reliably get pre-read.
There are also signs that the content itself is increasing the burden on directors — forcing them to read between the lines and dive down rabbit holes for the insight they need. For example, in 2024, 57% of directors said that finding the key messages in their board papers was like looking for a needle in a haystack, up from 50% in 2023. In addition, 42% thought management were not upfront enough about the bad news in their briefing notes.
“It’s incredibly frustrating as a board member when you receive 1,200 pages to read over the weekend and, as a result, you can’t see the wood for the trees. By the time you’ve got through all of that, you realise you’re missing the big picture.”
Sir John Manzoni, Chair, Atomic Weapons Establishment and SSE — read the interview
As if that wasn’t bad enough, 55% told us they receive their board packs under five working days before their board meetings, with 20% rarely or never getting the pack on time. In our research with US corporate directors, 35% expressed frustration at receiving papers too late to adequately review them. Until this improves, time pressure and poor-quality information will continue to interfere with the job boards are trying to do.
It’s true that a roomful of seasoned board directors could very well get to the heart of issues without rigorous pre-read documents, probing for the implications of what they have been told, and sniffing for what they haven’t been told. But it’s hard to expect people who don’t live and breathe a business to be sufficiently attuned to know what questions to ask. And they perform too important a role to simply leave it to chance.
It’s a risk that’s particularly acute when technical issues are concerned. One of the reasons the Post Office continued to falsely prosecute subpostmasters for two decades was that its board lacked the technical literacy to challenge what they were told about the Horizon IT system.
“I wasn’t familiar with the IT language. When discussing IT issues, I didn’t have the same instincts as I had when discussing issues with which I was familiar,” former chair Alice Perkins told the public inquiry into the scandal.
In cases like this one, directors may not even realise that the quality of their discussions is below the standard they would expect, which makes it doubly important that they are able to easily access the thinking that goes behind management plans and proposals.
2. Boards are stretched too thin and not discussing key topics in enough depth.
Plan strategic, forward-looking agendas that make every second of board time count.
The expanding remit of boards is well documented. What’s less commonly discussed — and evident from the research — is how thinly boards are now stretched, and how often their efforts are focused on the wrong things.
Data from our board cost calculators, which help companies to quantify the time and financial burden of board meetings and processes such as minute-writing, shows that the average board meeting for a £100m+ turnover business now lasts 3 hours and 48 minutes and covers 11 agenda items. That means, at best, each item gets only 21 minutes of discussion time. Hardly conducive to sparking creativity, thinking rigorously, or reaching considered conclusions.
Cramped agendas are clearly a problem, given constraints on time. But that problem is made worse when agendas include items that should not be there — and the evidence suggests this is a persistent performance blocker for boards.
Board Intelligence is currently building a range of AI-powered tools to analyse board agendas and meeting minutes, which will shed light on exactly how and where discussion time is allocated. In the meantime, anecdotal evidence from our client work and roundtable events, and directors' feedback on board packs (in which each report corresponds to an agenda item) suggests clear dissatisfaction with the focus of their meetings. For example:
- 66% of the directors we surveyed in 2024 thought that their dashboards and board packs were not a good reflection of their organisation’s priorities.
- 56% said the information they were given was too internally focused.
- 43% of attendees at a recent Board Intelligence webinar said their biggest challenge with board meetings was that they were too backward-looking or operational.
These findings have been reflected in research conducted elsewhere. For example, Korn Ferry found that 37% of S&P 500 directors considered a lack of conversation about strategic direction as one of their top board effectiveness concerns.
All of these issues create barriers to understanding risks and opportunities, which in turn makes it hard for directors to fulfil their legal duties. And there’s a practical performance implication too; when board time is focused on understanding recent operational performance or procedural matters, there’s less space for the forward-looking, strategic discussions and rigorous challenge that directors see as central to their role. It strips attention from the most important items facing the business: the kind that need to be discussed in depth if the board is to add value.
“We would use our time better if we abandoned the ‘high church’ rituals. Wasting the first half an hour reviewing minutes and matters arising does little to set the scene for a rich debate.”
Sir Kenneth Olisa, Chair