It’s hard to overstate how much the world of work has been transformed in the past few years — and yet how little board packs have changed for the better over the same period, according to the latest data.
In 2018, we launched a joint effort with the Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland to help organisations score their board packs. Since the board pack contains a company’s most confidential information, objectively benchmarking it against peers is inherently difficult, so the goal was to lift the lid and help boards, governance professionals, and management teams understand how they fared.
The initiative included two self-survey tools:
Over 1,000 directors, C-suite executives, and governance professionals from nearly 700 organisations across sectors have filled in these survey tools since their launch. And the results are damning: over the past five years, not only have board packs been getting longer, but the level of insight they bring to bear has been declining too.
Let’s start with the good news: 2022, where more boards and governance professionals found their papers to be a hindrance to the board conversation (30%) than a help (28%), seems to have been the low point in board reporting, and 2023 shows a marked improvement.
The bad news? Still less than half (48%) of board papers add value in the eyes of their readers, with the rest considered as either having no impact (42%) or being an obstacle (10%).
Overall, 63% of board members and governance professionals continue to score their board packs as “Weak” or “Poor” (a slight improvement to the 2018–2022 average of 70%).
To make matters worse, the board members and governance professionals who believe that their management team spend enough time writing their board papers are just a slim majority (57%) — despite board packs increasing in length overall.
Beyond the waste of executives spending days writing reports that directors find unhelpful, this matters because the board pack is the canary in the coal mine. A poor board pack is almost always symptomatic of a lack of critical thinking amongst management more widely, a lack of clear focus and alignment around what matters most, and patchy communication between management and the layers below.
And what does this lead to? It makes boards slow to spot risks and opportunities within the business, slow to make decisions, and slow to execute changes in strategy and direction. And at times of such rapid change and transformation, that’s a risky place to be.
Having sat in on hundreds of board meetings over the years, we’ve seen first-hand how the quality of a board pack is a key determinant of the quality of the board discussion and the board meeting itself. Done well, it can set the board up to succeed, enabling it to have strategic, forward-looking conversations about the things — and the various stakeholders — that really matter.
So, what’s going wrong in the board reporting process? It’s not that report authors are lazy and don’t write enough; it’s that they’re unequipped for the job and so write the wrong way about the wrong things.
Case in point, looking at data covering 2020 throughout 2023:
But just because the stats are ugly, doesn’t mean this downward trend has to continue. The best board packs follow the tenets of the Question Driven Insight (QDI) principle — a method that ensures that each paper within it is built on robust and critical thinking, is communicated effectively, and focuses on what matters.
Lucia — our AI-powered thinking and writing platform brings that QDI principle to life, equipping authors with the tools and real-time feedback they need to craft papers that get to the heart of what matters. It acts as a skilled editor and critical friend, helping even novice writers strike the balance between information and insight; past performance and future outlook; what’s gone well and what hasn’t. And it makes it easy to create a high-quality executive summary that showcases the key points up front.
So: