Notes on writing for the board pack

Most of the work of a board meeting happens before anyone sits down. It happens in the document that lands in the directors' inboxes seven days earlier.

I have been on the writing side of board packs for a decade and on the receiving side for half of that. They are not the same skill. The receiving side wants to be told what matters in the first paragraph and asked the right questions in the last. The writing side wants to defend every line of the financial commentary. The reconciliation between those instincts is what makes a good pack.

My rule, which I borrowed from a chair I worked with at Petrus, is that any paper longer than three pages must open with a half-page summary that a sensible person could read in the lift on the way up. If the summary cannot stand on its own, the paper does not yet know what it is trying to say. The detail can follow. The opening cannot wait.

There is a second rule that I have stolen from internal audit. Lead with what changed since the last meeting. Boards are forensic about change. They want to know what moved, in which direction, why, and whether anyone has done anything about it. A status paper that opens with 'no material change' is a gift to a chair who is short on time. A status paper that buries a material change in the third appendix is a problem the next meeting will have to deal with.

The financial sections deserve their own discipline. Most management commentary is too long because it explains the actuals in language the actuals already speak. The version that earns a director's attention does the opposite. It explains the variance against budget and the variance against the same period last year, and then it explains what the management team is doing about each, in the same paragraph. The numbers go in a table. The paragraph stays short.

The risk and compliance sections need a different treatment again. Here the test is whether the board can act on what is in front of them. A heat map without a recommendation is not yet a board paper. The recommendation can be 'monitor and bring back in three months,' but it has to be there. Boards exist to make decisions. A paper that does not ask for one is asking the chair to invent one in the meeting.

There is a final discipline that nobody enjoys, which is the discipline of leaving things out. Every paper I have written has been better for the third draft, because the third draft is where I cut the paragraph I was most proud of in the first. The board does not need the paragraph. It needs the decision.