Less Reporting, Better Decisions: Rethinking the Board Agenda

Insights from our latest webinar featuring governance researcher and educator Matt Fullbrook, host of One Minute Governance and founder of Ground-Up Governance.

Most board packs are full. Most agendas are busy. But is any of it actually improving decisions?

That was the provocation Govn365 director Gerry Lynch put to Matt Fullbrook in our latest webinar: what if the board agenda itself is one of the biggest barriers to better governance? What if boards spent less time looking backwards and more time shaping the future — less time being updated, and more time improving decisions?

As Gerry Lynch opened in our recent Govn365 webinar with Matt Fullbrook:

“Is the time [spent on the board agenda] actually improving the quality of the organisation’s most important decisions?”

The wrong question boards keep answering

Boards are told, again and again, that if they want to be more strategic the fix is simple: move the strategic items to the top of the agenda and give them more time.

Fullbrook’s response: that advice has already been followed, and it hasn’t worked.

A Harvard study released late last year found that boards already spend more time on strategy than on anything else on the agenda. And yet boards keep saying they want to be more strategic.

“We might be kind of misinterpreting the signals here,” Fullbrook said. Rearranging or expanding the agenda was never the fix, because the problem was never time allocation.

It’s a definition problem, not a time problem

Fullbrook has run an informal poll of 1,500 to 2,000 executives and directors worldwide, asking them to rate their board on a scale of 1 (deeply operational) to 10 (highly strategic). The answers cluster around 6 or 7. Ask where they’d like to be, and almost everyone says 8, 9 or higher.

Then ask the harder question: describe what an 8 actually looks like in a real board meeting. Most people struggle to answer it. Most struggle to recall ever having experienced it.

That’s the real finding, Fullbrook argues: it isn’t a time allocation problem, it’s a definition problem. Boards haven’t agreed on what “strategic” actually looks like in practice, so no amount of rescheduling will get them there.

His prescription: define the behaviour you’re chasing, in specific terms. Try it for five minutes if that’s all you can find. Assess whether it felt like an 8. If it did, do more of it. If it didn’t, try something else.

Design the agenda for the consumer: management

Fullbrook offered a reframe that’s simple but rarely applied: during a board meeting, the main consumer of the board’s work is management.

Borrowing from human-centred design, he argues that if the board is producing something for a consumer, it should be designed around what that consumer needs to leave the room with, in order to do their job well.

That doesn’t replace compliance, risk oversight, or the board’s other duties. But it changes the starting question. Instead of “how should we structure the agenda,” the better question is: what does management need to get out of this time together, and how do we design a meeting that gets them that?

Catastrophe avoidance isn’t the job

Fullbrook named a pressure he sees on boards everywhere, from regulators, consultants, stock exchanges and educators: the idea that a board’s job is catastrophe avoidance.

“A board doing a great job is not, hey, look, we avoided catastrophe,” he said. Avoiding disaster matters, but it isn’t the definition of good governance, and treating it as the job crowds out anything more valuable.

His alternative question: under normal circumstances, no crisis, no catastrophe, what would it look like for this board to do something great right now? Asked that way, most boards find they have more room to create value than the compliance-and-reporting default suggests.

Agree on the problem before you agree on the solution

One of the clearest patterns Fullbrook has seen, across years of facilitating board reviews, is how quickly boards skip from problem to solution.

The sequence he recommends: first agree on the definition of the problem, then agree on objectives and constraints, and only then start discussing solutions. In his experience, that first step almost never happens naturally in a board meeting. Someone states what they think the problem is, someone proposes a fix, and the room debates the fix, with the hard, upstream work of defining the problem skipped entirely.

1. Agree on the definition of the problem
2. Agree on the objectives
3. Agree on the constraints you’re working within

Only once those three are settled does the conversation move to solutions.

It can feel like a waste of time in the room. Fullbrook’s view is the opposite: for a consequential decision with time to spare, agreeing on the problem is one of the highest-value things a board can do.

The discipline of subtraction

On the question of the 1,200-page board pack, Fullbrook pointed to a well-known case study on Netflix’s approach to governance: 30-page board papers, all prose, backed by a self-serve data platform directors can dig into as deep as they like, on their own terms.

He wasn’t recommending every board copy that model. His point was different: boards rarely ask what they could take out. Agendas and board packs tend to grow by addition, item by item, year on year, and rarely get pruned.

He pointed to a cognitive bias called subtraction neglect: when faced with a problem, most people default to solutions that add something, and instinctively overlook solutions that remove something, unless someone deliberately asks, “how might we solve this through subtraction?”

For boards juggling limited time against ever-growing expectations for information, that’s a discipline worth building in deliberately, not leaving to chance.

Final thought

Fullbrook’s closing point cuts against how most governance advice is framed. Most of the norms boards follow, the length of the board pack, the shape of the agenda, the emphasis on reporting, carry very little actual evidence behind them. Much of it isn’t even mandatory.

That doesn’t mean boards are doing it wrong. It means there’s more room to experiment than most boards assume. The pain of an overloaded, backward-looking agenda is real, but it’s optional; it comes from norms boards have chosen to keep, not rules they’re required to follow.

A few practical experiments worth trying at your next board meeting:

• Pick one five-minute slice of the agenda and design it deliberately, instead of leaving it to habit
• Ask what could be subtracted from the board pack, not just what could be added
• Agree on the definition of a problem before anyone proposes a solution
• Rate your board from 1 (operational) to 10 (strategic), then describe what the next number up actually looks like
• Praise good moments in the boardroom, openly and often

Fullbrook’s challenge to every board: pick one thing. One five-minute experiment, one item to cut, one question to ask differently. Try it, measure whether it moved you closer to the board you want to be, and build from there.

Want to explore this further?

Watch the full webinar discussion here.

Continue the conversation

Join us for our next webinar featuring governance advisor and facilitator Guy Beatson, Director of Beatson Company, where we look at how boards connect purpose and strategy to the practical work of governance, and build the capability needed to deliver on a ten-year ambition, not just this year’s agenda.

Is Your Board Designed for the Future It’s Trying to Create?

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