The board gathered eleven times a year, worked through roughly four thousand pages of papers, and could not state — truthfully — what it had actually resolved. Those were the chair’s opening words to me, and the most candid brief I have ever been handed.
Development banks display an acute strain of a common condition. The mandate stretches across half the economy, the stakeholders would fill a stadium, and the board papers gleam enough to discourage reading. Attention, the rarest currency in any boardroom, was being spent exactly where it earned least: on approvals management had already granted in effect, beautifully packaged, weeks after the real moment of choice.
We began with a stopwatch rather than a doctrine. Over two full cycles I logged every minute of board time against a single question: did this minute handle something only the board can handle? Setting risk appetite. Testing strategy against evidence. Holding the chief executive to account for results instead of activity. Fewer than a third of the minutes qualified.
The cure was deliberately plain. Consent agendas for the routine, matched with a genuine right to pull items back — used sparingly, which is precisely the signal. A one-page decision brief per material item: the ruling requested, the options discarded, the evidence, the risk. Plus one fixed opening question: what deserves our attention that these papers leave out?
The toughest opposition was cultural, not procedural. Some directors took thinner papers for thinner respect. The chair defused it head-on: “You are here for your judgement. The paperwork is just the catering.” Within two cycles, meetings finished early and shone brighter — dissent moved from the hallways into the chamber, where it belongs.
What they carried away
- Clock the attention before redesigning the process — the stopwatch beats the survey.
- Label rulings apart from debates on the agenda, explicitly.
- One-page decision briefs: ruling, rejected options, evidence, risk.
- A fixed opener snaring whatever the papers omit.
Twelve months later, the chair shared the board’s self-assessment. The marks had risen, but the comment I kept came from a new arrival: “I came expecting a briefing. Instead I was asked to think.” That sums up the whole engagement — boards reasoning, on purpose, about the right things.
Jordan Ellery writes, speaks and advises on governance and judgement. He helps boards reclaim their focus. About the review →
