Rehearse the board meeting out loud, and be interrupted
I am taking a bad number into a board meeting and I have one chance at the answer.
The paper is not the meeting
You have written the board pack. The numbers are in it, the explanation is in it, and the explanation is good, because you had a week to write it and nobody was talking while you did.
The meeting is a different exercise. Somebody reads the second line of the summary, stops you, and asks about the number you were planning to contextualise on the following page. Now the framing you built is gone and you are answering out of order, from memory, to a person who has already decided the number is bad.
The skill that decides how the meeting goes is not the quality of the written answer. It is whether you can give a shorter version of it under interruption and then get back to the argument. Reading the pack again rehearses none of that.
What the room does with a board pack
You brief the room on the decision or the number you are taking in, what changed since the last meeting, and the three questions you expect in the words your board will use. The advisers read that and join a room with you.
They will cut across you, because that is what the format is for. Only one holds the floor at a time and the room decides which, so you are interrupted by somebody rather than talked over by everybody. When you speak, they stop.
The three do not agree with each other about which of your problems is the serious one. That disagreement is the rehearsal that matters, because a real board is also several people with different worries, and the answer that satisfies one of them frequently annoys another.
The board question and answer brief
An operator taking a difficult number, a missed target or a change of direction into a board or executive meeting.
- The decision or the number you are taking into the room, in one sentence.
- What changed since the last meeting, stated without softening it.
- The three questions you expect, in the words the board will use.
- Who in the room has already made up their mind, and about what.
- What you want to walk out with, and what you will settle for.
The room will interrupt. That is the point of rehearsing out loud rather than writing an answer down: an answer you can only deliver uninterrupted is an answer you do not have. Expect to be cut off mid sentence and to have to find the thread again, which is the part reading never rehearses.
Not yet produced
The strip for this use case, cut from a session about this kind of problem. No session of any kind has been recorded, so there is nothing to cut, and a reconstruction of a use case we have never seen anyone attempt would be an invention rather than an illustration.
Before you start
What a session leaves you with is a transcript of who objected to what, and the assumption two advisers argued about. Read it the morning of the meeting rather than the night before.