How to share board papers that stop at the board

A board pack is written for a named group of people who have a legal duty to the company, which is exactly why it says things nothing else you produce says.

Real numbers rather than presented ones. Risks named as risks. Legal exposure. Decisions about people, sometimes about people who report to the person printing it. The going concern discussion. The acquisition you are considering and the one you walked away from.

It is the single document that would do most damage in the wrong hands, and it is distributed by email on a monthly schedule.

It reaches assistants, because directors have assistants and papers need printing and calendars need managing.

It reaches investors’ internal teams, because an investor director does not read a pack in isolation. They take it to their own investment committee, which is doing its job and is not your company.

And it reaches personal email, because reading two hundred pages on a plane is easier from a personal iPad, and a director who has been on boards for twenty years has a habit older than your policy.

This is the moment the arithmetic turns. Board turnover is normal. An investor exits, a term ends, someone takes a role that creates a conflict.

They hand back the laptop if they had one. Their access to the portal is closed. And every pack they ever received stays exactly where it was: in their mail archive, on their devices, in the hands of an institution that may now be an investor in a competitor.

Ten years of your company’s most candid thinking leaves with a handshake.

Distributed as controlled links, a pack is readable by the directors you named, and stops being readable when you say so.

The natural rules are simple. Access expires a set period after the meeting, because a pack has a purpose and the purpose passes. And when a director leaves, you withdraw their access once and their entire history goes dark, not just the pack you can remember.

What does not change is the reading experience. A director clicks a link and reads the pack, on whichever device they were going to use anyway. A distribution method that makes board papers annoying to read does not survive contact with a board.

Every company secretary would like to know, on the Sunday before a Tuesday board, who has opened the pack.

It changes how you run the meeting. If three directors have not opened the strategy section, you spend the first ten minutes differently. It is a small thing that makes the meeting better, and today it is entirely guesswork.