In July 2019 I wrote a blog piece entitled Think Like a Director – Writing Effective Board Papers.
In essence I was saying that board packs should be written with the reader (in this case a board director) in mind.
We are all encouraged to print less and read more, preferably online so as not to kill trees, so anything that makes the reading experience easier and easier to comprehend has to be a good thing. In the piece I referenced an approach to writing online documents called The Inverted Pyramid, which I would commend you to research.
In January 2021 my colleague Carissa Duenas followed up with a piece entitled 7 Tips For Building Effective Board Packs.
The overall conclusion from the two pieces is that when creating board packs, there are two important things to consider:
- Start with the end in mind. Board packs are designed to support strategic decision-making and the management of risk for the organisation. To overwhelm directors with data without clear insight or focus diminishes their capacity to perform their responsibilities in an effective manner. In short, the reports in board packs should always seek to address the “What Does This Mean?” and “Why should I care?” questions.
- Quality over quantity. Large volumes of information do not necessarily equate to thoughtful analysis. On the contrary, boards derive more value from data that is filtered and drilled-down so as to be concise, focused and insightful.
It cannot be emphasised enough: the board is highly dependent on the value it is able to derive from the information presented. The board pack is a springboard not only for high-value, effective board meetings, but also for good corporate governance.
This advice still holds true but of course depends on individuals being open to new ways of thinking about preparing board papers and minutes.
There are consulting options, training programmes and applications that are designed to help. Recently, I even came across a few articles that referenced what ChatGPT is doing in this space.
If you are one of the few people on the planet not yet familiar with ChatGPT — it is a freemium chatbot released in November 2022 by OpenAI, a research company with big investors, including Microsoft.
Chatbots are AI systems that engage in spoken or written dialogue and commonly power customer service sections of company websites as well as expert systems and virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa.
At the most basic level, a chatbot is a computer program that simulates and processes human conversation (either written or spoken), allowing humans to interact with digital devices as if they were communicating with real persons.
Clearly there should be an opportunity to use a product like ChatGPT to help produce higher quality, more focused and better structured board packs.
Let’s assume that you have quite a long and detailed report (or other paper) that you would like to include in a board pack but that you also want a concise and readable summary included at the beginning. Well, with ChatGPT it is possible to auto-generate such a summary today.
An article entitled Here are 15 incredible ways to use ChatGPT to simplify your life explains how ChatGPT can produce a summary easily read and understood by board directors.
The article relates that creating a manual summary can be long and boring. You have to read the entire article carefully, find the main points and then rewrite all of that in a shorter form. Depending on the length of the article, this could take anywhere from several minutes to several hours (or longer).
In contrast, with ChatGPT you can:
- Write, “Please summarize the following article into a list of talking points.”
- Copy and paste the full content of the article below the command above.
- Hit the Enter or Return key.
Microsoft clearly feels that this is the way forward as the company is looking to incorporate ChatGPT into their Microsoft Office packages, as can be seen in this article, ChatGPT takes meetings to the next level for Microsoft Teams users.
Not only can this technology help prepare better structured board packs but it might also revolutionise the taking of minutes. Let’s just consider, with voice to text technology coupled with something like ChatGPT, you could:
- Record board meetings.
- Have the recordings auto-transcribed into text, BUT not as an exact transcription (real conversation transcriptions can be almost unintelligible) but rather as a summary of the main points and actions agreed, responsibilities allocated, etc.
Working on the raw data with the right instructions, this technology could save hours of laborious document creation, be almost instantly available and likely be generally accurate and reflective of what was actually discussed in the meeting.
The end product must be sense-checked, edited and of course controlled by individual companies to start with, especially as to how ChatGPT analyses meeting transcriptions and creates appropriate summaries, BUT this does seem like a massive leap forward, doesn’t it?
After all, the purpose of the work isn’t about holding meetings, preparing weighty board packs and collecting and documenting the minutes of those meetings. It is about helping well informed people make better informed decisions and ensuring that those decisions are actioned in order to deliver the intended outcomes and value.
The key question is, “What do we need to do to prove that this technology works, is accurate and can be trusted?” And once we’re done with that question, the subsequent questions will be around adoption choices.
Companies like Microsoft and Google will make sure that their workplace suites include an abundance of such AI functionality.
Specialist providers of template-based and other application models for report writing will likely link their applications to AI engines in various ways to capture more value for boards and leadership teams.
The near future will be interesting and we will all have choices to make.
Alan Hewitt