Tell us what the board has to decide, and when.

Write to us

The question, in your own words. Narrowing it is the first two weeks of the work.

Plain sentences are enough. Nobody here is reading this for the prose.

Four people read it. Nobody else does.

What you send goes to the four people who do the work. It never goes into a sales system.

You are not added to a list.

Sending this does not add you to the newsletter, and no second email unless you write back.

Some fields are still empty, and they are marked. Fill them and press send.

01

Required

First and last

A name, so the reply has somewhere to go.

02

Required

you@organisation

Without an address there is nowhere to send the reply.

That address is missing something. Check it for a typo.

03

Required

Regional water authority, company secretary

One line is enough. The organisation on its own will do.

04

Required

What has to be decided, and the date it has to be decided by.

Two or three sentences. The rest can wait until we reply. Do not paste board papers into this field.

This is the field that matters. Even two sentences will do.

We reply to every message, including the ones we cannot take on.

Sent. All four of us see it. The reply comes from the partner or principal who covers your sector, not from an inbox.

The answer comes from the person who would carry the file.

All four of us see what arrives. The one who answers is the partner or principal who covers your sector, and that is the person who would sit on the file. Two of the four sit on each file, and one of them is always a partner. They answer it themselves, including the answer that we are the wrong firm for this one.

01

Partner

Mireille Osei

Energy and utilities

Four years on an energy regulator's appeal panel, reading the files from the other side.

Working on now

Network investment programmes, where the board has to commit before the connection queue is settled.

02

Partner

Tomas Reinholt

Health systems

Wrote clinical trial protocols before Plenary, and still writes the failure condition first.

Working on now

A merger of two clinical services, where the staffing case and the safety case point different ways.

03

Principal

Nadia Fournier

Financial services

Writes most of the firm's method, including the rule about what would make a recommendation wrong.

Working on now

The confidence section, rewritten so a board can see the limits of the evidence without opening the appendix.

04

Principal

Anders Vik

Public infrastructure

Keeps the decision archive, the one cited when a decision is reopened.

Working on now

Municipal borrowing, where the repayment runs past the term of the council that votes on it.

The method is written down.

Five short pieces on how we work, including how to say what you do not know.

Low sunlight through vertical blinds across an empty boardroom table
Board practice3 min read

What a board actually reads

A board pack is written in the order the work happened. It is read in the order the risk sits, and those two orders are almost never the same.

Mireille Osei, Partner, energy and utilities