Item seven on the October agenda: Strategic Plan Update.
Getting there took two weeks. Your cabinet emailed every initiative owner, twice; someone rebuilt last spring's slides, updated the percentages, and hunted for a photo of the new reading program. The deck came in at forty slides.
The presentation runs forty-five minutes, and the board listens politely. Two questions come at the end, both about slide thirty-one. Each would have taken five minutes to answer had anyone seen slide thirty-one before that night. Then it's on to item eight.
Nothing went wrong that night. Indeed, that is precisely why it will happen again in February.
Consider what the plan has become. The board adopted it to guide five years of decisions; three times a year, it gets performed instead; a recital of sorts, covering what already happened, delivered at the exact moment the board could be deciding what happens next.
Is the update serving the board, or is the board serving the update?
It seems to me the status update isn't the work at all. It's the cost of a plan nobody can see between meetings. Every goal that lives in a slide deck has to be read aloud eventually.
Flip the order. Put progress where your board and community can check it any week of the year, on the measures your board already adopted. Then October doesn't need forty slides. It needs one question: this objective is behind, so what are we going to do about it?
The purpose of a strategic plan update is to help the board decide what comes next, not to recount what came before. Every minute on the agenda ought to be measured against that.