A recent BoardPro webinar, Governing for growth – Why traditional governance does not cut the growth mustard, prompted me to revisit a familiar boardroom question: are boards spending enough of their scarce meeting time looking forward? The webinar, held on 3 September 2026, featured Serge van Dam, Steven Bowman and Anna Pham.
The question is not new. Board self-assessments sometimes produce comments that more time should be devoted to strategy, emerging issues and the longer-term direction of the organisation.
The Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) itself says good agenda design should provide sufficient time for directors to focus on future-oriented strategic decisions, with important matters prioritised when directors' energy and concentration are high.
There is also some evidence that the balance has shifted. AICD/Mandala research published in 2025 reported that board time spent on risk and compliance increased from 24% to 55% over a decade. That figure should not be regarded as a universal benchmark for every board, but it reinforces a concern many directors and governance professionals will recognise: regulatory and assurance demands can consume time otherwise available for growth, innovation, strategic risk and opportunity.
So here is a thought experiment.
What if we recast the agenda?
What if every substantive item on a quarterly board agenda were classified as principally backward-looking or forward-looking, with genuinely mixed matters split between the two?
A backward-looking item asks:
What happened? How did we perform? What did management do? What does the evidence tell us? Did the organisation comply?
A forward-looking item asks:
What is changing? What choices do we face? What assumptions are we making? Where should we allocate capital and capability? What could disrupt the strategy? What should we do next?
The classification is not necessarily revealed by the heading on the paper.
A “strategic performance update” may be predominantly backward-looking if it consists of historic KPIs and operational achievements.
A financial report can contain both perspectives: actual results and variances look backwards; forecasts, liquidity scenarios and capital decisions look forwards.
Risk and compliance are not inherently backward-looking either. Incidents, breaches and assurance findings look backwards. Emerging-risk analysis, scenario testing and preparation for new regulatory obligations look forwards.
Merely inserting the word strategic into an agenda heading does not make the discussion strategic.
An illustrative recast
A typical 3½-hour quarterly meeting might, for example, be separated analytically as follows:
Backward-looking
Present / forward-looking
Minutes, actions and routine matters
Strategic decisions
Historic operational/KPI performance
Market and competitive outlook
Actual financial results and variances
Forecasts and capital allocation
Incidents, breaches and assurance
Emerging risks and regulatory change
Completed committee activity
Committee recommendations
Historic culture/workforce indicators
Succession and future capability
Illustrative total: 75 minutes
Illustrative total: 105 minutes
Another 30 minutes might comprise procedural matters, a break and an in-camera session whose content cannot sensibly be classified in advance.
In this illustration, roughly 42% of substantive classified time looks backwards and 58% looks forward.
Those percentages are not intended to constitute a benchmark. Their value lies in making the allocation visible.
But should the meeting actually run backwards first?
Probably not.
The AICD recommends positioning important strategic decisions early in the agenda, when directors' concentration is highest. Governance Institute guidance likewise supports prioritising decision items ahead of discussion and information items.
A “backward then forward” agenda may therefore be more useful as a diagnostic device than as a meeting-running template.
That distinction matters. The objective is not to replace one rigid agenda structure with another. It is to expose where the board's attention is being allocated.
Avoiding false precision
There is no universal rule that a board should spend 60%, 70% or some other proportion of its meeting looking forward.
The right balance will depend on industry, size, maturity, complexity, financial condition, regulatory environment, risk profile and prevailing circumstances.
A bank responding to a prudential problem, an ASX-listed company considering a transformational transaction, a start-up facing a funding decision and a mature not-for-profit should not be expected to have identical agendas.
Nor should oversight be dismissed as simply “looking in the rear-view mirror”.
Monitoring performance, risk, controls, culture and compliance is fundamental to good governance. Historical information is also frequently the evidence base on which future judgements are made.
The problem arises when reporting becomes an end in itself – when valuable boardroom time is spent hearing information repeated from papers, leaving strategy, alternatives, assumptions and emerging issues to compete for whatever time remains.
Perhaps the better principle is:
Read the past. Discuss the future.
A Board Attention Audit?
There may also be value in periodically examining not merely the agenda but what actually happened in the meeting.
A short Board Attention Audit might ask:
- How much planned and actual time went to backward-looking, present and forward-looking issues?
- How much time was devoted to DECIDE, DISCUSS, ASSURE and NOTE items?
- Were the most consequential decisions considered when directors were most alert?
- Were routine reports taken as read and discussed by exception?
- Did papers explain what had changed, key assumptions, available options, material risks and opportunities, and the particular questions requiring board judgement?
- Did the annual board workplan preserve adequate space for strategy, scenario planning, emerging risks, succession, innovation and technology?
Comparing planned and actual time is particularly important. An agenda may allocate 30 minutes to strategy and 20 minutes to compliance while the meeting ultimately does the reverse.This is explored in more detail below.
The objective is balance, not neglect
Too much backward-looking attention carries an opportunity cost: potentially insufficient consideration of strategy, assumptions, competitiveness, capital allocation, emerging threats and opportunities.
Too little attention to assurance can weaken accountability, controls, compliance and the board's understanding of how the organisation is actually performing.
Effective governance needs both.
The question is therefore not whether boards should stop looking backwards. Plainly, they should not.
It is whether traditional boardroom processes sometimes cause boards to spend more of their scarce collective time receiving and reviewing, rather than thinking, challenging and deciding.
After the meeting
Consider three approaches to post-meeting review and reflection on how the board has spent its time: end-of-meeting reflection + light-touch CoSec analysis + periodic Board Attention Audit (mentioned above).
As part of Review and Reflections (typically the last item on the agenda before the private / in camera session and close), the Chair might ask two or three questions:
- Did we spend our time on the right things today?
- Did routine or backward-looking matters crowd out matters requiring judgement about the future?
- Is there anything we should change about the next agenda, papers or meeting process?
That can be done in two or three minutes and creates an immediate feedback loop.
Separately, the Company Secretary could maintain a simple internal record of planned versus actual time – not necessarily to the minute, and not necessarily incorporated into the formal minutes. The CoSec might then report periodically, perhaps quarterly or at the next meeting, that:
“At the last meeting, approximately 55% of substantive discussion time was devoted to backward-looking/assurance matters and 45% to present or forward-looking matters. The principal variance from the agenda arose because the risk item exceeded its allocation by 25 minutes, resulting in the strategy discussion being shortened.”
That is potentially far more illuminating than producing another document for its own sake.
Thus, there are essentially three escalating levels of sophistication here:
Approach
How it works
Intrusiveness
Meeting-end reflection
Chair asks whether time was spent on the right matters
Very low
CoSec time review
Informal planned-versus-actual analysis reported at/before next meeting
Low
Periodic Board Attention Audit
Quarterly/annual analysis of B/F balance, decision vs assurance time, overruns and deferred items
Moderate
The third option might be particularly valuable as part of an annual board effectiveness review, rather than after every meeting. It could identify persistent patterns that are difficult to see meeting by meeting – for example, strategy items consistently being shortened, committee reports repeatedly overrunning, management presentations consuming disproportionate time, or “for noting” items generating lengthy discussion.
There is one further distinction. The CoSec's analysis should probably remain an internal meeting-effectiveness tool rather than part of the formal minutes, unless there is a particular reason to record it. The formal minutes should evidence the business considered, decisions made and relevant deliberative process; they need not become a detailed chronology of how every minute of the meeting was consumed.
This moves the proposition from:
“What does the agenda say the board will spend its time on?”
to the more revealing question:
“What did the board actually spend its time on – and was that the best use of its collective attention?”
The agenda is not merely as an administrative document, but as an allocation of one of the board's scarcest resources: collective attention.
Governance in Action Pty Ltd can assist clients with reviewing board and committee agendas, together with modern approaches to board reporting.
David Cantrick-Brooks FGIA FCG, Principal & Director of Governance in Action Pty Ltd, would be pleased to assist with enquiries. Please feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or via gia.net.au.
AI-assisted tools and techniques were used here to support the research, drafting and editing of this publication. Responsibility for the final content rests with David Cantrick-Brooks.
