Your board pack is assembled by hand, by one person, every time.

The pack is the one thing that has to be right, so it lands with the person most trusted to get it right. That instinct is sound, and it works, which is why nobody examines what it costs.

Every cycle that person chases the same figures from the same colleagues, copies them into the same template, spots the two that look wrong and quietly fixes them. None of it is written down, because it lives in their judgement rather than in a process.

What the board reads is a snapshot someone assembled by hand, already several days old by the time it lands.

Take the last three packs and find, for each figure, the date it was true rather than the date the pack went out. If those two dates are more than a week apart, your board is making decisions about the recent past.

Ask the person who builds it how long it takes, and how much of that is chasing rather than thinking. Multiply by the number of meetings a year.

Then the real test. If they were away next week, who assembles it, and would you be comfortable with what came out?

Decisions get made on what is in the pack, so the age of those figures becomes a speed limit on the organisation. A board meeting six times a year on numbers that are already a fortnight old is steering with a delay built into it.

Then there is the single point of failure. One illness, one resignation, one holiday in the wrong week, and either the pack does not arrive or it arrives without the quiet corrections that person makes every cycle. Nobody else knows those corrections exist.

Trustees are also the people you most need to be confident in what they are reading. That is hard to sustain when half the meeting goes on establishing whether a number is right rather than deciding what to do about it.