Board Pack Prep

name: board-pack-prep
description: Synthesizes board or committee meeting materials into a per-agenda-item pre-read with anticipated director questions and cross-document inconsistency checks. Use when the user shares board materials, an IC pack or committee papers and needs to prepare.

Read the board pack the way the best-prepared director in the room will. Then hand the user the synthesis, the inconsistencies and the questions that are coming. Board packs are assembled from multiple authors under deadline; they almost always contain at least one internal contradiction, one buried risk and one paper that never states what it wants from the board. Finding those before the meeting is the difference between running the meeting and being run by it.

Inputs

• The meeting materials: board pack, committee papers or IC materials (uploaded). Required.
• The agenda, if separate from the pack.
• Prior meeting minutes, if available. For tracking what was promised last time.
• The user's role: presenting, chairing or attending. A presenter needs the hostile questions on their own item; a chair needs the whole map plus where the meeting could run aground; a director needs the sharpest three questions per item.

Workflow

1. Read the complete pack first, including appendices. The contradictions usually live between a summary and its own appendix.

2. Synthesize each agenda item:

• In brief: what the paper says, in three or four sentences, in plain language rather than the paper's own framing.
• The ask: what the board is being asked to do: approve, note, discuss or decide between options. If the paper never states its ask clearly, that itself is a finding. Flag it and infer the likely ask with a marker that it is inferred. Boards waste more time on papers with no ask than on any other failure.
• Watch-outs: buried risks; assumptions doing heavy lifting (especially in projections. Flag any hockey stick where the inflection conveniently starts next quarter and note what the paper says justifies it); items placed in appendices that soften or contradict the summary; anything material mentioned once and never developed; and language changes from prior packs on recurring items ("on track" becoming "broadly on track").

3. Cross-document consistency check. Compare every figure that appears in more than one document. The CFO report versus the CEO summary versus the appendix versus the resolution language. Check both values and definitions: the same "revenue" can be gross in one paper and net in another, actuals in one and forecast in another. List every inconsistency:

A director who finds one unexplained inconsistency stops trusting the pack; the user should find them first.

4. Prior-minutes check (if minutes were provided): list every commitment, action and "we will report back" from last meeting and whether this pack addresses it. Unaddressed commitments are the questions most likely to be asked. Directors keep their own lists.

5. Anticipate the questions: two or three per substantive item, calibrated to who asks them. Think in director archetypes: the audit-chair type asks about controls, definition changes and anything that moved between documents; the investor director asks about cash, runway, covenant headroom and the delta versus plan; the independent asks the naive-sounding question that is actually the hardest ("why is this the right time?"). For each anticipated question, give a suggested response grounded in the pack with its citation. If the pack cannot answer it, write "Not answerable from the pack. Prepare separately" and list what data would be needed. Never draft a plausible answer the materials do not support; a presenter caught improvising numbers in a boardroom does not recover.

6. Assemble by role. Presenting: lead with the hostile questions on the user's item and the weak points in their own paper. Chairing: add a one-line meeting map. Where the time risk is, which items can be taken as read, where the real discussion should happen. Attending: lead with the three sharpest questions worth asking.

Guardrails

• Everything comes from the pack and provided minutes. Do not supplement from general knowledge without labeling it.
• Board materials are among the most confidential documents a firm produces; work only with what the user provides.
• Distinguish throughout between what a paper states and what it implies. Directors will and the user must not defend an implication as if it were stated.

Optional: Connect Microsoft 365

Out of the box, the user uploads the pack. If a Microsoft 365 connector with SharePoint access is available, you can retrieve prior packs and minutes from the board library for the prior-minutes check and the recurring-item language comparison. If no connector is connected, ask the user to upload last meeting's minutes alongside the pack.