Ten questions your board should be able to answer. Can you?

Every company is moving faster. Not all of that speed reaches a customer. Some of it goes on decisions made twice, on work that gets sent back, and on running more at once than anyone can carry.

These ten questions do not ask how your company is doing. They ask whether you can see it. Most boards can answer three or four.

Five minutes. Nothing is stored against your name, and nobody sees your answers unless you choose to share them.

Decision Velocity

1. Do you know how long your last three major decisions took, from first raised to finally settled?

Yes No Not sure

2. For the next big decision your company faces, can you name the one person whose call it is?

Yes No Not sure

Decision Adherence

3. Could you say how many of last year's strategic decisions have since been reopened?

Yes No Not sure

4. Is there a defined point at which a decision here counts as closed?

Yes No Not sure

5. Could you put a number on the leadership time that went to reopening settled decisions last quarter?

Yes No Not sure

Throughput Efficiency

6. If you asked five function heads to name this year's top three priorities, would they name the same three?

Yes No Not sure

7. Do you know what share of this year's delivery effort went to work that was later redone, paused or dropped?

Yes No Not sure

Change Load Saturation

8. Is there one complete list of every strategic initiative live across the company?

Yes No Not sure

9. If you added a major initiative tomorrow, could you say what would have to stop to make room?

Yes No Not sure

10. Do you know whether anyone you wanted to keep has left because of the volume of work rather than the work itself?

Yes No Not sure

These ten questions are a screen, not a measurement. They tell you what you can see. They do not tell you whether what you can see is accurate.

The next step is to take it to the room. Put these ten questions to your own team in twenty minutes, using the one-page version below. Or ask us to run it at your next board meeting, which takes ninety.

What the Baseline does Get in touch

Want to put these to your own team?

Two things, by email.

The ten questions as a single page, written to be tabled at an exec meeting rather than read alone.
And a short written read of your own pattern: the dimension you can see least, what it usually costs, and the two questions worth asking your team first.

There is no benchmark for this yet. When enough boards have answered to say something honest about where you sit against them, we will send that too. We will not invent it before then.