# What Boards Actually Read — calibration for the deck that matters most

A board deck is consumed twice: 15 skim-minutes before the meeting (where opinions form) and in-room (where opinions perform). Build for the skim; survive the room.

## The pre-read reality
- Directors read: **the first slide, the financials page, and whatever slide has red on it.** In that order. Everything else is reference material.
- Therefore slide 1 is the whole company: 3-5 numbers vs plan, one sentence of narrative ("growing, but the enterprise motion is 2 quarters behind"), and the asks. A director who reads nothing else should still vote right.
- **Bad news travels first, from you.** A risk the board discovers on slide 14 becomes a governance conversation; the same risk in your slide-1 narrative is an operating conversation. Same fact, different meeting.

## In-room dynamics worth designing for
- The deck is not the meeting. Allocate: 10% reporting (they pre-read), 60% the 1-2 decisions you need, 30% the discussion *they* want (you'll discover it in the pre-calls — always do the pre-calls; no board meeting should contain a surprise in either direction).
- Every metric needs the same definition as last quarter. A silently redefined metric, once noticed, taxes every number you show for the next year.
- **Anticipate the cross-exam on your weakest number.** Whichever metric you're least proud of, a director will find it; the appendix slide answering their exact follow-up is how competence looks.

## The asks discipline
Boards exist to decide and to help. Every deck ends with both lists: decisions needed (each with your recommendation — never open-ended) and help wanted (specific: "an intro to a CFO who's run a usage-based migration," not "leverage your networks").

## Anti-patterns the room notices instantly
Vanity slide-count (>20 for a quarterly says the operator can't prioritise) · charts whose y-axis starts above zero on a growth story · "strategic" as an adjective for anything unmeasured · a deck that changed structure since last quarter (structure churn reads as narrative management).
