The CEO View from the Bridge

What is a CEO View from the Bridge?

The CEO View from the Bridge is a one-page summary of the board pack’s key points.

Why is a CEO View from the Bridge important?

Board members are busy people. Investors, NEDs and Chairs often sit on numerous boards and might have several board packs to read a month. That’s a lot of information to absorb and process.

According to research by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) an average board pack for organisations with an annual turnover of less than £10 million is 125 pages. A turnover of £100 to £500 million results in a board pack of 195 pages. And a turnover of over £500 million? Board members can be faced with 256 pages of content (ICAEW, 2019).

With this much content to plough through, board members need to have a summary of key points at their fingertips. Key messages should be easy to find so they feel briefed and ready to make informed decisions.

We see the board pack as a piece of journalism. It should capture attention and inspire action.

The CEO’s View from the Bridge is the beginning of the story.

A CEO View from the Bridge template

The CEO View from the Bridge presents critical information at a glance. Within a few minutes, board members can see the main successes, concerns, issues and recommendations to discuss in the meeting.

It should focus only on the information the reader needs to know – not what the writer finds interesting. And include just enough detail to drive the structure and agenda of the meeting.

The page has six elements:

1. The top reason to celebrate

What is the most significant achievement since the last meeting? What is the one key reason to celebrate? The answer is not always obvious. Isolating one thing from pages of content written by numerous contributors is hard. But it helps to focus board members’ attention on what matters.

2. The main reason for concern

What’s your biggest risk or challenge? What’s the most significant problem that needs to be solved? This is the other side of the coin. Yin and yang. As well as your top reason for celebration, highlight the main reason for concern to the board. What’s the one thing that’s keeping you awake at night? Again, this often isn’t easy.

3. Three highlights from the month or quarter

In our top tips below, we talk about limiting your ideas as far as is practicable. When isolating your single top reasons for celebration and concern you are likely to have come up with a shortlist. From that shortlist, what are your top three highlights? For a SaaS business, examples might include ‘Delighted customers’, ‘Improved usability’ and ‘ARR outperformance’.

These highlights can be backed up with brief facts, opinions and recommendations to provide context. This relates to our QFOR-A (Question, Fact, Opinion, Recommendation and Action) discipline.

4. Three lowlights from the month or quarter

You’ve got the three highlights, so give the opposite standpoint. What are your three lowlights? Board reports can gloss over the pain. Don’t be afraid to share. Board members need a clear picture of what isn’t going so well. These lowlights are likely to drive the discussion in the meeting. For a SaaS business, three lowlight examples might include ‘Employee churn is too high’, ‘North America leadership setback’ and ‘Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is too high and not under control’.

Again, each of these lowlights can be contextualised using our QFOR-A discipline.

5. Three key issues to discuss

It’s helpful to isolate three issues to provide structure for the meeting. These might mirror your lowlights, but not always. Returning to our SaaS example, you might decide that employee churn and the setback in North America should dominate the meeting. Your top three issues could therefore be ‘Employee churn’, ‘North American leadership re-boot’ and ‘Replan North America entry and timeframes’.

6. Three recommendations to discuss

Your discussion of the highlights and lowlights will include recommendations for action. Pull these out into a separate section to focus the board’s attention on them. You might have recommended a pay benchmarking review as part of the lowlight concerning high employee churn. Make this a key recommendation for approval with the required action clear: ‘Appoint pay benchmarking firm’. This clarifies the minimum expected outcomes from the meeting.

Together, these six elements give the board a digestible overview of what’s happened since the last board meeting which is easy to scan and absorb.

Below are 5 top tips for getting these elements right.

5 top tips for putting together a CEO View from the Bridge

1. Work with a thought partner.

Two heads are better than one. We recommend preparing the View from the Bridge with a thought partner, preferably the Chair. Once individual contributions have been submitted for the pack, agree on the key points together. As we said above, isolating key concerns from pages of content can be challenging, which is why it often doesn’t get done.

2. Use our QFOR-A discipline

Use our QFOR-A discipline to help structure your thinking and write short, impactful sentences in simple and clear language.

QFOR-A stands for Question, Fact, Opinion, Recommendation and Action. The hyphen between the R and the A reminds us that the point of any question is to reach action. The F, O and R are the steps between the question and action.

3. Stick to one page

The CEO View from the Bridge is designed to give key information on an uncluttered page. Making executive summaries no longer than a page is not new advice, but it’s hard to implement in practice unless you have a great template to follow.

Distilling information down to one page makes it easy to communicate and understand.

4. Make things as simple as possible but no simpler

Above, we talk about limiting your ideas as far as you can. The CEO View from the Bridge forces you to isolate the single biggest successes and concerns and, ideally, three highlights, lowlights, issues and recommendations.

Note that we say ideally three. We try to stick to ‘The Rule of 3’ as much as possible. It is well known that humans absorb information best when presented in groups of three. Think The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, etc. Our brains have been hardwired this way since childhood. Many people can struggle to remember lists of more than three items.

We say ideally because it’s not always possible to stick to three. This list has five items, after all.

The well-known author and consultant, Barbara Minto talks about ‘The magic number seven, plus or minus two’. According to her source, the American psychologist George A. Miller, some people can hold up to nine items in their heads at once, but others as few as five (Minto, 2021).

Our advice? Aim for three. If you can’t manage three, limit yourself to five. Other pages in the pack can contain more detail, but not this one.

5. Refine, refine, refine

You’re unlikely to get your View from the Bridge perfect the first time you write it. It takes thought and refinement. Write a draft and let your thoughts percolate for a couple of days. Or send it to your thought partner for their feedback.

The key is to refine it until you are happy you have distilled the key points from the pack.

Part of this refinement is checking and proofreading your work. Careless mistakes can irritate the reader and embarrass the writer. Check it with a fresh pair of eyes before you publish it.

Unlock the power of board report executive summaries: The CEO View from the Bridge