Nobody read the packet. Now what?
By Erik Reagan · · 3 min read
The chair asks if there are questions on the financials. There is a pause. Then the particular silence of twelve people looking at a document for the first time — pages turning slightly out of sync, someone scrolling fast on a tablet, a trustee saying “sorry, which page?”
Everyone in the room knows what happened. The question is what you do in the next ninety seconds.
In the meeting: name it, don’t punish it
Three instincts show up here, and two of them are wrong.
The first wrong instinct is to make a point of it. A sigh, a pointed “I did send this a week ago,” a lap around the table asking who read what. It buys you nothing tonight and costs you volunteers later. People who feel scolded at board meetings stop raising their hands for things.
The second wrong instinct is to fix it by reading the packet aloud. This feels generous and responsible. It converts a ninety-minute decision-making meeting into a ninety-minute reading session, and it teaches the board that reading in advance is optional because the chair will cover it. Do it twice and you’ve built a norm.
The third instinct is the right one: say it plainly, once, without heat. “It looks like the financials haven’t landed with everyone yet. Let’s do this — Ellen, give us the three-minute version, we’ll take the two decisions we can make well tonight, and I’ll move the rest to next month.”
Then triage. Some decisions can be made responsibly on a three-minute summary — approving a routine renewal, accepting a report. Some genuinely cannot; a board should not approve a budget it hasn’t read, and there’s no shame in saying so in the room. For those, defer — to the next regular meeting, or to a short special meeting in two weeks if the timing is real. A thirty-minute special meeting with one item on it is a perfectly respectable tool, and boards underuse it.
Deferring is not a failure of the meeting. Voting on something nobody read is.
Before the next one: fix the design
If it happened once, it was a bad month. If it happens routinely, the packet is the problem, not the people.
Send it earlier. A week out, on a fixed day, every time. Most late packets are late because contributions to them are late; move that deadline, not the send date.
Cut it shorter. This is the big one. If nobody reads a sixty-page packet, the packet is sixty pages. Attachments and supporting detail can live behind links for the members who want them. What every trustee must read should fit in fifteen or twenty pages.
Put the ask at the top of every item. One line before the detail: what the board is being asked to do, and what the committee recommends. A trustee who reads only the first line of each item still arrives usefully prepared, and most will read further once they know why it matters.
Make reading it an expectation, set at recruitment. Not a rule announced at a meeting after a bad night — a sentence in the board member agreement and in the recruitment conversation: we send materials a week ahead, and we expect you to arrive having read them, because we don’t re-read them in the room. People honor expectations they agreed to before they joined far more reliably than ones imposed later.
The firm part
Chronic non-reading is a culture and design problem, not a character problem. Your board is not lazier than other boards. It is made of people with jobs and evenings and a document that arrived Sunday at nine, and it is responding rationally.
That’s genuinely good news, because you can change a document and a deadline. You cannot change twelve people’s characters, and boards that try mostly succeed at making everyone feel bad.
What to do Thursday
Look at last month’s packet. Count the pages. Find the date it actually went out. Those two numbers will tell you most of what you need to know, and both are fixable before the next meeting.