Most MI rebuilds start in the wrong place. The team produces the existing pack, page by page, and the conversation that follows is about layout, frequency, dashboard design and which charts could be cleaner. Those things may need fixing. But in my experience they are rarely the reason the pack has stopped being useful.
What is wrong with the pack is structural. The Board is being shown a story that the firm is not living, and the way you find out is not to read the pack more carefully. It is to read what the Board has been deciding while the pack was sitting in front of them.
The exercise that does the work
Take the last four cycles of Board and Audit Committee minutes. Sit them on the table next to the MI pack from each cycle. Mark against each page every decision, challenge or follow-up it produced. Not simply “noted”. I mean an approved action, a recorded risk acceptance, a request for further analysis, a challenge that changed the discussion or a decision that followed.
That does not mean every page needs to produce a decision every time it appears. Some MI earns its place by showing that a risk remains stable, a control remains effective or an agreed tolerance has not been breached. But if a page repeatedly produces no decision, no challenge and no useful assurance, I would ask what job it is doing.
On most packs I have run this exercise against, most pages carry no marks. The pages have been read. They have been noted. They have not moved anything in four cycles. That is a meaningful piece of data on its own, and it often gives me a surprisingly clear view of what can be challenged or removed in the rebuild.
The decisions that came from nowhere in the pack
The more useful column, though, is the one for decisions the Board took that were not connected to any specific page in the pack. There are usually some. And they are often among the most useful decisions to examine.
A Non-Executive Director who asked, halfway through the meeting, what the firm's exposure was to a particular customer segment that nobody on the executive could immediately quantify. A Chair who paused on the regulatory correspondence summary and asked whether two recent letters were really about two different control areas or one. An Audit Committee member who challenged the ageing of a single finding and triggered a wider conversation about ageing as a whole.
The decisions that came from outside the pack are the map. They tell you what the Board needed to see and was not being shown.
What the orphan decisions often have in common
There is a pattern I have seen more than once. The questions tend to move away from activity and towards residual risk. They get more specific: a segment, a jurisdiction, a product or a customer type. And quite often they expose something the standing pack was never designed to show.
Sometimes that is because the business has changed. The segment was smaller, the product did not exist or the exposure looked different when the pack was built. The pack has been added to over time, but its bones have never been reset to the shape of the current firm. The additions sit on top of the bones. The rebuild puts the bones back into alignment.
What I would do this week, if I were the MLRO
Read the minutes of the last four Board and Audit Committee meetings, in date order, in a single sitting. Mark, in the margin, every decision, challenge or follow-up that came from outside the standing pack. Group them by theme. The themes that recur tell you where the next rebuild needs to focus. Sometimes that means a new page. Sometimes it means changing the segmentation, commentary or thresholds on one you already have. And the pages that have produced nothing beyond “noted” for four cycles are the ones I would challenge hardest.
None of this is sophisticated. None of it depends on a new data feed, a new system or a new dashboard. It depends on the discipline of reading what the Board has actually been worrying about and rebuilding the pack to put those worries on the page earlier next time. That is the difference between a pack that supports decisions and a pack that describes activity.
Guide 008 sets out the full MI cycle, including the five-question rebuild, the KRI register, the commentary discipline and the annual rebuild as a standing Board paper. Download the full guide and use the KRI register in the appendix as the starting point for your own.
