A chief executive who lost the room in the first ninety seconds

The client — The chief executive of a Series B software company in London, three years into the role, presenting to a board of six every quarter.

The problem — Board meetings consistently ran long and ended without a decision. The CEO believed the issue was the board being difficult. The recordings said otherwise: every presentation opened with two minutes of context-setting before reaching a single decision-relevant point. By the time the ask arrived on slide fourteen, the board had already started forming views from their own reading, and the rest of the meeting was spent unpicking them.

What we found — The first playback session identified three things. The opening buried the ask. The deck had twenty-two slides for a forty-minute slot, which meant every slide was rushed and none landed. And under interruption the CEO restarted from the beginning of an argument rather than answering the question, which is what made meetings overrun.

What we did — We rebuilt the structure so the ask arrived in the first ninety seconds and the rest of the deck defended it. We cut twenty-two slides to nine. Then we spent four sessions rehearsing under interruption — being stopped at slide three and asked something from slide eight, repeatedly, until the answer stopped derailing everything after it.

The result — The next board meeting reached a decision in twenty-two minutes. Two quarters on, the format has held: shorter meetings, decisions carried at the first ask, and a CEO who has stopped describing the board as difficult.