A steering report has one job, to change what happens next.
Most of the reports I see do not fail at that job. They were never built for it. They were built from what was available, not from what was pending. Someone asked which numbers we can pull, and the pack grew from there. Nobody asked which decision is due this month, and what would have to be true for it to be made.
The distance between those two questions is the whole of steering.
A number becomes steerable when two things are attached to it:
• a threshold, the point at which something has to happen
• a name, the person who does it
Without the threshold, the number is context. Without the name, the threshold is an opinion. You can have a figure that is accurate to the second decimal and has neither, and it will sit in the pack while everyone agrees it is concerning.
This is also why steering packs grow and never shrink. Adding a page costs nothing and no one has to justify it. Removing a page means saying out loud that it does not matter, in a room where the person who built it is sitting. So the pack gets more complete every quarter, and less useful at the same rate.
I have watched this hold in organisations that have almost nothing else in common. The reporting improves. The decisions arrive at exactly the speed they did before.
Run this over your last steering pack. Page by page, one question each: if this number were twenty percent worse next month, who would do what, by when?
Where you can answer that, the page is steering. Where you cannot, the page is filing. Keep it if it is useful for other reasons, and stop expecting the meeting to produce a decision it has no material for.
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C · Helping finance and programme leaders build steering logic that works.