For the first meeting

Five questions for Monday.

Five questionsAnswerable by the next meeting

For the meeting where none of this exists yet: no register, no score, no owner. Ask them in any order. Each is answerable by the next meeting, without heroics, if the institution is sound — and unanswerable in a very specific way if it is not.

Notice what they have in common. None can be answered with a purchase. None can be answered with a policy. Every good answer is a name, a number, a date, or a record — and the fluent half-answers management will reach for first all describe the health of the machine, in reply to a question about the crew.

What sits behind them

Each question is a reading off one instrument. The framework sets out all of them.

The framework

The questions

Question 01

Who overrode the machine?

“How many times last quarter did one of our people overrule our most consequential automated system — and what makes that number healthy, rather than merely low?”

A good answer
A number, its direction over time, and a floor somebody set in advance.
A bad answer
Celebrating the number as it falls, or defending a stable one by the machine's accuracy. A falling override rate is either a machine improving or a bench going quiet, and an institution that cannot say which is watching neither.

Question 02

Who decided what to protect?

“In our most automated process, which steps still build the judgment of the people who run it — and who decided which steps those were?”

A good answer
A named process owner, and a map of the process marked step by step into the steps that form judgment and the steps that merely consume time.
A bad answer
That every step was assessed for automation potential — an answer about the machine, to a question about the people.

Question 03

Tools down, who catches it?

“If our most senior credit — or claims, or audit — judgment left the building on Friday, who catches what she catches, and when did we last test that with the tools off?”

A good answer
A name and a date.
A bad answer
A succession plan: a document that says who inherits her chair, and nothing about who inherits her eye.

Question 04

What did nobody see?

“What share of the machine's decisions last quarter did no human look at — and who samples that share, on what schedule, against what standard?”

A good answer
A percentage, a sampling owner, and a schedule.
A bad answer
That the model is continuously monitored. Monitoring watches the machine's health, not whether the decisions nobody saw were safe to leave unseen.

Question 05

Where is it written?

“Where are the answers to the first four written down, who verified them, and would the record survive an auditor?”

A good answer
A document with a verifier's name and a review date.
A bad answer
This meeting — assurances that exist only in the minutes recording that assurances were given.

After the five

The motion is three lines long.

If the room is with you, the first Monday has a motion of its own: that management answer these five questions in writing within sixty days; that a named person verify the answers; and that the answers return to this committee as an agenda item.

Pass that, and the second meeting’s business writes itself — because the moment the answers must be written, verified and kept, the subject has acquired the beginnings of a clock and a chair, whether or not anyone has yet said the words standing item out loud.

Adapted from Chapter Thirteen. Take them into your meeting, put them in your own board paper, change the wording — no attribution needed and no permission required.

The list

If these were useful, the book is the instrument behind them.

One letter when there is something worth sending: the publication date when we have it, and the occasional note from the argument. No sequence, no drip.

Or read the framework the questions come from.