Governance tools you can use in the boardroom.
Governance Notes by Paul Halpin (formerly Governance Decoded) has reached 3,000+ directors and governance professionals on LinkedIn. Now it has a home of its own, published here alongside the governance toolkits I design.
Fourteen governance toolkits.
The 360-Degree Board Evaluation
Your annual evaluation confirms the board is functioning well and changes nothing: run one that surfaces what goes unsaid and ends in commitments.
No. 02The Decision Rights Clarity Map
Your board and management keep disagreeing about what reaches the board: build one shared map of who decides what.
No. 03The First-Year Operating Plan
The seat is accepted and the first meeting is weeks away: build a plan for the four meetings your first board year is made of.
No. 04The Chair's First-Year Protocol
You spent months recruiting a director and the board is quietly forming a verdict on whether the appointment worked: protect that investment in about four hours across the year.
No. 05The Induction Request Schedule
The induction pack that arrives is generic and your first meeting is close: send the company secretary the list that builds your induction around the view you were appointed to bring.
No. 06The “Acquire the Map” Conversation Guide
You have read every paper and still cannot tell where the board's tensions sit: gather the unwritten map in a conversation before Meeting One.
No. 07The Board Paper Framing Audit
A board paper arrives with a tidy recommendation and you need to see what it is steering you towards: test it against four reads and a scoring strip.
No. 08AI Governance: The Board's AI Decision-Rights Framework
AI proposals reach the board at the wrong level, trivial ones consuming time and material ones slipping through: agree one shared map of which AI decisions belong to the board.
No. 09The AI Governance Readiness Diagnostic
Your board talks about AI but nobody can say where it is running: find out where you stand and which governance gap to close first.
No. 10The AI Governance Question Architecture
AI keeps appearing in board updates and the questions asked about it stay easy: put governance-grade questions on your agenda by design, on a cadence.
No. 11AI Governance: The Named-Owner Protocol
An AI system is about to go live and nobody can say whose name is against its outcomes: settle a named owner, and what that owner must secure, before approval.
No. 12AI Governance: The Dependency Threshold
The technology update sounds like unqualified good news while one provider carries more of the business each quarter: set the point at which that reliance becomes a board conversation.
No. 13AI Governance: The Remuneration Gap
The incentive plan rewards an AI efficiency gain and measures nothing of the concentration risk built beside it: ask the one question, then close the gap without redesigning executive pay.
No. 14AI Governance: The Self-Inflicted Incident Plan
Your incident plan assumes an attacker and the next AI failure will come from a system your board approved: audit the plan and settle the hard decisions while the room is calm.
Paul Halpin
Director, Chair & Governance Practitioner
Sansepolcro, Italy
Governance Notes by Paul Halpin is a free fortnightly newsletter read by 3,000+ board directors, NEDs, governance professionals, and company secretaries. The Closed Session is the imprint that turns that thinking into toolkits you can pick up and use.
Paul Halpin has twenty years of multi-sector board experience across Africa, emerging markets, and internationally, carrying fiduciary responsibility as a serving director. He holds observer and director positions on several boards today.
Every toolkit here comes out of that work: shaped by the questions that matter when the agenda arrives, the papers need to hold up, and the quality of governance is on the line.
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