Ninety minutes, one document, one written finding.

What this is

A single ninety-minute session, run on one document: the last matter your board, audit committee, or equivalent body actually approved. No slides are prepared and none are shown. The facilitator works on the document itself, live, in the room where the approval was given.

The session does not survey the curriculum. It applies three of its six modules, Vocabulary, Arithmetic, and Structure, to one real decision your organisation already made, and establishes what could have been asked of it and was not.

This is the entry point into the Academy’s engagement work. It is priced, scoped, and delivered as a single unit, deliberately narrower than the two-day intensive and smaller than a standing retainer, so that a board can commission it without a procurement process.

What is excluded

A session is not a curriculum walkthrough, a strategy consultation, or a legal opinion. The facilitator does not recommend a decision, dispute the approval that was given, or advise on remediation. The document is read for what was, and was not, put to it before it was approved. What the board does with that reading afterward is the board’s decision, not ours.

A session covers one document. A second document, a recurring flow of documents, or a request to review a pipeline rather than a single approval falls outside the format. See Standing Retainer.

How a session runs

1. Instruction. The organisation names the document: the specific proposal, contract, or report the board or committee approved most recently, with the approval date.
2. Document received. The document reaches the Academy no later than 48 hours before the scheduled session. Nothing is prepared from a summary; the facilitator works from the document as filed.
3. Preparation. The facilitator reads the document against the relevant modules and identifies the questions the record shows were not put to it.
4. The session. Ninety minutes, on site or remote, in the room where the original approval was given where the organisation can arrange it. No slides. The facilitator works on the document with the participants present.
5. The written finding. A numbered list of the questions that were not asked, each attached to the page, clause, or figure it concerns. Delivered before the session ends.

The written finding

The session’s output is a physical document, not an impression carried out of the room. Each entry names a question, cites where in the source document it would have applied, and states what a satisfactory answer would have needed to contain. Participants leave holding it, not recalling it.

The finding also serves as a record of what one document, read closely once, actually surfaces. Organisations that commission a session and later commission a Standing Retainer generally do so having already seen, on one document, what a closer reading finds. We state that plainly, as part of the offer, rather than leave it as an unstated reason to return.

Price and terms

The fee is not set against the ninety minutes in the room. It is set against the next approval, the one the board will make after this one, which will be put to better questions because this one already was.

Who leads it, and who it is for

The facilitator is drawn from within the firm against two criteria: a working record of explaining a technical mechanism plainly, at speed, under the kind of scrutiny a live document reading creates, and comfort doing so without a script to fall back on. Which named individual leads a given session is arranged at booking and is not fixed to the format.

Where a session ends

A session covers one document and ends when the written finding is handed over. It does not renew, and it is not repriced for a second document: a second document is a second engagement, scoped and scheduled the same way, or it is a Standing Retainer, the format built for organisations for whom one document was never really the problem.