The executive committee found that its controls were in place, but that its leaders saw the company very differently from one another. Its first commitments were clear ownership of recurring decisions and declaring conflicts of interest before a decision rather than after.

“We thought we were one leadership team looking at one company. The Index showed us how differently each of us saw it, and exactly where the pictures differed. That became our agenda for the next eight weeks.”Executive committee, a private company

The leadership found that everyone could quote the mandate word for word, yet each read it differently. Its first commitment was to agree one reading of the mandate before any further work on strategy or systems.

Working only from its published documents, we found an institution that counts its activity carefully but publishes no measure of what that activity changed. Its own plan describes its monitoring as manual. The full Index would show where inside the institution that chain breaks.