Governance Scenario
Standard 5.1 · Monitoring and Evaluation of Strategic Goals
Six Objectives, All Amber
By Synnovate · Published 2026 · Governance Scenario
The Situation
The head had introduced a strategic dashboard eighteen months ago. It tracked progress against the six priorities in the school's strategic plan, using a RAG rating system. Every quarter, the board received an update. Every quarter, all six objectives were rated amber.
At the third quarterly review, a trustee asked what amber meant in practice. The head explained that amber indicated progress was being made but that the objective had not yet been achieved. The trustee asked what would make an objective green. The head said it would be green when it was complete.
The trustee then asked whether any objective could ever be green during the five-year plan period, or whether green was only possible at the end. There was a pause. It was a question that had not previously been asked.
Provocations
- "A RAG system that never produces a green rating is not a monitoring system - it is a reporting habit."
- "When a board cannot distinguish between good progress and poor progress from the dashboard, the dashboard is not doing its job."
- "Objectives that cannot be evaluated during the plan period have no mechanism for course correction."
- "The question 'what would make this green?' should have been asked before the dashboard was built, not eighteen months into it."
Considerations
Strategic monitoring is only useful if the board can use it to assess whether the school is on track and, if not, what should change. A dashboard that shows all objectives at amber - every quarter, without variation - provides no information that enables either of these functions. It tells the board that things are in progress. It does not tell them whether progress is sufficient, ahead of expectation, or falling behind.
The problem in this scenario is not that the head introduced a dashboard. It is that the dashboard was built without defining what each colour means in terms of observable progress at each stage of the plan. A meaningful RAG system requires clear criteria: what does green look like at the end of year one? What would trigger a red rating? Who decides?
Boards that accept a monitoring system without interrogating its design are accepting a governance tool without understanding whether it works. The trustee's question - what would make this green? - is exactly the kind of scrutiny that should happen at the point of adoption. Better eighteen months in than never.
The practical response is to pause the dashboard and rebuild it with the head - defining criteria for each colour at each stage, agreeing what constitutes meaningful progress, and ensuring the board and the head are using the same language. This is not wasted effort. It is the work that should have happened first.
Platforms like Loom support strategic monitoring by enabling boards to attach defined success criteria to strategic objectives from the outset, so progress can be assessed against something specific rather than against an undifferentiated sense of direction.