The Efficiency Dividend
Assume the cost of operating this organisation falls — meaningfully, and soon. That money does not allocate itself. Three provocations for the boardroom: what you do with the dividend, what you now demand from your software vendors, and what you now expect from people like the one presenting this page. Every note you capture lands in one of five board-language buckets, so you can see where the room's attention actually went.
How to run this — facilitator guide
Timing (40 min)
- 0–3Frame it: these three threads are exactly what this board will hear in future meetings. The job today is to arm you, not to make you experts — you do not need to be an expert in a thing to set expectations about it.
- 3–18Thread 1 — the dividend. Set the gain together, then hand the sliders to the room. Let them argue. The argument is the deliverable.
- 18–28Thread 2 — vendors. Go category by category. Force a choice: cheaper or more capable. "Both" is allowed only after they pick which one leads.
- 28–36Thread 3 — consultants. Deliver the disclosure line verbatim, then let them set the expectation.
- 36–40Debrief on the bucket map: where did the attention land, and what got no notes at all?
Thread 1 — say this
"If running this organisation gets fifteen or twenty percent cheaper — and that is the conservative end of what's coming — deciding what to do with that money is not an operations question. It is a board decision. And in a mutual, the shareholders you are deciding for are the policy members."
Do not resolve the split for them. When someone says "reduce headcount," don't flinch — put it on the slider and make the trade-off visible. When the total won't reach 100, point out that unallocated money is also a decision.
Thread 2 — say this
"From now on, every vendor renewal starts from one fact: their cost of building software just collapsed. So either your bill drops, or the product gets dramatically better. If neither happens, that margin went to their shareholders instead of your members."
Expect "our vendor is building X" stories to surface in future board meetings. This exercise gives directors the questions to ask when they do.
Thread 3 — say this, verbatim
"Before we do this one, full disclosure: this cuts against my own marketing — I'm the external consultant in the room. If you have historically hired consultants as domain experts, AI now offsets much of that need. So your expectation should shift: we should be cheaper, or we should deliver more. Hold me to it."
The self-awareness is what makes the rest of the day credible. Don't soften it.
Note discipline
Every comment worth keeping gets tagged to a bucket — revenue, cost, risk, strategic positioning, or stakeholder value. If you can't tag it, it isn't a board point yet; ask the speaker to translate.
Operating gets cheaper. Now what?
Pick an assumed efficiency gain, then split the dividend across the options a board actually has. The sliders must sum to 100 — because in the real world, it does.
Add a number and the split turns into dollars.
What this split says
Your software vendors owe you an answer
AI has collapsed the cost of building and running software. For each vendor category, pick the demand this board takes into the next renewal: drastically cheaper, or drastically more capable. Each choice generates the questions to ask across the table.
The value of external advice is repricing
"Full disclosure: this cuts against my own marketing — I'm the external consultant in the room. If you've historically hired consultants as domain experts, AI now offsets much of that need. Your expectation should shift: we should be cheaper, or we should deliver more. Hold me to it." The facilitator, out loud, before this thread starts
Set the board's new default expectation for external advisers — then take the questions that follow into every engagement letter.