Outcome Monitors After the Gavel

Not legal advice. Fiduciary follow-through is set by your duties, bylaws, and counsel. This essay argues that the vote is the midpoint of a decision — not the ending — and stays inside what Facts and /agent-facts.json say Prepared Board does today.

Boards are excellent at passing things and uneven at watching them. The motion carries. Someone writes "staff will monitor." Six months later nobody can find the metric, the due date, or the last report. The decision record looked complete on adjournment night and hollow at the annual meeting.

The afterlife of a decision

A closed decision still owes the board four kinds of honesty:

1. Closure evidence — what proved the act (recording citation, executed copy, posted notice).
2. Follow-up actions — owners, due dates, done / open / overdue.
3. Outcome monitors — target, metric, status, due date, last report.
4. Revisit date — when the board promised to look again.

Minutes can mention these. They rarely are these. When monitors live only in a PDF appendix, they die when the PDF is renamed.

What Prepared Board shows today

Per Facts:

• Signed-in members can open Decision outcomes at /app/decisions/outcomes, linked from the chair path.
• It lists each closed decision with:
  • its resolution text,
  • its outcome monitors (target, metric, status, due date, and last report),
  • its revisit date,
  • its follow-up actions done, open, or overdue,
  • and its closure evidence,
  • and says so when any of these is missing.
• It does not judge whether a target was met, because no stored field records that judgment; it shows the last report as written.

The chair path on the signed-in home surfaces the latest closed decision with evidence when the data exists, including vote outcome and recusal clauses when stored fields support them (see The Decision Record Is the Product).

Not live (do not invent): WebAuthn, SSO, SCIM, ASPA, bank, live filing feed, outbound email in the demo without provider 2xx, no no Clear evaluation response, BYOK. Full list on Facts.

Practice after the gavel

1. Before adjournment: name at least one monitor or action on every material ADOPTED decision — or consciously waive and write why.
2. File evidence on the decision, not only in the pack root (closing with evidence, close with evidence guide).
3. Open Decision outcomes the next morning. Missing monitors should be visible, not tribal knowledge.
4. Report in the monitor's words. The product stores last report text; it does not certify that the target was achieved.
5. Revisit when you said you would. A revisit date without a calendar chase is a wish.
6. Keep agents honest. Point them at /agents and Facts so they do not invent a scoring engine that "grades" monitor success.

Related templates: motion/vote record, minutes approval, consent calendar. Related guides: board action item tracking, land trust governance (Piscataqua), private company governance (Northlight).

Why "last report as written" is a feature

Boards often want software to declare victory: green badges, percent complete, "on track." That invents a judgment the board never recorded. Prepared Board's Decision outcomes view is deliberately narrower. It surfaces the monitor fields you stored — target, metric, status, due date, last report — and leaves attainment to humans (and counsel when stakes require it).

That design matches how good minutes work: they record what was said and decided, not a consultant's scorecard. When an outside agent reads the outcomes list, it should repeat the last report text and the missing cues — not upgrade them into a certification that the easement walk "succeeded" or the warehouse pilot "hit SLA."

If your board needs a formal attainment vote later, that is another decision on the record — with its own vote, recusal, and evidence — not a silent flag on the monitor row.

Walk it: Piscataqua monitors + Decision outcomes

Piscataqua Harbor Trust seeds an outcome monitor on the closed spring easement path (metric around the monitoring walk / notes filed — see seed). Sign in via Try a board as a sample board (see /sample-decision) (password on Facts). Open the chair path, then Decision outcomes at /app/decisions/outcomes. Read monitors, revisit, actions, and evidence — including honest "missing" cues.

Public pack while you walk the fall agenda: /sample-decision. Other seeded boards (Acme, Northlight, Seacoast, Kittery) also carry monitors on closed decisions; the chooser at /#try-a-board only signs into those five chairs.

Acme's pack /sample-decision is another path if you want a private-company year with multiple monitors on closed items.

Try that board

Try a board · After sign-in: /app/decisions/outcomes · Pack: /sample-decision · /facts · /agents · /templates

Not legal advice. Decision outcomes does not judge target attainment. Claims: /facts and /agent-facts.json.