Addressing the elephant in the boardroom
by RApport
RApport is an online communications hub for members of the biotech community to share ideas, problems, and solutions.
“Blind Monks Examining an Elephant,” Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724). Source: Wikipedia (public domain).
January 27, 2022
Have you heard the parable of the blind men who encounter an elephant?
Each one puts his hands on a different part of the animal - the leg, the tusk, the tail, the trunk - then argues passionately with the others about the nature of the creature, with no one of them understanding the complete picture.
This is how board members can feel when asked to sit through a detailed meeting as sequential members of a biotech company’s team get up to explain individual parts of this quarter’s progress and plan. The board struggles to see the complete picture, while listening to you assert, “I promise, by the end, you’ll know what animal this is.”
Instead, it’s helpful to take a few minutes at the beginning of the meeting to give the board the big picture before asking them to analyze individual pieces of your narrative. At RA Capital, we encourage our companies to use a tool called the Elephant Slide. This slide helps visualize a company’s value proposition, goals, challenges, and upcoming decisions in one place - allowing you to address the elephant in the room, or four key questions that will be on every board member’s mind:
When will we next need to raise money?
What are we on track to achieve by the time we need to raise money?
How much will we need to raise to reach our next inflection point?
Have recent updates significantly impacted the company’s fundamentals?
Starting with the Elephant Slide puts every update your team members will present into its broader context. It reassures the board about your company’s fundamentals and clearly illustrates how any changes have affected them. Once the board has been calibrated to the overall strategic implications of upcoming updates, members can absorb operational and housekeeping presentations with less anxiety about overlooking their significance.
The Elephant Slide framework is used by an increasing number of companies today. In fact, we consider it to be the most important slide in any board pre-read deck. Give it a try and see for yourself! We bet you’ll find it quickly becomes a board favorite.
So what does the Elephant Slide look like?
The Elephant Slide is a visual dashboard built around your company’s core narrative. (For more on how to define your company’s core narrative, see RA Capital’s complete “Strategic Alignment: Board & Executive Resource” [SABER] guide. It’s a freely-available how-to manual on preparing for and running the most efficient, productive biotech board meetings.)
Let’s see an Elephant Slide in action.
Imagine a (totally fictional) clinical-stage neuro company called Neo, convening for its Q3 board meeting.
Neo starts by presenting their Elephant Slide for the previous quarter (Q2). You can see a slide title that puts the take-home message (“bottom line”) at the top; clear lines showing cash balance and next twelve months’ (NTM) spend; expected timing of important data readouts and the company’s next raise; and the point at which the company will run out of cash:
Then, Neo calls out all of the important things that have changed since the Q2 board meeting:
And ends with a clean copy of the Q3 Elephant Slide, along with an updated “bottom line” at the top. This is where the company is today. (The next board meeting starts here!)
In this way, you can use the Elephant Slide to track changes to your company’s core narrative across board meetings, allowing board members to easily follow progress. (The elephant slide never forgets!)
A company can also use the Elephant Slide to easily visualize scenario planning exercises. For example, what will happen if you raise money earlier than planned? What happens if a high-risk experiment does not go well or an important trial does not enroll as quickly as expected? Instead of speaking in detailed hypotheticals, which can get complicated quickly and confuse board members, visually illustrate the impact of each scenario using the Elephant Slide.
Interested in learning more about the Elephant Slide and its starring role in the best-designed board pre-reads? Check out RA Capital’s SABER guide. (And if you’re a visual learner, scroll down to watch our associated video series, where seasoned executives share their experiences with SABER principles!)
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Further Reading
