Summary

  • LACNIC's February 2026 Board minute reports 99.5% completion for 2025 strategic objectives and 98% for projects. It also closes the 2022–2025 cycle with every objective above 90%, a 96% average and 100% for the Associates–Community perspective.
  • An earlier Board minute reports 98% completion for the 2023 Operational Plan and separately says cancelled actions represented 6% of total strategic actions. The minute does not say how those cancelled actions entered the 98% calculation.
  • Objectives, projects and actions are different units. The percentages cannot be added, subtracted or compared until the formula, weights, plan version and denominator rules are known.
  • A versioned denominator-change ledger would let LACNIC preserve legitimate adaptation while showing how cancellation, replacement, deferral and reweighting affected the published score.

The Board minute of 23 February 2026 records two remarkable closing judgements. For 2025, the strategic map reached 99.5% completion at objective level and 98% at project level. Across the full 2022–2025 cycle, every strategic objective exceeded 90%, the average was 96%, and the Associates–Community perspective reached 100%. The Board approved both the 2025 result and the four-year closure unanimously.

There is a strong defence of the process in the same record. Directors did not receive only a pair of percentages. The minute says their folder contained a complementary document detailing each objective and target. A public minute is a summary of a governance meeting, not necessarily the complete management scorecard. Nothing in the checked sources proves that the calculations were wrong or that the Board lacked evidence.

The evidentiary question lies elsewhere. The public minute does not show the objective count, project count, target values, actuals, weights, tolerances, rounding rule or treatment of work that changed state before closure. A reader can see approval, but cannot reproduce the approved figure.

That becomes more than a theoretical concern when the Board minute of 8 March 2024 is placed beside it. Reporting on the 2023 Operational Plan, management highlighted 98% completion. The minute says project delivery was detailed through both activities and budget. It then records that cancelled actions represented 6% of total strategic actions and that they had not been marked as “desired” during planning.

Those sentences should not be forced into an equation. The 98% may describe a weighted strategic map, project completion, an aggregation of indicators or another internal formula. The 6% concerns strategic actions. The minute does not say that cancelled actions were counted as complete. It does not say they were removed from the denominator. It does not say they kept their weight, lost it, transferred it to replacements or sat outside the calculation from the beginning.

That absence is the object of this article. It is not permission to choose the most suspicious answer.

A cancelled action is not automatically a failed action

Good management changes plans. An action can become unnecessary because another project delivered the same result. Conditions can alter. A Board can decide that a low-value activity should stop. A target may be replaced by a better one. Treating every cancellation as failure would reward institutions for continuing obsolete work merely to protect a score.

The opposite convention also carries risk. If every cancelled item simply disappears from the denominator, a completion rate can rise even when delivery has not changed. Reweighting can have the same effect. Neither convention is inherently dishonest; each answers a different question. One measures delivery against the plan originally approved. Another measures delivery against the plan still active after authorised changes.

Consider a hypothetical illustration—not LACNIC's calculation. A plan begins with 100 equally weighted actions. Six are cancelled after review, and 92 of the remaining 94 are completed. Against the original plan, completion is 92%. Against the active plan, it is about 97.9%. Both figures can be arithmetically correct. They describe different denominators.

Real strategies are more complicated. Objectives, projects and actions may carry different weights. Some targets are binary; others are continuous. A replacement may inherit the old item's weight, create a new target or sit under another objective. A partially completed action may contribute a fraction. A late correction may change an actual without changing scope. That complexity makes the calculation receipt more necessary, not less.

What the two minutes prove—and what they do not

The 2024 minute proves that cancellation was a visible category in LACNIC's reporting on the 2023 plan. It also proves that high completion and cancelled actions were discussed in the same agenda item. It does not prove a causal or mathematical relationship between the two figures.

The 2026 minute proves that management reported very high objective and project completion, that directors had a complementary objective-and-target document, and that the Board unanimously approved closure. It does not publish the formula used by that complementary document. Nor does it establish whether the 2023 and 2025 methods were identical enough for a trend comparison.

The public record checked here therefore supports a narrower conclusion. LACNIC has disclosed the result and the governance decision. The minutes do not disclose the versioned denominator path needed to reproduce or compare the result.

This distinction matters because a strategic score is reused. It can inform the next plan, justify priorities, shape budgets and appear in institutional accounts of performance. If the number travels without the state changes that produced it, later readers may treat a revised-plan score as performance against the original plan, or compare two percentages built from different units.

A denominator ledger, not a second management system

The remedy can be compact. LACNIC need not publish sensitive project detail, staff deliberations or security information. It needs a public calculation receipt that keeps material changes attached to the score.

Ledger field Minimum public evidence Why it matters
Plan version Identifier and effective date Fixes the scope against which the score was calculated
Stable item ID Objective, project or action ID plus parent Prevents renamed work from disappearing
Original target Unit, baseline, target and cut-off States what completion meant before change
Weight and aggregation Contribution to parent and headline Makes the percentage reproducible
State Complete, partial, cancelled, replaced, deferred, retired or superseded Separates delivery from authorised change
Change authority Date, responsible body and bounded reason Shows that scope did not change invisibly
Successor link Replacement or transferred target Prevents omission or double counting
Denominator treatment Retained, removed, transferred or reweighted Exposes the arithmetic consequence
Score reconciliation Before-and-after effect Joins the change to the published figure
Evidence and correction Completion pointer, limits and version history Preserves review and later repair

The ledger should distinguish units. An objective-level score cannot silently absorb project counts, and an action-level cancellation rate cannot be subtracted from it. Where weights are confidential or operationally sensitive, LACNIC can publish a bounded class or aggregate reconciliation while retaining the protected detail for oversight.

The crucial field is not “cancelled”. It is the combination of state, authority and denominator treatment. A cancelled action can remain visible as a legitimate decision. A replacement can show where its weight went. A deferred item can survive into the next cycle without being mistaken for completion. A correction can amend the score without erasing the earlier report.

LACNIC's figures may survive this test perfectly. That would be useful evidence in their favour. The point of a denominator ledger is not to lower a score. It is to make the score carry its own meaning.

Sources