Before the meeting had even started, the Board Chairperson leaned back, looked around the room and sighed. “Why do we keep discussing problems that should have been solved two years ago? Every board paper explains yesterday. Who is helping us prepare for tomorrow?”
The office coffee machine had earned an unofficial name among staff: The Monday Morning Queue. Every Monday, the same ritual unfolded. Everyone wanted coffee before the weekly executive meeting. Nobody wanted to refill the water tank when it ran empty, each person assumed someone else would do it. The queue grew longer. Frustration spread. Meetings started late. Eventually, the office administrator quietly arrived, refilled the machine, cleaned the spill and disappeared without recognition.
As part of high performance culture transformation, I request to observe the staff go about their business. I arrive early at the company, and just take note of the day to day behaviours. One such morning, I stood there watching the scene unfold, so many people staff rushing to the coffee machine.
When one of the executive members arrived, they complained, “This machine is becoming unreliable.” Another replied, “We should probably buy a bigger one.” The administrator smiled politely before saying, “The machine is fine, it only needs someone willing to notice the water is running out before everyone becomes thirsty. “That small office moment has stayed with me for years because many boards behave exactly like that queue.
The problem is rarely capacity but anticipation. When I facilitate board evaluations, directors often believe their responsibility begins when management submits board papers. By then, the future has already happened, the board is reacting rather than governing. Boards become irrelevant because they lose the discipline of looking around corners. That is why we talk of the sights of the board – oversight, foresight, hindsight and what else?
Figure 1: The six sights of the board
Looking through the windscreen instead of the rear-view mirror
During a governance assignment sometime in December 2022 involving a long-established family-owned manufacturing business, the financial results looked healthy. Revenue had increased, profits were stable, and cash flow remained positive. Every board meeting celebrated another successful quarter.
Then one independent director quietly asked, “Where are customers buying from five years from now?” The room became noticeably thoughtful, and the Managing Director responded. “We have not discussed that yet, operations have kept us busy.”
Another director added, “Our market is loyal.” I interrupted gently. “Loyal until someone solves their problem better.”Within eight months, imported substitutes entered the market through digital distributors. Younger customers shifted quickly. Sales volumes began falling even though management continued reporting record production efficiency.
The board had mastered operational oversight while neglecting strategic anticipation. Efficiency protected yesterday, adaptability protects tomorrow.
Governance is becoming a future profession
Many directors still spend most of their meeting time reviewing compliance reports, approving budgets and examining historical performance. Those responsibilities matter, but simply no longer differentiate high-performing boards.
Artificial intelligence is changing industries faster than strategic plans are written. Customer behaviour changes before annual budgets are approved. Regulation evolves continuously, and family businesses face succession challenges while competitors emerge from entirely different sectors. That is why, I came up with the saying, “execution is the strategy” and started a Linkedin newsletter with that name. Yes, execution is the strategy.
Yet many agendas still allocate seventy percent of board time to reviewing history, that is governance through the rear-view mirror. The boards creating lasting value deliberately reserve meaningful time for emerging risks, technology shifts, talent pipelines, geopolitical developments, customer expectations and scenarios that management has not yet considered. Leadership begins before certainty arrives.
The question every CEO secretly wishes the board would ask
Executives often tell me privately, “I wish the board challenged our assumptions instead of asking us to explain every decimal point.” One Chief Executive recently admitted, “We spent forty-five minutes discussing travel expenses worth less than one percent of operating costs. Nobody asked whether our business model would survive the next decade.”
That message summarised the difference between administration and governance. Directors create value through judgment, and management creates value through execution. When directors become better accountants than strategists, the organisation slowly loses its future.
An exercise I use with boards
Whenever I facilitate strategy retreats, I ask directors to place every agenda item into one of three columns.
Column one: Protect today.
Column two: Improve tomorrow.
Column three: Invent the future.
The discussion becomes fascinating. Most agendas are crowded in the first column and very little survives in the third. Then I ask everyone to imagine they have been invited back exactly five years later. “What decision sitting on today’s agenda will people remember as the one that changed the organisation forever?”
The room becomes remarkably focused because directors suddenly realise that governance is not measured by how many resolutions they passed. It is measured by whether those resolutions changed the future. As I often tell boards, “History rewards directors who noticed tomorrow before everyone else did.”
If you are a Board Chairperson, ask your directors:
- How much of today’s agenda is preparing the organisation for opportunities and risks that have not yet appeared in management reports?
- Which assumptions about our business have we accepted for too long without challenging them?
- If our competitors redesigned this organisation from scratch today, what would they stop doing immediately?
If you are a director, ask your CEO:
- What trend worries you most that has never appeared in a board paper?
- What customer behaviour has changed that our strategy still ignores?
- If we were starting this organisation today, what would we build differently, and what is stopping us from starting that journey now?
I remain, Mr Strategy.
