How many Board papers have you approved this year that looked excellent, sounded intelligent, contained colourful dashboards, and still told you almost nothing about the actual condition of the organisation?
That question landed awkwardly in a Board retreat recently at a lakeside hotel where I was facilitating a governance session for directors of a fast-growing regional manufacturing company. The room had the usual ingredients of corporate respectability: leather folders, polished speeches, impressive titles, and enough tea breaks to feed a small village. Yet after two hours of discussion, something became painfully obvious. Everybody was discussing reporting formats while the company itself was slowly drifting into strategic confusion.
Quite embarrassingly, I had entered the room feeling clever, carrying governance frameworks like a village preacher arriving with ten commandments. Then one elderly non-executive director quietly leaned over and asked, “Young man, before we discuss governance maturity, can someone explain why profits are rising but customers are disappearing?”
That question humbled all of us in the room. Because many Boards confuse movement with stewardship. Activity becomes mistaken for insight. Thick reports become substitutes for clarity. Directors begin governing paper instead of reality.
The three-stone fireplace problem
In many rural homes across East Africa, cooking traditionally depended on three stones carefully positioned to support the cooking pot. Remove one stone and the pot tilts dangerously even if the fire underneath still burns brightly. That is exactly how many Boards operate today.
The three stones of effective governance are simple: truth, strategic clarity, and disciplined challenge. When one weakens, the organisation may still look stable for a while, but eventually the entire pot collapses.
I remember conducting a Board evaluation assignment years ago while serving around governance circles connected to directors across the region. One telecom company had spectacular monthly reports. Customer acquisition was on track. Revenue growth was green. Network expansion was fantastic. Employee engagement was fine. According to management, life inside the company resembled paradise itself.
But during a breakout session, a junior executive accidentally said something revealing. “Sir, the reports are technically correct,” he said cautiously, “but they are designed to avoid difficult conversations.”
That single sentence explained why the Board had failed to notice rising customer frustration, political exposure around tower expansion, and dangerous overdependence on one executive who controlled nearly every strategic decision.
Why “everything is fine” reports are dangerous
Weak Boards believe reporting is about information. Strong Boards understand reporting is about tension. If every Board meeting feels comfortable, somebody is hiding something.
You see this repeatedly in banks, telecoms, family businesses, and government agencies. Management teams learn quickly that directors prefer reassurance over ambiguity. So executives gradually curate information upward like a hotel chef preparing food for an important guest. The ugly parts are trimmed away before serving.
One CEO once joked privately: “Directors say they want transparency, but when you bring real business problems into the room, they suddenly become tired and ask for tea.” Everybody laughed. But nobody denied it.
That manufacturing company eventually discovered inventory leakages, weak succession planning, and a growing culture of fear among middle managers. Yet the Board had spent years receiving beautifully written “everything is fine” reports.
Kodak did something similar globally. The company had brilliant engineers who understood digital photography early enough. The problem was not absence of intelligence. The problem was governance psychology. The Board and leadership became addicted to protecting yesterday’s business model instead of confronting tomorrow’s reality. Meanwhile, companies willing to challenge themselves moved faster and survived.
The same pattern appears whether you are in Kampala, Nairobi, London, or New York. Geography changes. Human behaviour does not.
The boardroom reality check
During governance retreats, I use a simple exercise called the Boardroom Reality Check. The process is simple. Every director receives a blank sheet of paper and answers five questions anonymously:
- What issue are we avoiding discussing openly?
- Which report do we trust the least?
- What risk is growing faster than management admits?
- If the CEO resigned tomorrow, what would break first?
- What truth would frontline employees tell this Board that management never will?
Then the responses are shuffled and read aloud. You should see the room afterwards. One director once removed his glasses and whispered, “So we have all known this for months?” Exactly. That is the tragedy of many Boards. Directors privately sense the danger but collectively perform optimism.
The role of the Board is not ceremonial oversight. It is disciplined strategic stewardship. That requires directors to create conditions where difficult truths can travel upward quickly without punishment.
The best Boards Mr Strategy has seen do three things exceptionally well. They ask fewer operational questions but much sharper strategic ones. They reward early escalation of problems instead of punishing it. And they spend more time discussing assumptions than admiring dashboards. “A Board that only receives good news is not governing an organisation. It is supervising a public relations exercise.”
Before your next Board meeting
Before approving the next glossy report, ask yourselves this:
- What important truth might management be too afraid, too loyal, or too exhausted to say openly?
- Are your Board meetings generating strategic clarity, or merely producing ceremonial comfort?
- And finally, if your organisation collapsed slowly over the next three years, would the warning signs already exist inside the reports you currently describe as satisfactory?
Copyright Summit Consulting Ltd 2026. All rights reserved.
