The Better Boards Podcast Series
The Better Boards podcast series is the podcast for Chairs, CEOs, Non-Executive Directors, Company Secretaries, and their advisors.
Every episode is filled with practical insights and learnings from those inside the boardrooms. We tease out what really matters and highlight actionable steps you can take to enhance the performance of your board.
The Better Boards Podcast Series
When Experience Isn't Enough: Governing in a World Without Precedent | Dorothy Burwell, Senior Advisor, FGS Global
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Rapid global change has created an unprecedented landscape. Many Boards have fallen into a reactive mode. A new research report from FGS Global highlights the challenges and offers insights to help boards govern with confidence again.
In this podcast, Dr Sabine Dembkowski, Founder and Managing Partner, is joined by Dorothy Burwell. Dorothy is Global Head of Board Advisory at FGS Global, a board director herself at Post Holdings and Pennon PLC, and co-author of A Hard Job Getting Harder: The Board's Role in a Rewired World. Drawing on interviews with board directors and General Counsels in North America, the UK, and Europe, Dorothy brings both the data and lived experience to this conversation. What she found is sobering and actionable.
“It is impossible to govern when you are flying blind.“
One of the most striking points in the new research is that more than 50% of Boards receive no real-time data updates between meetings. This creates practical challenges for Boards in terms of both intelligence and credibility. Management will not take recommendations from an out-of-date Board seriously, nor can Boards react well using stale information. As a result, smart Boards are building adaptive capacity to obtain fresher data and insights without sacrificing the deep expertise and judgment of experienced members.
“When you have to put everything together in a pretty, pretty bow and wrap it up for the board meeting, it's disruptive.”
Board members are often advised “nose out, fingers out” when it comes to operations. Management teams can find it intrusive to need to pull up to deliver reports and data packets to the Board, especially in a time-sensitive crisis. However, the best Boards blend rigorous accountability with psychological safety to have authentic discussions of business challenges and needs. These conversations and data sharing happen between and around formal meetings, so that Boards can have more meaningful official sessions and offer more impactful support in crisis scenarios.
“Our biggest job is to help management prioritise.”
For Dorothy, the most important duty of a Board is to make it easier for management to identify and respond to risk and change with the right levels of urgency and prioritisation. To do this, she recommends a 2x2 decision matrix modelled from emergency medicine’s best practices.
In this matrix, Boards look at issues across two dimensions. The first asks if the change is evolutionary or revolutionary. Evolutionary change is sustained and gradual, while revolutionary change is disruptive and destructive. The second dimension asks if the change or issue is uniform or fragmented. This considers whether there will be equal impact or whether selected areas will be more intensely impacted.
Once Boards understand where the issue falls in the matrix, they can work out the tangible ways to support management. For example, does a geopolitical risk require an adjustment of protocol over time, or an immediate halt to in-market activities? This approach clarifies conversations and nourishes ongoing transparency about priorities and impact
The three top takeaways from our conversation for effective boardss are:
1. The power of the question is no longer enough. You need continual dialogue to build trust and relationships as the foundation of meaningful governance.
2. If your decision architecture within your Board is not clear and well-practised or does not enable you to rapidly prioritise between issues, it’s time to have a rethink.
3. Don’t be afraid to question whether you need to unlearn some of your assumptions and build new ones based on experiences rooted in the current environment.
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