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Governance
From oversight to foresight: How boards can learn to see the future
Published June 30, 2026 in Governance • 7 min read • 
Audio available
In an era of constant disruption, oversight is no longer enough. Having served on boards through extreme turbulence, Natacha Theytaz introduces a new framework to integrate strategy with foresight and shield organizations from structural volatility.
I served as a board member in the air transport industry during the pandemic, when revenues collapsed within days. I have also governed through sustained volatility, where instability accumulated rather than erupted. In both scenarios, risks had been identified, registers were finalized, and controls were operating. Yet documentation did not translate into anticipation. These experiences have led me to question what we, as board members, can do differently to shield the companies we serve from emerging futures.
Boards operate in what increasingly feels like structural volatility: not episodic disruption, but a steady erosion of predictability. Beyond diligent supervision, how can boards anticipate change before it becomes visible in results? Oversight remains necessary, of course, but it is no longer sufficient. Boards are rarely inattentive and governance processes are often rigorous. The problem is not diligence, it is design. Many governance architectures have been built to supervise rather than to sense.
Strategy discussions, risk reviews, assurance reports, and cultural indicators are typically handled by different committees, at different moments, through different lenses. This fragmentation can create temporal blind spots – not always visible in the moment, but often evident in hindsight. Our instruments are largely lagging. Financial results, audits, compliance dashboards, and risk heat maps tell us how the system performed but rarely reveal how the terrain is shifting beneath it.
The problem is not diligence, it is design. Many governance architectures have been built to supervise rather than to sense.
Two scenarios that test foresight
- Shocks expose the absence of extreme-scenario exploration
When COVID-19 struck, I was serving on the board of an international airport. Passenger traffic collapsed almost overnight, and revenues fell by roughly 80% within days. As chair of the audit and risk committee, I witnessed how quickly oversight tools lost predictive power. Pandemic risk had been listed and controls were functioning, yet survival suddenly depended not on compliance thresholds but on liquidity endurance and strategic optionality.
This led me to question whether our governance systems enabled us to anticipate the unexpected, or if we were simply reacting to events as they unfolded. At times, it felt like recalibrating an aircraft in mid-flight. Every assumption had to be re-examined, without the option to pause. The boardroom atmosphere shifted. Discussions moved from validating past performance to recalculating viability under radical uncertainty. Forecasts became assumptions, and recovery curves became hypotheses. Each decision carried disproportionate consequences because visibility was limited and timelines undefined.
- Sustained volatility exposes the absence of structural sensing
In a board role within a national association representing international investors in a volatile emerging market, our assessment of risks was tested in a different way. Here, volatility manifested in operational disruption, regulatory uncertainty, and financial exposure. Price rises accelerated into hyperinflationary territory, the currency depreciated sharply, regulatory interventions occurred with limited notice, and political and geopolitical tensions intensified.
Board discussions increasingly focused on regulatory predictability and investment confidence. We engaged policymakers in dialogue to seek clarity and stability in a rapidly shifting environment. Then devastating earthquakes struck, killing thousands of people and injuring members of our teams. Infrastructure and supply chains were disrupted overnight, and liquidity tightened as capital sentiment changed.
Unlike the shock of a pandemic, there was no single inflection point. Pressure accumulated – operationally, financially, and psychologically. Our attention constantly shifted between day-to-day resilience and long-term viability. From consolidated reporting, performance could still appear resilient. On the ground, the strain was visible in fatigue, capital constraints, and rising uncertainty. Individually manageable pressures and events compounded into systemic fragility.
The sensing gap
Dynamic environments rarely deteriorate in straight lines. They shift when assumptions fail simultaneously: when liquidity, trust, regulation, and behavior interact. As geo-economic fragmentation accelerates – through trade realignment, sanctions regimes, and regulatory divergence – the assumptions underpinning strategy and business models become more fragile. Boards must deliberately connect external macro signals with the strategic assumptions underpinning their business model.
Yet few boards are deliberately structured for sensing, even when the intent to be forward-looking is there. Having led the integration of global audit, risk, ethics, and security insights across multinational environments and contributed to executive committee and board deliberations, I have seen that integration alone does not guarantee anticipation. Even well-aligned assurance systems remain structurally retrospective if they are not explicitly connected to strategy, external signals, and scenario exploration.
We supervise execution, we validate control integrity, and we review exposure – often thoroughly, sometimes exhaustively. But how often do we rigorously interrogate the assumptions beneath strategy? We must ask the following: What must be true for our capital allocation logic to remain viable? Which regulatory or geopolitical shifts could invalidate our model? What ecosystem signals are emerging before they appear in earnings? And where might execution strain accumulate before it breaches formal thresholds?
Boards tend to scrutinize results more than assumptions, yet fragility often hides in assumptions. The consequence is rarely immediate collapse, rather an erosion of optionality – strategic flexibility narrowing before we realize it. Decisions become reactive. Adaptation occurs under pressure rather than through foresight. A sensing gap emerges.
From registers to radar
In volatile environments, governance becomes less about precise prediction and more about disciplined sense-making. How do we achieve this more robust anticipatory approach to governance?
These experiences led me to articulate a four-pillar framework to address the tension between oversight and anticipation: integrated strategy, risk, assurance, and foresight, or ISRAF. Most organizations have improved coordination across assurance functions, but far fewer have woven structured anticipation into core board dialogue to integrate:
- Strategic intent and major capital bets.
- Risk exposure and assurance insight.
- Cultural and behavioral indicators.
- External ecosystem and geopolitical signals.
Without this integration, signals remain compartmentalized – visible within functions, but not synthesized into strategic judgment. Through ISRAF, strategy becomes the organizing lens, assurance provides contextual input, and foresight becomes disciplined exploration. It does not act as yet another dashboard but as a governance radar system. The objective is to recognize structural shift earlier, before strategic optionality narrows.
Increasingly, digital tools and AI-enabled analytics can help detect weak signals across assurance data, operational metrics, and external trends – turning fragmented reporting into an early sensing capability for boards.
How would this work in practice? When approving an investment, for example, the board not only reviews projections and risk heat maps but also stress-tests the assumptions underpinning the decision:
- What regulatory stability are we assuming?
- What capital conditions must persist?
- What geopolitical developments could alter cost structures?
- What cultural or operational indicators could signal execution fatigue?
It means mapping dependencies across revenue, supply chains, stakeholder access, and regulation as interacting dynamics rather than static categories.
One starting point is simple: dedicate recurring board time to assumption-testing of the organization’s most material strategic bets, integrating external signals and cultural indicators. Anticipation becomes a discipline of integration rather than an additional governance layer. The approach remains evolving, refined through application, experimentation, and shared learning.
In volatile environments, governance becomes less about precise prediction and more about disciplined sense-making.
Anticipation as fiduciary discipline
Oversight asks, “Are controls functioning?” Enumeration asks, “Have we identified the risks?” Anticipation asks: “What future are we implicitly assuming, and how might it change?”
Oversight and enumeration protect performance. Anticipation preserves durability under pressure. For boards, recognizing this distinction is now a fiduciary duty. Institutions weaken when early signals go unchallenged and resources remain misallocated. Fiduciary responsibility increasingly requires structured anticipation; not only to prevent the erosion of optionality, but to preserve room to maneuver when conditions shift.
For boards to remain effective stewards in turbulent times, governance must move beyond monitoring past performance to rigorously challenging the assumptions that shape the future. Ultimately, the task of governance is not only to safeguard performance today but also to preserve the institution’s capacity to endure and adapt across cycles.
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