Why chairs must act to broker board-CEO relations
With CEOs facing unprecedented demand for information and constant updates, chairs need to step in urgently to prevent management from becoming overloaded....
Governance
Honestly speaking? Your board is probably too vanilla
Published August 13, 2026 in Governance • 7 min read • 
Audio available
Modern corporate governance is built for a stable world that no longer exists. If your board members look diverse on paper but always agree in practice, then it’s time for a rethink, suggests Parminder Kohli.
Rapid read:
- The question a board should be asking is not, “What is most likely to happen?” but: “Have we tested this strategy against the extremes?”
- A board of 10 benefits from having one or two whose frame of reference is meaningfully diverse.
- The real test of boardroom preparedness is not how diverse the table looks, but whether the individuals around it are willing and able to disagree.
The right board for the right era
The questions a board asked about the world were very different a decade ago. Are supply chains lean enough? Is the company sufficiently globalized? Are we capturing the opportunities in emerging markets like China?
These were the dominant strategic conversations, and they assumed that a stable world order underpinned the rules of the game.
That stability is gone. The global COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East, and a dramatic shift in US trade policy have, in quick succession, unsettled assumptions that once seemed safe to make.
For sectors like infrastructure and energy, where investment decisions are large and play out over decades, that matters enormously.
Businesses need some confidence in the fiscal environment, the tax regime, and continued market access to commit that kind of capital. Geopolitical instability raises the risk premium on almost every major decision a board signs off on.
The result is that conversations that used to sit quietly on the risk register, reviewed once a quarter by the audit committee, are now live and central. Supply chains that appeared secure can be disrupted overnight by a blocked shipping lane, a tariff announcement, or a country no longer considered a safe place to operate.
Boards are being asked to oversee strategy in conditions far less predictable than those for which most governance structures were designed.
This creates a particular tension. The more uncertain the environment, the greater the temptation for a board to get closer to the operational detail – to feel, in effect, that it needs to run the business rather than govern it.
That is the wrong instinct. The job of the board is to keep its, “nose in and its hands out,” to stay close enough to challenge and stress-test the strategy, without drifting into decisions that are the executive’s to make. The more turbulent things become, the harder it is to maintain that discipline, and the more important it becomes.
Expertise on paper is not the same as in practice
Faced with this shift, many boards have responded by adding geopolitical or geographic expertise to their composition. That is a reasonable instinct, but it is not enough on its own, because the expertise that helps is not always the kind that is easiest to recruit.
I left India 27 years ago. If I described myself today as an India expert on the strength of having grown up and worked there, I would be doing any board I served on a disservice. The country has moved on in ways that someone who left decades ago cannot fully track.
Yet boards routinely lean on this kind of credential: a director who once worked in a region or studied a market years ago is treated as a substitute for a lived understanding of how that geography functions today.
Genuine geopolitical insight on a board means people with current depth, who understand not just the history of a region but its present politics, alliances, and the way decisions are made there now. That is a higher bar than simply checking whether a director has international experience somewhere on their CV.
Diversity goes beyond geography and culture, in any case. If everyone around the board table agrees with everything, that is probably not a good sign. A board where everyone has arrived at similar conclusions, by similar paths, is poorly placed to spot the assumptions that turn out to be wrong.
Different perspectives are valuable precisely because they create tension, test the consensus view, and surface the blind spots that a more homogeneous board would miss.
A board where everyone has arrived at similar conclusions, by similar paths, is poorly placed to spot the assumptions that turn out to be wrong.
What has held boards back
If the need is so clear, why is progress so slow? Two things hold boards back, in my experience.
The first is a bias toward familiarity. Even boards that have diversified along lines of gender and ethnicity often remain conservative about diversity of background and sector.
There is a natural pull toward directors who have spent their careers close to the company’s industry, rather than bringing in a genuinely different perspective: someone from government, from a different sector, or from a part of the world the business has not traditionally drawn directors from. A board of 10 benefits from having one or two whose frame of reference is meaningfully diverse.
The second is cultural, and it is particularly pronounced in the UK and parts of Europe, where boardrooms tend toward a consensus-driven style. That culture has its strengths, but it can mean that sharp challenge gets softened precisely when it is needed most, because directors are reluctant to be seen as difficult.
If you compare the growth performance of UK and European companies against other major indices over recent years, it is hard not to wonder whether that tendency toward consensus, however well-intentioned, has cost performance.
Turning diversity into better decisions
Assembling the right range of perspectives is only the first step. The harder and more important task is to create an environment in which those perspectives shape the conversation. That responsibility sits substantially with the chair.
Three questions stand out for consideration here:
1 – Is the board using scenario thinking rather than approving a single forecast?
In an uncertain world, no one can say with confidence which direction events will take. The question a board should be asking is not, “What is most likely to happen?” but:“Have we tested this strategy against the extremes? What happens if a key trade route closes? Or if a market we depend on becomes politically unviable?” Boards that only discuss the central scenario are not stress-testing anything.
2 – Do directors trust each other enough to have honest conversations?
Boards invest time in strategy days, site visits, and informal get-togethers for reasons that go beyond familiarizing people with the business. All build the relationships that make it possible to challenge a colleague’s view without the conversation becoming personal. The same is true of the relationship between the board and the executive team. Challenges have to be understood as a shared effort to improve the decision, not an adversarial exercise, or people will simply stop speaking openly.
3 – Is the board’s view of an uncertain future shaping who leads the business?
Few board responsibilities matter more than CEO selection, and if a company is navigating a different geopolitical environment, the board needs to ask honestly whether its leadership has the range of perspective that moment requires – not simply whether the boardroom does.
The harder work is ahead
Boards have made progress on the visible markers of diversity over the past decade, and that should be recognized. But assembling the right range of perspectives was always the easier half of the task.
The harder half – building a culture in which those perspectives are genuinely heard, tested, and allowed to challenge the prevailing view – remains unfinished. It matters more now than it did a decade ago, because the world has become so much less predictable.
The real test of boardroom preparedness is not how diverse the table looks, but whether the individuals around it are willing and able to disagree.
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