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Strategy
Strategic friction beats perfect harmony for better decision-making
Published September 24, 2026 in Strategy • 11 min read • 
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Smooth board meetings and quick approvals are misleading indicators of effectiveness. Marianna Zangrillo and Thomas Keil reveal how the best-performing boards harness the power of carefully managed conflict.
Rapid read:
- Strategic friction allows boards to embed constructive tension into their discussions and decision-making processes.
- Disagreement too often surfaces only after the decision is implemented, typically too late to adjust.
- The highest-performing boards share a counterintuitive characteristic: rather than avoiding tension, they deliberately build it into their governance processes.
When challenge is a gift
The boardroom was calm, with a pervading sense of harmony. The CEO had outlined a bold strategic plan, focusing on a multi-billion-dollar investment in artificial intelligence to reshape the company’s operating model and long-term positioning, pretty much in line with investors’ expectations.
The directors nodded in agreement; some raised clarifying questions, but no one challenged the core assumptions or engaged in debate. The chair was satisfied, believing there was alignment, and guided the discussion to secure the board’s approval.
Six months later, the weaknesses of the decision began to emerge, and board members started to blame each other. The investment relied on optimistic adoption rates, underestimated execution complexity, and reflected an incomplete understanding of geopolitical constraints affecting data flows. What had been perceived as efficient decision-making gradually revealed itself as a collective oversight failure.
Yet the board had done what many governance frameworks and board chairs implicitly encourage: making a decision quickly, aligning behind a common position, and avoiding publicly visible disagreement. In doing so, it failed to assess the decision with sufficient rigor.
This situation is far from unusual. It reflects a growing paradox in governance, where boards, under increasing time pressure, often equate lack of debate with alignment and effectiveness. One board chair told us: “The best meetings are those where we reach decisions without too much debate. Given our tight agenda, we don’t have the time to debate everything.”
Disagreement too often surfaces only after the decision is implemented, typically too late to adjust. High-profile governance failures such as Enron, Wells Fargo, and Boeing can be interpreted as involving limited board challenge and apparent consensus despite diverging private opinions. Many boards are optimizing for cohesion when they should be optimizing for robust debate. The result is a subtle but dangerous pattern in which premature consensus weakens strategic decision-making.
High-performing boards treat disagreement as a resource rather than a problem.
Boards operate in an environment where the pace, magnitude, and unpredictability of change frequently outstrip the ability of governance structures to adapt, whether it’s AI, geopolitics, supply chains, organizational footprints, capital allocation, or activist investors.
The traditional signals of a “good board,” such as alignment, collegiality, and efficient meetings, can become misleading indicators of effectiveness. Trust and psychological safety may be confused with a lack of debate or a failure to stress-test any proposal.
When taken too far, these qualities can suppress dissent and debate just when they are most needed, limiting the board’s ability to challenge its own and management’s assumptions and to explore alternative perspectives. Following the Boeing 737 Max crisis, investigations criticized the board for relying heavily on management’s representations and failing to challenge it sufficiently.
The research for our book, The Next Board: Delivering Value Today While Making The Board Fit for Tomorrow, suggests that the highest-performing boards, when it comes to decision-making speed, quality, and effectiveness, share a counterintuitive characteristic: rather than avoiding tension, they deliberately build it into their governance processes.
Based on interviews with over 120 chairs, directors, and CEOs across Europe and North America, we found that, rather than focusing on rapid consensus, these boards deliberately create opportunities for directors to challenge assumptions, explore competing alternatives, and test strategic proposals to improve the quality of their decisions.
Combined with mutual trust and psychological safety, chairs consistently described rigorous, even heated, debate not as a sign of dysfunction but as a defining characteristic of boards that make better long-term decisions.
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Explore programsThe danger of extremes
During our interviews, we discussed challenges related to board dynamics. We found that boards tended to fall into one of two patterns, each of which undermines effective decision-making.
Artificial harmony: Boards prioritize collegiality and alignment to the point that dissent remains largely hidden. Directors may hesitate to challenge management or each other for fear of disrupting meetings, changing the tone of the conversation, or appearing confrontational. Meetings may be efficient and well-managed, but decisions are insufficiently scrutinized, allowing risks and blind spots to remain hidden until they materialize in implementation.
Unmanaged confrontation: Disagreement is present but poorly structured and dysfunctional. Discussions can quickly become personal, positions may harden, and trust between board members erodes. Instead of sharpening decisions, conflict and debate become distractions that consume time and energy.
Both extremes lead to the same outcome: a reduction in the quality of decisions and diminished effectiveness as the board loses the ability to debate issues constructively. The challenge is not to eliminate conflict or to encourage more of it indiscriminately, but to calibrate it carefully so that it remains constructive and focused on substance.
Beyond harmony: the case for strategic friction
Boards that productively manage conflict explicitly build strategic friction into their decision-making. We define this as the structured, intentional use of disagreement and conflict to improve the quality of decisions without eroding trust and psychological safety.
High-performing boards treat disagreement as a resource rather than a problem, creating conditions in which assumptions are challenged, alternatives are explored, and decisions are rigorously stress-tested, all without allowing discussions to become personal or divisive.
Instead of asking how to create fast alignment, boards should ask: “How do we design for sufficient disagreement so that it strengthens decisions, avoids premature closure, and enhances performance?”
One director we interviewed said: “The speed of decision-making matters, of course, but the most important factor for good board decision-making is whether we have considered all angles to the problem. Have we thought about the proposal deeply enough? Have we considered all the risks? Today, stakeholders look at your decisions in detail and will challenge them if you don’t do your work.”
From concept to practice
The transition to strategic friction does not require a complete overhaul of board practices. It can begin with targeted steps that gradually reshape how discussions take place. Here is a practical starting point:
Diagnose the status quo
Assess whether discussions tend toward excessive harmony or unproductive confrontation and identify where critical perspectives may be missing.
Redesign one key agenda item
Experiment with structured challenge in a single high-stakes decision, for example, by introducing dual options.
Experiment with role rotation
Assign challenger and integrator roles to distribute responsibility for dissent more broadly.
Clarify behavioral norms
Explicitly define how disagreement should be expressed, reinforcing the distinction between challenging ideas and challenging individuals.
Equip the chair
Provide tools, feedback, and, where necessary, coaching to support effective management of tension.
Over time, these practices can be scaled and embedded into all decisions, turning strategic friction into a capability rather than an occasional intervention.
Three levers for designing strategic friction
Our research identifies three levers that enable boards to transform friction from a potential liability into a strategic asset.
1 – Structural friction: designing debate into the agenda
Board meetings often begin with management presenting its preferred option before opening the floor for discussion, often followed by quick approval, especially if pre-meeting alignment was part of the process. As one board chair of a Swiss publicly listed company told us: “I talk to all the board members in advance to bring everyone on board so that when we meet as a group, we can be effective and make quick decisions.”
However, this approach reinforces a single narrative and limits the exploration of alternatives. Structural friction can introduce a counterbalancing mechanism that creates contrast and opportunity for challenge:
- Ask management to present multiple strategic options, so the board can compare alternatives rather than react to a single recommendation.
- Invite board members to share concerns or counterarguments with everyone, or at least the board chair, before the meeting, giving alternative views a chance to surface early, and allowing directors to form alternative perspectives.
- Set aside dedicated time for debate before moving toward a decision, especially on major strategic issues, rather than allowing the remaining time in the meeting to determine the depth of debate.
Structural friction makes constructive disagreement part of the process rather than something individuals have to introduce on their own. Challenging ideas becomes more natural, expected, and easier for everyone around the table.
2 – Role-based friction: separating challenge from identity
A common issue in board dynamics is the tendency for certain individuals to regularly adopt behavioral roles, such as “the challenger” or “the devil’s advocate,” while others do not speak up. This can unintentionally limit participation in critical debate and lower the quality of the discussion. Kathleen Bailey-Lord, chair at ed-tech company Janison and board member at Datacom, AMP, and St Vincent’s Health Australia, explained: “It is not enough just to ask people for their opinion when they are around the table. Not every voice will speak their truth.”Â
To counter this, high-performing boards explicitly assign and rotate responsibility for challenging, identifying risks, or identifying weak assumptions or blind spots, to ensure dissent is not tied to personality but embedded as a shared responsibility.
Board chairs can assign temporary roles among board members such as: the challenger, who questions underlying assumptions, searches for risks, and tests the robustness of the proposal; the devil’s advocate, who argues why the proposal should not be approved to highlight alternative positions; and the integrator, who synthesizes different perspectives, identifies common ground, and helps the board move toward a balanced decision.
By rotating these roles between directors, boards normalize dissent, avoid labeling individuals as inherently difficult, and ensure that a broader range of perspectives is consistently brought into the conversation.
3 – Relational friction: building trust and psychological safety
Structured disagreement can be effective only if it is grounded in trust and psychological safety within the board. Boards that excel along this dimension establish clear behavioral norms that guide how disagreement is expressed in practice, ensuring that tension remains constructive rather than personal and disruptive.
Typical norms include:
- Critique ideas, not individuals, so that debate remains focused on substance rather than becoming personal.
- Assume positive intent, recognizing that differing views are expressed in good faith, even when perspectives diverge.
- Encourage dissent before decisions, but shut it down after, creating space for disagreement early enough to influence outcomes.
Ian Carter, board chair of Watches of Switzerland Group PLC and Eataly, described the importance of such explicit principles: “We agreed on a clear rule for final decision-making for our board. When we are in the boardroom, and the doors are closed, anything is up for discussion.
“We discuss and argue different points of view, but at the core of our process is a commitment to improving decision‑making for the benefit of our teams, our shareholders, and our company. Once we agree on our decisions, the expectation is that everyone will stand behind them. Once we leave the boardroom, everybody speaks as one.”
These norms must be reinforced, especially by the chair who plays a central role in maintaining the tone of discussions, intervening when debates risk becoming personal, and ensuring that all voices are heard.
The board chair role and calibration toolkit
In the boards we studied, the chair (or the lead independent director in cases where the CEO is also board chair) is the primary architect and orchestrator of strategic friction in the board. In our experience, it is almost impossible to implement strategic friction without the leadership of the chair.
“The board chair should set the tone of the board meeting, and they should be in charge of the board meeting and set the agenda,” observed Rod Adkins, chair of Avnet and board member of UPS, PayPal, and Grainger. The chair needs to feel comfortable with managing conflict and with balancing intense, ideas-driven debate. Not all do.
They must not only shape the agenda but actively manage the quality of discussion as it unfolds. This requires micro-interventions that help maintain the right level of tension, ensuring that debate remains rigorous without becoming unproductive. They should:
Invite dissent: open up space for alternative views by asking questions such as, “What are we missing?” or “Who sees this differently?” particularly when the room appears too aligned.
Reframe conflict: keep discussions constructive by separating ideas from individuals and focusing attention on the argument itself.
Slow down decision-making: resist the urge to move too quickly to closure by pausing to test assumptions more rigorously.
Balance voices: ensure that more vocal contributors do not dominate the discussion, while actively drawing in quieter perspectives.
While each of these interventions may seem small, their cumulative effect is significant, shaping a board culture in which disagreement is expected, valued, and directed toward better outcomes.
From harmony to high performance
Boards cannot rely on the comfort or the illusion of consensus as a signal of effectiveness. What may appear as alignment on the surface can mask insufficient challenge and untested assumptions, leaving critical decisions more fragile than they seem.
In a turbulent environment, boards must develop a stronger capability to question underlying premises, explore alternatives, and test decisions before committing to them. Regardless of board members’ seniority, the future is inherently uncertain, and no one has a crystal ball. Success comes from combining board members’ broader experience and distinct perspectives.
Many boards are optimizing for cohesion when they should be optimizing for robust debate.
This does not require more conflict for its own sake, but a deliberate and structured approach to how disagreement is introduced and managed. Strategic friction allows boards to embed constructive tension into their discussions and decision-making processes while preserving the trust and cohesion that effective governance depends on. When used well, it becomes a source of clarity rather than disruption, and a driver of performance rather than a risk to stability.
Every board experiences friction. The question is whether that friction is left to chance or whether it is designed as a strategic asset.
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