Consider an imagined village gathering. A drum calls everyone together and announces the decisions. Its sound commands attention, and people remember it long after the gathering ends.
But before the drum sounded, a spider had been weaving connections between people, carrying ideas and shaping opinions. The drum was audible; the spider’s influence was less visible. The loudest voice is not always the one that moves the community.
Boardrooms can work in much the same way. Airtime and influence are not the same thing. To understand the quality of a board’s judgment, we must examine both what happens during the discussion and what has already shaped it.
A board can have the right skills around the table and still fail to use them. Its members may collectively understand finance, operations, people, technology, risk and the organisation’s wider environment, resulting in a board that looks well composed on paper. Yet, it may not see what is actually shaping its most material decisions.

Those moments, when the tension is so thick in the Boardroom that you can cut it with a knife, tend to sneak up more often when the organisation is under pressure. They arrive without being calculated into the room.

I prefer to the called in prior to cultures becoming toxic, but I generally find myself called in when tension runs high between the NEDs and the executives – and most of the time both have legitimate reasons to be tense. Frustration is palpable and, before you know it, an us-versus-them atmosphere is created. I am often amazed at how a group of good people divides itself into camps where each considers the other not worthy of their trust. And often the cost of the tension to the organisation is not calculated or even acknowledged. Especially not when the organisation is in crisis.