What Boards Get Wrong About Strategy

Many boards believe their job is to approve the strategy that management brings to them. Management does the work, presents the plan, and the board votes. If the plan looks reasonable and the numbers stack up, it gets approved.

That is a limited view of the board's role — and it often produces strategies that are neither well-tested nor genuinely owned by the people responsible for delivering them.

The approval trap

When a board's primary contribution to strategy is approval, several things tend to go wrong.

First, the strategy arrives at the board table already formed. The thinking has been done, the options have been narrowed, and the recommendation has been made. The board is being asked to ratify, not to contribute. In that context, meaningful challenge is difficult — it feels like obstruction, and it often comes too late to change anything.

Second, the board's approval can create a false sense of accountability. Management has "presented" the strategy and the board has "endorsed" it. But if the strategy fails, the question of who owned it becomes genuinely unclear. Approval is not the same as ownership.

Third, a strategy that has only been tested internally — by the management team that developed it — is a strategy that has not been properly tested at all. The board's role is to provide the kind of scrutiny that internal processes cannot.

What a more active role looks like

A board that takes its strategic role seriously does not wait for management to present a finished plan. It engages earlier, asks harder questions, and contributes perspectives that management may not have access to.

That means being genuinely curious about the assumptions underlying the strategy. What would have to be true for this to work? What are the two or three things that could cause it to fail? How confident are we in our understanding of the external environment, and what would change our view?

It means being willing to challenge the framing, not just the details. Sometimes the most important contribution a board can make is to question whether the organisation is solving the right problem — not just whether it is solving the stated problem well.

And it means being honest about what the board does not know. Boards that pretend to more certainty than they have tend to approve strategies that have not been adequately stress-tested.

The relationship between board and management

None of this works without a productive relationship between the board and the executive team. A board that is adversarial, or that micromanages, or that substitutes its own operational preferences for management's judgment, is not being strategic — it is being disruptive.

The goal is a relationship where management brings its best thinking to the board, and the board provides the kind of rigorous, experienced, external perspective that makes that thinking better. That requires trust, clarity about roles, and a shared commitment to the organisation's long-term success.

It also requires a board that has done the work to understand the organisation's context well enough to contribute meaningfully. A board that only engages with strategy at the annual planning retreat is not in a position to provide that kind of contribution.

A more useful question

Instead of asking "does this strategy look reasonable?", a board that is taking its role seriously might ask: "Have we genuinely tested this? Do we understand the assumptions it rests on? Are we confident that the organisation has the capability to execute it? And are we prepared to hold ourselves accountable for the outcome?"

Those are harder questions. They are also more useful ones.