Thinking ahead, market collapse and boardroom blind spots, with Orna NiChionna

“You are not on a board to make friends. Friendship causes groupthink, and your job is to resist it at every turn." 

This week's guest on the Boardroom Confidential podcast, powered by Sherpany, is Orna NiChionna, Senior Independent Director at Burberry and the management consultancy Eden McCallum, and Chair of the Eden Project.  

Orna shares the boardroom story that defined her understanding of crisis governance: her time on the board of HMV. As streaming and the Kindle hit the company's music and book businesses simultaneously, she takes us inside the boardroom as lawyers and bankers crowded in to assess whether the business could continue to trade. 

Orna makes a compelling case for why the best board members are playing chess, not draughts - thinking several moves ahead between meetings, not just turning up, reading the materials, and going home.  

And she shares the story about an external board reviewer who spotted a groupthink pattern nobody inside the room had noticed. 

Orna previously served as Senior Independent Director at Saga and Bupa, non-executive director at Bank of Ireland UK Holdings, and spent nine years on the board of Royal Mail. 

Boardroom Confidential is brought to you by Sherpany, a leading meeting management solution, designed to meet the unique needs of the board, board committee, and executive meetings.  

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(02:10) Crisis on the high street 

(09:50) When The CEO Fails 

(11:16) Chess not draughts 

(15:02) External Reviews 

Key takeaways

Scenario planning must confront the full impact of AI

(07:12)

I think everyone has to get very knowledgeable about this. [...] The boards need to demand scenario planning, and honest scenario planning, from the executive teams. Look more forensically at scenarios of what if we were to use AI to its fullest extent here — to not have a call centre, what would that look like? What would it mean? Would we hire people for other roles?

I think there's a lot of confusion at the moment. People aren't actually focusing their thinking on the future. And it's very difficult because there's so much turbulence in the AI technology. I have some sympathy, but pretending it isn't there and that it will just make everybody a bit better at their jobs is delusional.

Board members must keep thinking between meetings

(11:16)

Boards are playing chess, not draughts [...] If you're playing chess, you have to think several moves ahead. And if you're playing draughts, you don't really. You think in little bursts and then you stop and wait for your opponent to do something. And if you're playing chess, you're thinking all these scenarios: what could happen, what might happen and how you might react.

I've been at boards, and I think my own career as a board member initially, it started off with: you go to the board meeting, you've read the papers carefully, you make some comments, and then you go home. And then a few months later you get more papers and you read them and you go home. And actually that's not a very good way to be a good board member, because as a board you really have to engage in the issues and think about them even when you're not in that board meeting at the time.

You will have a far more valuable board if you've got people who are , because you're not an audience member watching the chair and the CEO. You are a participant. And if you place yourself as an audience member, you won't be much value and you won't actually get the intellectual satisfaction of having engaged, having asked the right question at the right time, having perhaps changed the course of thinking because you were bringing something to it from outside that had occurred to you in another situation.

External reviews can expose dynamics boards cannot see themselves

(15:02)

The rule that I've tended to live with is that you get an independent outside review by an individual reviewer, having an individual reviewer in the room, once every three years or so.

I had one occasion when the board reviewer said she had noticed that the chair always caught my eye when he was floating an interesting proposition. And he was, in effect, looking for my support, and other members around the table were picking it up and thinking, well, if the chair wants that idea and Orna is keen on it, then it must be right, so we should fall in with them. In effect, we were creating a groupthink without noticing. [...] You could have a board dynamic that's really only noticeable to a third party, as it was in that case. It wasn't going to turn up in my questionnaire.