The Future-Ready Board: What It Takes to Lead in a BANI World

Boards once geared themselves for operating in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Today, directors face a combination of pre-existing disruption and new geopolitical realities: BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensible) environment, where traditional governance models may be cracking under pressure. A once-reliable cadence of quarterly meetings, site visits and annual off-site working sessions can’t keep up with the constant pace of change—be it geopolitical, technological (AI’s impact on the future of work alone will require a new approach) or cultural. 

A future-ready board must be agile to support and guide leadership teams in this ever-evolving, noise-filled ecosystem effectively. We see three dimensions as critical to fulfilling a board’s mandate: 

• the importance of providing (and demanding) the space to stay forward-looking despite today’s often necessary “game of whack-a-mole” that can easily usurp any future-focused mind space
• the importance of having the right mix of voices (board composition)
• and the right behaviors (board culture) in the boardroom. 

The most effective boards today are forward-leaning and deeply engaged. They equally support the leadership team in prioritizing initiatives to drive performance today and guide them in defining the questions that enable a company to thrive. Boards can achieve this by embracing agility: the capacity to adapt with speed and clarity. They often practice scenario planning, hold unscheduled convenings, and seek outside expertise, all of which are powerful tools to make them better equipped to anticipate and respond to disruption. But agility also depends on mindset. Board directors must model learning behavior—staying curious, asking hard questions, embracing experimentation and being a student of the respective business, attuned to consumer and market trends.

Oversight and foresight have always been the mandate of any board but leaning into both and ensuring that foresight does not fall by the wayside matters now more than ever. 

This focus on foresight and agility requires a hard look at who is sitting at the table. With relatively few board seats and a shifting environment, every director and every director’s contribution matters. In the past, boardrooms have skewed heavily toward financial, legal, and operational backgrounds. But in a BANI world, new kinds of expertise may also be critical.

Some boards may benefit from functional and category expertise—such as digital transformation, ESG, geopolitical risk, and talent. This expertise helps to navigate complexities with specialized knowledge and insights. However, balancing this with an enterprise perspective and relevant industry expertise is equally important. CEOs who have actively led through crises or transformations bring an invaluable external lens to the board. They understand rapid shifts and can provide strategic guidance that others might not be able to.

Generational and experiential diversity are also significant. Boards that integrate fresh voices—through term limits, creative pipelines, or other board programs—gain a more current understanding of emerging customer behaviors or technology innovations, for example. 

The true magic lies in the blend. How do you curate the right portfolio of backgrounds across experience and recency, outside and industry perspective and functional depth and enterprise view given the company’s opportunities and challenges? Being intentional in bringing together varied perspectives will foster constructive creative friction and enable richer discussions. By weaving these elements together, boards can be agile, can inspire and drive long-term success while being prepared for immediate challenges.

An often undervalued lever at the board’s disposal is culture. Culture is not just a set of values or a purpose statement; it is the lived behaviors of an organization, or on a board — how decisions are made, how resilience is celebrated, how dissent is welcomed, and how actions align with stated values and with strategic intent. It determines whether a company can sustain innovation, weather shocks, and retain talent through turbulence. 

Boards should invest in being explicit about their own culture, asking themselves: 

• What behaviors are required to successfully guide their company? 
• What is the expectation of board directors at the table? 
• And how is the relationship between board directors and executive team, between Chair/Independent Lead Director and CEO lived? 

In today’s environment, we believe trust and transparency to be crucial. CEOs need true sparring partners and sounding boards, which requires building relationships that are grounded in psychological safety, strategic alignment, and shared purpose. As Ashley Summerfield, global leader of Egon Zehnder’s Board and CEO Practice says, “The boardroom should be a safe but not a soft space.” 

The most impactful boards don’t just challenge—they inspire. They help CEOs reconnect to long-term vision, define strategic priorities (maybe even encourage bold bets), and evolve organizational culture to reinforce those behaviors that will enable strategy implementation, starting at the top. 

The board as the steward of a company’s long-term success and value creation is becoming ever more critical. And, as the corporate landscape continues to shift, a new operating model for boards is emerging. One that is strategic, developmental, and deeply human. 

It blends oversight with foresight. It carefully curates the composition to include a variety of diverse experiences to prompt and promote the right breadth and depth of discussions. And it invests in a board culture that allows these discussions to be productive, turning challenge into inspiration, into action and into opportunity. This requires self-reflection on how to interact, how to empathize, how to challenge and how to find the collective will to adapt. It is the boards that prioritize their humanity as much as their mandate that will set the pace for a new era of board leadership. The resilience needed to navigate a BANI world is not built on process alone, it is built on people.