Pace & Perspective: What I’ve Learned Sitting on Both Sides of the Board Table

One thing I've realised since spending more time on the other side of the board table is that I spend far less time thinking about the answers and much more time thinking about the questions.

As an executive, you're immersed in the organisation. You know the history behind the decisions, the personalities involved, the operational realities and the dozen other things happening at the same time. You're responsible for moving things forward, often at pace, and inevitably that shapes the way you look at a problem.

A board has a different job to do.

It has the benefit of distance and the responsibility to use it well. To ask whether the assumptions still hold, whether the risks have been properly understood, whether resources are being directed towards the right things and whether today's decisions are taking the organisation where it ultimately wants to go.

Having now sat on both sides, I think the relationship between pace and perspective is an important one.

Too much distance and a board can lose sight of what it actually takes to make things happen. Too little and it can get drawn into the detail, duplicating the work of the executive team rather than adding something useful to it.

The best conversations happen somewhere between the two.

My executive career taught me a lot about pace. At Chester Zoo, we were making decisions about growth, income, audiences, partnerships, investment and long-term direction while running a complex organisation that never stopped moving. Strategy had to survive contact with reality because ultimately somebody had to deliver it.

Agency life taught me something slightly different. You could walk into an organisation without carrying all of its history with you and sometimes see things that had become much harder to spot from inside.

I use both perspectives now.

Sometimes the most useful contribution around a board table is experience. Sometimes it's recognising a pattern you've seen somewhere else. Quite often, it's asking the question that gives everyone permission to look at something differently.

Good governance should create enough space for that thinking without becoming a brake on progress. Equally, pace shouldn't become a reason to stop asking whether you're heading in the right direction.

The strongest boards and leadership teams I've worked with understand the value of both. They know when to challenge, when to support and when to let people get on with the job.

Getting that balance right can make an enormous difference to the quality of the decisions that follow.