Each board pack I have ever opened is a prediction in evening wear. The numbers project, the risks hold scores, the sensitivities are tuned — and then reality performs something unmodelled, and directors discover their scrutiny was aimed at the plan instead of the world.

This session serves that moment: the governance conversation for occasions when sightlines are short and fallout is large. It starts from an uncomfortable claim — that prediction is the weakest use of board hours — and replaces it with something tougher: rehearsal, tripwires, and way-backs.

Rehearsal means exercising the verdict before the emergency sends its summons. The toughest boards I guide hold a yearly drill with a blunt title: what could sink us? Not ceremony, but pipework — who rings whom, who may pledge what, which limits bend and which break. When the unmodelled strikes, the room answers from habit, not panic.

Stop requesting forecasts from management. Insist instead on knowing what breaks, what warns of it, and who acts first.

Tripwires turn foggy vigilance into working oversight. Instead of “watch the risk,” the board pre-agrees which readings unleash which replies: at this number we meet, at that number we move, at the red line control passes over. Agreed calmly, tripwires pass for prudence. Agreed mid-crisis, they prove unworkable — which is why they must precede the storm.

And way-backs raise the question most boards dodge: if we are wrong, how do we get back? Rulings with cheap reversals can be taken quickly on thin evidence. Rulings with no return merit the full deliberate machinery. Most boards I meet run both kinds through the full machinery, then marvel at their own tardiness.

The session framework

  • Practise the rupture: who rings whom, who pledges what, which limits bend.
  • Lay tripwires in calm weather: readings that call a meeting, an action, a handover.
  • Price the exit before the entry: cheap reversals move fast, dead ends move slowly.
  • Oversee the readiness, not the forecast.

As a keynote, the session fills forty-five minutes with a practical exercise: each table drafts one tripwire for a live risk on its own register. Chairs say the exercise is what lasts — a drafted tripwire tends to be adopted by Monday morning.

Jordan Ellery

Jordan Ellery brings this session to boards and regulators. About the keynote →