What we do
Our Board work rests on a single proposition: that the criteria boards are currently judged on are not the criteria that predict whether they decide well. Composition, tenure, process, and disclosure are extensively measured. The substance of board decisions is not. Closing that gap is the work this firm exists to do, across four practices.
Decision Intelligence
The first offering of its kind for boards. The Board Decision Quality Framework is a structured methodology for recording board-level decisions, reviewing them against what actually happened, and producing a measure the Framework calls assumption accuracy: how often a board's analytical judgements prove correct over time. Most governance evaluation looks at proxies. Assumption accuracy looks at the substance.
Board Advisory
We work with chairs and boards in a bespoke advisory capacity, typically on a retained basis. The work tends to cluster around the questions that do not fit anywhere else: a difficult decision forming over months, a transition the board needs to think through before it becomes formal, a crisis that requires independent perspective and accumulated experience rather than process. Within this practice we offer two specialist services in areas we have particular experience of.
Funds governance. Helping Fund Boards go beyond second-guessing the portfolio manager, and where needed, addressing the threat or reality of shareholder activism. Both are areas where conventional governance tools fall short and judgement matters more than process.
Private Equity portfolio governance. An under-served area. Helping new investment directors make a strong contribution from the start, and improving consistency of governance across a portfolio of companies where the same investor sits behind multiple boards.
Risk Culture
Senior managers need confidence that their reports will make the right judgements in situations no playbook covers. That is what risk culture actually is, and it is now a supervisory expectation in its own right. We work with regulated firms on the practical question of how to build and sustain a consistent, risk-aware culture across the business, through structured workshops and ongoing review designed around the specific risks the firm faces.
Corporate Culture
Culture, in the sense that matters to a board, is the pattern of decisions an organisation makes when no one is watching: how risk is escalated, how challenge is received, how bad news travels upward. Great culture adds value. Weak or corrosive culture destroys it. We work with boards and executive teams to identify where the gaps sit between stated values and lived experience, and to address what we find through tailored remediation rather than off-the-shelf programmes.
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