I once sat in the so-called “war room” of a fast-growing retail chain. Every wall screamed activity, sticky notes, colorful charts, and “critical” project trackers. It looked impressive. The CEO stormed in with three new urgent priorities. The COO countered with five more. The CFO waved a looming cash crisis. The Head of Marketing was ready to launch a campaign “immediately.” It was not a war room. It was a circus. The truth here is that most leaders refuse to admit. When everything is urgent, urgency loses its meaning. It is like a hospital that calls “Code Blue” every hour;…

A regional insurance company hired a brilliant actuary. Top marks. Big potential. Every day, he would come in early, sit at his assigned workstation. Eyes sharp, shirt tucked. Ideas ready, but eight months later, he walked out. “I still do not know why I was there,” he told me. “Nobody explained how my work mattered. I just kept submitting reports. No feedback. When I asked for a copy of the strategic plan, my direct supervisor simply told me that “it is confidential.” I was there, with no direction. Just… noise.” He had been headhunted. He was gold. But they buried…

If your board is still relying on quarterly reports to understand risk, you are already too late. At one of the financial Institutions I consulted, the board confidently signed off on a clean internal audit report only to wake up to a ransomware attack that shut down operations for three days. The audit committee chair later confessed to Mr Strategy, “We asked all the wrong questions. We trusted compliance reports instead of interrogating risk intelligence.” That is the new reality of risk in the digital age: fast, silent, and often invisible—until it is too late. Today, governance without digital risk literacy…

A chair of a national commission once told me, “Our board is fine, we trust each other.” Six months later, three directors were under investigation, two strategic projects had stalled, and the CEO stopped attending meetings. The Company Secretary called again, not for strategy support, but for crisis recovery. Most board failures do not begin with fraud or scandal. They begin with blind spots, unchecked assumptions, unchallenged behaviours, and unmeasured effectiveness. The boardroom is the cockpit of your institution. If you never check the instruments, do not be shocked when the organisation crashes. The truth is simple: Boards that are…