Volatility pulls boards into operations. Their leverage lies in decisions made before the disruption.

Jesper E. Thomsen · 25 October 2026

Disruption now reaches a company as an operating problem within days, and boards respond by moving closer to the weekly loop. The outcome is largely set earlier, by decisions on exposure, thresholds and who can act without asking. Taking those decisions well requires more time and operating knowledge than the traditional portfolio of five seats allows.

Boards have moved closer to operations. More meetings, more data requests, directors calling managers below the CEO. Harvard Business Review opened a piece in March with the line that boards are acting more like operators than ever before. The reason is easy to see. A shock to supply, prices or demand now reaches the company as an operating problem within a week, and the board wants to be where the problem is.

I agree with the diagnosis. I doubt the remedy. It puts the board where the decision shows up, which is rarely where it was made.

Where the decision was made

The week a tariff lands, management chooses between the options the sourcing footprint left open, and the footprint was decided years before. A supplier failure plays out inside the room set by how many sources were qualified and where stock was held. A price shock on energy lands on contracts and hedges signed long before it.

A board that joins the weekly loop adds a step to a decision that needs fewer steps. It arrives with less information than the people already in the room, and with the authority to override them.

Decisions taken in calm

What a board can do is decide in calm what has to hold during a disruption. These decisions concern operations, but they are meant to change slowly.

Exposure in operating terms. The largest share of volume the company accepts on one supplier, one market or one customer. How much margin it will give up to keep a customer through a disruption, and for how long.

Decision rights and thresholds. What management can do without asking, what comes back to the board, and how fast. Switching supplier at a cost of two points of margin for a quarter is management's call. Changing a commitment to a customer worth a fifth of revenue is not. The threshold has to exist before the disruption, because during it every decision feels like the second kind.

The assumptions under the strategy. The few assumptions that would break the plan if they proved wrong, each with a trigger that brings it back to the board when it moves. Energy prices, a tariff regime and the price point of AI-enabled competitors are typical.

None of this is new. What has changed is the cost of skipping it. In a stable period nothing tests these decisions. In a volatile one they are tested every quarter, and a board that agreed nothing in advance has to be consulted on everything.

Operating data as evidence

The day-to-day matters to the board as evidence about those decisions. The question about a weekly number is whether it pushes an assumption past its trigger or shows that a threshold was set in the wrong place. If it does, the board has work. If not, the board has information.

That distinction gets harder as data gets cheaper. Lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell noted last year that, absent a conflict or improper purpose, a director's right to company information is essentially unfettered. The line is crossed by purpose, asking in order to oversee or asking in order to run. AI removes the cost of asking. A director can now hold the same dashboard as the COO, without the context the COO has.

Accountability

A board that shares the operating decisions also loses the position from which it judges them. When the CEO executes a decision the board pushed for, the board cannot hold the CEO to account for the result, and the CEO knows it.

BDO's 2026 survey of more than 200 US public-company directors suggests boards are finding this difficult. The share rating their collaboration with the CEO and management as highly effective fell from 69% to 58% in a year.

Ram Charan, Dennis Carey and Michael Useem described three modes for a board, taking charge, partnering and staying out of the way. Each is right at some point in a disruption. The failure is moving between them without saying so, which leaves management guessing which board it has this week.

What this does to the market for directors

Setting a threshold in operating terms, and reading an operating number as evidence about an assumption, requires directors who know the operations. That knowledge decays, and keeping it current takes time.

Ronald Gilson and Jeffrey Gordon described today's directors as thinly informed, under-resourced and boundedly motivated, and wrote of the monitoring board that it simply does not scale. Their Board 3.0 borrows from private equity, with a group of empowered directors who have more time, real equity and analytical support of their own. The portfolio of five or more non-executive seats was built for a monitoring board. If boards keep moving in this direction, I would expect fewer seats per director, higher fees, more working chairs, and more boards anchored by an owner close to the business.

Danish boards start with an advantage. The Companies Act already gives the board responsibility for the overall and strategic management of the company, and Nordic boards with an anchor owner have long worked with managers below the CEO. BCG found 77% of anchor-owned Nordic boards interacting with management below the CEO, against 53% where ownership is dispersed. A Danish board needs no new mandate. It needs different people and a different cadence for the decisions it takes in calm.

Where it does not hold

In a company of thirty people the chair is often the most experienced operator available, and the board is part of the management bench whether anyone calls it that or not.

When survival is at stake, the board takes charge, and it should.

Events nobody wrote a trigger for are not covered either. The first weeks of the pandemic had none. What helps then is a board that can convene quickly and decide on incomplete information, which is a question of who sits on it.