The Board Value Index: are boards delivering on their potential?

In December 2025, Board Intelligence published the second Board Value Index, a unique benchmark of board performance designed to uncover what’s really happening in boardrooms around the world.

In this webinar, the report's author, Megan Pantelides, and a panel of experts including David Grayson CBE, Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta and Dr Scarlett Brown, unpacked the findings and the implications for directors navigating an increasingly complex landscape.

Watch the video or read the transcript below to explore:

• Key findings from the report — how board impact is evolving over time and where boards today are falling short.

• How board performance stacks up across the UK, US, and Middle East, and what regional differences reveal about governance trends.

• How board members can upskill themselves to govern with confidence in 2026 and beyond. 

Below is a transcript of the webinar.

Megan: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Board Intelligence webinar. I'm Megan Pantelides. I'm a senior director here at Board Intelligence, and I'm the author of the research that we'll be discussing today. It's great to have so many of you joining us. Do let us know in the chat where you're dialling in from. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are.

I'm delighted to be joined today by three brilliant speakers who I'll introduce you to very shortly. We're going to be discussing the findings of the latest board value index.

Over the next forty five minutes, we'll be sharing some of the key insights from the research, a little bit of data. But more importantly, we'll be hearing what our expert panellists make of it all. So please do feel free to ask questions via the q and a function and chat. We'll be monitoring those throughout.

Before I introduce our panelists to you, I'll just give you a very quick introduction to Board Intelligence.

We are EMEA's largest board technology and advisory firm. We provide consultancy services and AI powered software to more than eighty thousand leaders around the world, but all of this is underpinned by what we call the science of board effectiveness.

Now what does that mean in practice? Many of you will know us for our board management software, our board portal. But we help boards at every stage of the board cycle. Not just in and around meetings, but we provide software and services that are supported by methodologies, insights, and systems we've developed over the past twenty years that do everything from helping to set boards and committees up, so clarifying their mandates and building out forward agendas and calendars through to improving the efficiency of board processes, such as writing minutes and helping directors to prepare for meetings using AI.

Beyond that, everything to do with enhancing board effectiveness through information, board evaluation, upskilling programs, and so on.

So that's who we are. If you have any questions about what we do, please feel free to visit our website or get in touch with Scarlett or myself.

Now I have the privilege of introducing our three amazing speakers. Thank you all for joining us today. So, Bhaskar, you're at the top of my screen, so I'll start with you. Hopefully, the first picture on our side here. Doctor Bhaskar Dasgupta is a seasoned board member. I hope that's not a euphemism for old.

And an executive with extensive experience in regulatory engagement, strategic business development across sectors such as banking, crypto, and asset management. He chairs the boards of Apex Group's regulated entities in the Middle East and India. He chairs the Middle East Stablecoin Association, the principal of a family office. And when he has time, I think, Bhaskar, you must have thirty eight hours in every day compared to the rest of us who’ve got twenty four.

You've also advised regulated firms, family offices, and startups in a number of countries, including the UAE, Brazil, the UK, India, and many others, and previously led the development of Abu Dhabi's International Financial Centre and its financial services regulatory authority. So welcome, Bhaskar. Thank you for joining us.

Bhaskar: Thank you for inviting me.

Megan: It's a pleasure. David Grayson is an Emeritus Professor of Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield University School of Management. He's a companion of the Chartered Institute of Management and a founding honorary fellow of the Institute of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability. David has chaired several public bodies and charities in the UK, including the National Disability Council and the Institute of Business Ethics. He's an independent board member for Baiduri Bank in Brunei, for which he chairs the group risk management committee and leads on sustainability. He's part of the circle of advisers for business fights poverty and atrocity of place matters.

And similarly to Bhaskar, seems to find so many extra hours in the day. He's also the author of eleven books and cohost of a podcast called All In, the sustainable business podcast. Thank you, David. Welcome.

David: Pleasure to be here.

Megan: And finally, last but not least, Doctor Scarlett Brown is a member of the advisory team at Board Intelligence. She works closely with our clients to assess and simplify their governance structures, to train directors and management teams, to design effective reporting systems and frameworks, and to evaluate board performance among other things. She previously headed up our think tank and is so into corporate governance, she got a PhD in it.

Before joining Board Intelligence, she worked as director of research at the think tank Tomorrow's Company, where she led her own research consultancy, research with purpose. She also cofounded the non-executive director search site Dynamic Boards, which I'm sure some of you will have heard of. In addition to that, she's authored some major research insights in collaboration with organisations such as the CIPD, Grant Thornton and the University of Oxford. Thank you, Scarlett. Welcome to you too.

Scarlett: Absolute pleasure.

Megan: Super. I'm itching to fire some questions at our panel, but before I do, I'll share a little bit of background very briefly on the research itself just to set the scene. So the Board Value Index is a twice yearly anonymous survey of directors that we first launched in June this year.

Our aim with the index is to offer a pulse check for board effectiveness, essentially. We want to check-in regularly on how directors think they're performing and what's on their minds, and we want to compare these results over time, over geographies, oversight structures, ownership structures, and so on. So every time, we ask ten quickfire questions to give us just a sneak peek insight into the vital work that boards and directors are doing. We released the second edition of this research just a few days ago, and we expanded the survey this time around to include directors in Canada and GCC member countries as well as the UK and the US. So we have three hundred and thirty three respondents in total, all representing organizations with over fifty million pounds of revenue across all sectors and split between private and listed companies.

So that's the research.

We'll share some links to the reports themselves in the chat and via email afterwards. They're also available on our website. But I'm going to dive in.

I'm going to start with a question that runs through every edition of the Board Value Index, and it's a pretty simple one. Are boards adding value? I suppose that's really what the whole thing is about. This time around, thirty three percent of directors in the UK and North America and forty eight percent of directors in the Middle East describe their board as an essential tool for value creation.

But one key takeaway for me, when we look across all the regions we surveyed, is that many boards are leaving value on the table. Majority of respondents in all cases, in all regions, believe there is room for improvement in how directors operate and that their boards could be adding more value.

So I guess we'll start. Maybe, David, I'll come to you first. Is this a state of affairs that you recognise, and what do you think might be driving some of those responses and particularly those regional differences?

David: So I think that this is an incredibly useful pulse survey, and the report makes the point that it's going to become even more useful as you build up longitudinal data over the next few years. So, I'm less interested in the actual in one six month survey, but what the trends are going to show. And if we've got a significant number of people serving on boards who don't believe that their boards are adding as much to the effectiveness and the success of the organizations that they are responsible for, then we definitely need to work harder and to unpick why that is.

I think there are a number of reasons, and much of the work that board intelligence does is designed to try and tackle those challenges, whether that's in terms of the discussions on boards being too much looking back as opposed to really focusing on what are the challenges, what are the headwinds that we face, how we're going to deal with those problems, looking at the question of the really good board packs, what we can learn from those to make sure that nonexec directors have really got the most important information. And, also, of course, thinking about how do the discussions in the board meetings and outside the boardroom really can be organized in the most effective ways.

And part of that, and I'm sure we're come back to this a little bit later, Megan, is around what do we as non exec directors ourselves need to do in order to make sure that we individually are contributing as well as we possibly can to the collective efforts of the boards on which we serve.

Megan: Absolutely. Scarlett, I wonder if you have anything to add.

Scarlett: Yeah. No. Definitely. Again, mean, you would have seen me sort of nodding along furiously there.

I think, you know, it's something that we talk about a lot at Board Intelligence. Fundamentally I think what these findings say to me is that board members want to do well and I think we can sometimes forget that actually this is you know ultimately boards want to do well and the majority of board directors really want to add value to their organisations. One of the reasons I love this research that you run is that it's about asking board members how much they think they could be, they currently add value and the kind of potential there. And what I really love is that actually this suggests that board members are sort of going away from their board meetings with perhaps that nagging feeling that goes, do we really spend our time wisely?

Do we really in that two hour or three hour or five hour or three day board meeting, did we really get to the heart of the topics that matter?

Is the CEO going away thinking that I've really helped them to achieve something? And I think that nagging feeling that we might have, or whether we admit it in a survey or not, I think that's part of what this really gets to. And it's not to say, as you say in the research yourself Megan, it's not to say that we're making a value judgment and saying boards aren't adding value because many of them do, we know there's lots of brilliant board members out there, but that actually if the board members feel like they could be adding more, then we ask the question how do we set them up for success? And then you get to everything David's already mentioned about well actually there's loads we can learn about what we can do to set board members up for success if we support them or if ourselves as board members we can be doing the right things, the training, the upskilling, that kind of thing.

But really how do we make everybody go away from that board meeting, go, God, that was a really good use of everybody in that room's time, all the hours that were spent producing reports, all the administrative burden that adding all of that time and resources up we go, yeah, that was really worth it. And as you know Megan, from the other research you run, the total cost of that is significant.

So actually, getting value out of that board meeting, you're starting with quite a high cost. So really, how do we make that cost worth it? And for me, the sky's the limit there around how much more we could be getting.

Megan: That's a good point. Bhaskar, I know you sit on boards across lots of different market sectors. What are your thoughts? And I think in particular, bringing in that perspective on how boards in the Middle East perceive their performance.

Bhaskar: So I think, first of all, both David and Scarlett have said from a broad high level across the, across the board, if you excuse that pun, points, that the report, produces. In Asia and Middle East and perhaps in the emerging, markets, one of the things that I'm sure we will be talking a bit more about is that the vast amount of businesses are private businesses. So, the promoter chairman usually is a very, very strong and a big character.

Consequently, independent directors have to perhaps navigate a much more sensitive path that might not be seen elsewhere. There's also a preponderance of state owned enterprises, which bring their own challenges. And perhaps, in a way, the cultural factors over here are substantially higher in importance than perhaps more professional pieces, that you may have seen, or I've seen in London, Singapore, New York, etcetera.

The last point that I would like to make is just that: board directors don't have a good way to learn. Each role is so violently unique, and that role keeps on morphing, if I may, almost, every, six months to one year. You might be the same, but the company keeps on morphing, the challenges keep on morphing, and the buck stops with you.

And you can't really cross correlate or talk to others in generic ways, but the only people you can talk to are other board directors. And that's why the reports like yours, go a very long way in telling us what's happening elsewhere and distil it down. Look. I mean, I'm already reading hundreds of pages of board packs.

But you are able to bring all that knowledge down into capsules that I can capture and go deep if needed. So it's an amazing thing to have.

Megan: Thank you. Well, that's very kind. I think just to pick up on something you said there, I mean, the data does show that private company directors are more positive about the contribution that they make than those enlisted companies.

I guess my question is, are private company boards inherently more useful than public company boards?

Bhaskar: I would say, it's not a question of being useful or not useful. I would say public limited company boards, and I want to use this word which might not land very well, but what the heck? I'm an old git. I can get away with it, unlike David.

I think public limited company boards are encrusted with rules and regulations, and they are frequently not allowed to say quite a lot of things.

And the constraints on the board's freedom are much more. A private limited company can move much faster. Therefore, a private limited company board director necessarily has got more fun. I mean, I can do more things.

I'm sitting there. If I do something within three months, when I come back to the next board meeting, I expect action to happen. In a public limited company, if I do something, I'll be lucky if something comes back, you know, in two years time. I'm exaggerating to make a point.

Yeah. But the freedom of expression, execution, and result, I think, are much higher in the private limited companies.

Megan: Interesting. Nice. That is also something in in in why those boards exist to start with. More of a choice than an obligation, and the design of the board, composition of the board is more perhaps by individual bespoke design than perhaps by ...

Scarlett: I was going to say something similar, Megan. I think you're exactly right there that there's something about if you take away the fact that the board needs to be there, then everybody is there not necessarily by choice, but you know they're there for a particular reason. There was interestingly, McKinsey came out with some research earlier in the year that was looking exactly at this about, I think that the headline for those was something about what can listed company boards learn from private equity boards. And, again, I don't think any part of the ecosystem should hold any other part of the ecosystem sort of up as a pariah.

I think they all have their strengths and weaknesses. But again it was saying kind of echoing some of that, actually those directors coming from kind of private boards kind of across the piece, there was a higher propensity to have a clear sense of what their expectation of directors were. So things that we again do in our client work around establishing, like, what is the mandate of the board, and is everybody clear on that? What's the expectation?

Something that, for example, we don't see very often, for example, in onboarding, but can be a really powerful part of onboarding that you say that the onboarding sets the expectation of what the board is there to do. We sort of sometimes I think it's because these things get kind of lost in convention. We assume we all know, so we never actually articulate it. But of course, if you're an organisation that doesn't necessarily, isn't mandated to have a board that looks or feels a certain way, you've got more impetus to say this is how I want our board meetings to run, for example.

So, yeah, as you said, a bit more freedom. And I think that piece around, you know, what can we learn from that, that piece around making sure that every board member and the board itself has a really clear mandate and really clear what they're there to do is something that one can do no matter what kind of board you are.

Sorry, Megan. I think you've just talked yourselves into another board intelligence webinar topic around what can PLC boards learn from other types of boards. And perhaps, are there some things that over time, some accretions of compliance requirements, etcetera? Because I agree with Bhaskar that there is potentially a risk that some of the extra compliance requirements around PLC boards may be counterproductive.

And I think, David, you and I have talked about this before around, you know, we see it, for example, what can not for profit and profit boards learn from each other. Know not for profit boards are particularly good at setting the tone within a meeting of why are we all here, know who is the ultimate user of our services or what are we ultimately here to achieve, really clear sense of purpose and values.

So yeah, I think you're right, maybe we are talking ourselves into what can x learn from x, but I think there is a lot that we can learn without, as I'm really glad that we haven't delved too kind of too quickly into oh, well, listed boards are just, you know, overblown with all this compliance. It's actually there are things that you can do even within all those requirements that, of course, listed company boards can't get away from.

Megan: Absolutely. Absolutely. Great. Now my next question is going to focus on two big topics at the moment, I think, to some extent, cybersecurity and digital disruption. It took me nineteen minutes to get AI into the conversation.

So firstly, cyber.

We asked directors to tell us how confident they were in their board's ability to respond to a major cybersecurity incident. And forty two percent of directors in the UK and North America said they weren't fully confident in their board's ability to respond to such an incident. However, in the Middle East, sixty percent of directors said they were very confident in this regard.

I think in both cases, that still leaves a good proportion of boards with some work to do on building that confidence. And one of the most interesting questions that we asked of UK and North America respondents was whether or not their board or management team had engaged in a cybersecurity simulation or a cyber incident simulation in the past two years.

Almost half of respondents at their board or management team had conducted at most one simulation in the past two years, which was an interesting finding. On AI, we asked respondents in the UK and North America the extent to which emerging technologies like AI, other disruptive potential threats or opportunities were a standing item on their agenda. And fifty four percent of respondents said they only discuss AI periodically or reactively, which obviously made us sit up and listen when we heard that back. Now we're going to dive into cybersecurity in greater depth in future webinars.

So I'm not going to get too into the specifics of how you respond to that that risk and what it looks like there. Same with AI. Anyone that's attended any of our webinars in the last year will know we talk about this quite a lot. But I will ask one question of you all on this topic because I think this ultimately speaks to risk and how boards engage with risk.

And, David, perhaps I'll come to you first. I know you've got a lot of experience in this area in particular.

How do boards engineer meaningful value adding conversations about risk? I'd love your thoughts on that.

David: So, the bank board on which I'm currently serving, we have just very, very recently done a half day simulation of a cyber attack, organised with the help of, Singapore Institute of Directors. We're going to do something in even more detail next year to follow-up on that, to follow-up on a number of the risk areas that we identified through that kind of process. So, I think that doing these kind of simulation exercises, and I participated in one back in in London earlier in the year, which I found really helpful. I think that's one of the ways of bringing it to life, particularly if you have in the room also all the key people, like head of compliance and head of risk and the organisations, comms chiefs, etcetera, all able to think through from their own perspectives.

Okay. So do we have all of those ducks in a row if something negative were to happen? I think all the time challenging, and we have a standing item on our risk committee. What are the risks that fellow nonexec directors are seeing that haven't been covered in the report of the head of risk so that we are constantly asking ourselves, are we really spotting all of the most significant areas that we might have to confront?

Megan: Interesting. And, Bhaskar, one of the things we talked about previously was the challenge of risk in an internationally diverse distributed sort of business? I wonder what your thoughts are on that topic.

Bhaskar: So, it is difficult to have for example, if I look at, so I do chair, ARCs. And, of course, in quite a lot of boards, there is no separate ARC. Everything comes into one board.

And I have to say that, I mean, at all levels, the level of having control and management and mitigating actions and future looking things on risk management is highly variable.

The first is, do people worry about it on the board? Sometimes you do. I mean, you almost, like, have to be optimistically paranoid, but, you can't go too deep into that. The second thing is that, you need to have an extraordinary risk manager in place.

I would prefer to have somebody who walks into my office every two weeks and say we may have an issue rather than somebody who just reports to me on a quarterly basis in a very formal dashboard with lots of various colors and text.

I can't pick it up. I am very… I mean, of course, I will read the report, but they don't come out in talks about it. The last problem which you alluded to was the risk manager might be sitting in London, but the vast majority of risks are coming out from the satellite offices.

And if you're not walking the halls and having the lattes or the teas with the people, you don't understand, whether the risk is good, whether the mitigating action is happening well, or even language.

If you are out in Israel or you are out in in some of the Arabic speaking places and if you just know English, you are not just able to pick up what might be going on. So but that said, I mean, you do tend to pick up a sense of, of what's important and what's breaking down.

But the one thing that keeps me awake is something coming up and whacking me across the face with a with a big flounder, which will leave me floundering. Oh, there we go. Another I'm sorry. Another pun.

We can make light of risk as much as we as much as we want. I wonder, though, there is clearly a challenge with having with the visibility, the quality of the information, the transparency, the ease with which information about risk flows. But then I suppose the challenge is also one of turning that insight or that information into something that the board can meaningfully act on, potentially turn into an opportunity.

I suppose I'm thinking really about that concept of adding value through risk. Is that even possible?

David: Well, I mean, if I may just jump in, some of the things also you need to be extra careful about is, for example, you were talking about cybersecurity.

And it is present in the agenda. It is a risk. But because it is so common and constantly getting discussed, it actually drops down the sort of, you know, the mental map. So, okay, you keep on talking about it, but should I worry about it?

I should. But okay. Familiarity breeds content. But to take advantage of it, it is difficult to take advantage of mitigating actions around risks.

Easy to say in theory, but then the risk hasn't crystallized into an issue for you to do anticipatory mitigation or actually take advantage, it is tough.

Yeah. One… Sorry, Megan. One approach is to do deep dives in different meetings on particular aspects of the risk register. So, whether it's the technology side or the or the people side or the reputation side and so on.

Megan: Yeah. But, actually, Scarlett, I was going to bring you in here because I know some of this touches on agenda planning and agenda management and the challenge the that all boards face of crowd of creating space in a crowded calendar for forward looking conversations, deep dives of the sort that David has described.

And one thing we have found in the research this time around with Middle East boards, but also with UK and US boards in the last edition was that majority of boards are not prioritising forward looking conversations in their board meetings. I wonder just in a nutshell, kind of given the work that you do with our clients, what you what you'd advise to any board struggling with that challenge.

Scarlett: Yeah. No. Definitely. And I mean, we've already hinted at it already, but, yeah, I think risk is a place that this is happening a lot.

It's a real, like, it's a really my pun: It's a really risky place. It's a place where the tendency to kitchen sink becomes quite high. There's some interesting kind of legislative changes going on in the UK at the moment that are kind of requiring risk committees and boards to really genuinely rethink their risk and I think that's kind of a big opportunity actually at the board to go, what do we mean by a meaningful risk?

What do we mean by material? Are we really confident about the controls and kind of do that sort of re root and branch approach?

And actually a lot of the time when we're trying to think about, for example, how can we have more strategic conversations at a board or how can we be talking, how do we make space to talk about the future? Back to my point originally, how do we make space to come away from a board meeting thinking, gosh, that was a really good use of time. And a lot of it is because, you know, it starts with, as you say, the papers being crammed or the agenda being rammed with things that aren't strategic or not forward looking enough. And I mean, we pull those two things out quite a lot because actually a lot of this comes down to either are your papers covering the right information, the right things or is your agenda covering the right things.

And so what we tend to do with clients will be that and again it's something that you can all do if it's something that resonates with you is be okay where is the problem, where can we diagnose the problem. If we look at the agenda and we look at everything that we're going to cover in the year, where do we actually spend time talking about those big strategic conversations? And again a little hint, if it is only at the Strategy Away Day, then maybe we're not making best use of board time. So really mapping out that kind of what are we going to talk about through the year and exactly as David says, do we have time for deep dives on the topics that we really need to speak about, and are they connected to strategy?

And then again, we say, well actually, even if you've got an agenda that's kind of up to date and balanced and forward looking and covering everything, then that doesn't necessarily mean it translates to the papers. So, looking then at the papers and going, you know, when we look at the language that's within them, when we look at what the paper is covering, does it cover, does it really answer the questions on the board's mind? And that's the biggest thing for me. Questions like exactly to your point Bhaskar, what do I really want to know?

I want to know the thing that is going to hit me in the face, right? What is the flounder that's going to hit me in the face? I don't need to look over the eighty, sometimes it can be that many, you know, eighty things on the risk register, but what's the thing I need to worry about? So what questions are on the board's mind and is it answering that?

And actually just starting, it's a really good time of year for this right, we're looking at twenty twenty six planning. You're thinking about your agenda for the year ahead. Looking at what we've covered in the year. This year, did you cover the right things?

Were the papers balanced? And starting to diagnose that before you go into twenty twenty six planning. Just yeah. It's a really great time of year to be thinking about it.

Megan: Agreed. And that's a nice segue, actually. The concept of self assessment and using data and insight to shape to change how you operate. I want to focus a little bit on some of the questions that we asked around board development activity and board evaluation because this concept of continuous improvement of the board is something that we're very passionate about. So, the first insight I wanted to share is that around sixty percent of the directors that we polled in the UK and North America said that, they rely on ad hoc rather than structured board development. So, it's periodic, infrequent, reactive board development activity.

The second is that, boards clearly have an interesting, relationship with board evaluation. So, while ninety two percent of respondents survey said they would run board evaluations even if they were not required to, where that's the case, half of those said that they would do so because they are proof of good governance rather than as an opportunity to improve performance. We kind of gave them gave them both options and asked them to pick one.

That to me suggests that evaluations are considered by a good chunk of directors as signals. They provide good signals rather than necessarily providing opportunities to change how we operate. So, I've drawn the conclusion, perhaps rashly, that this is a bit of an issue.

And I'm interested to know what you all think about that. Bhaskar, I'll come to you first.

Bhaskar: Sorry. Could you just repeat that? I missed out on the last bit.

Megan: I've drawn the conclusion that it's a bit of an issue that people aren't engaging with structured, proactive, continuous improvement activity or opportunities in the boardroom, I wonder what you think of that.

Bhaskar: I would actually tend to agree with you. In fact, in my part of the world, having board evaluations is, again, as I said, because of the preponderance of private firms, and the fact that usually the board meeting agenda is so jam packed and the fact that usually the chairman of the board is the promoter or the majority shareholder, for them to do a self evaluation is generally lower. This is the reason why you would normally find that the tenor of directors in a private limited company are much higher and that's often a and they're longer lasting than perhaps in in the west or the developed markets.

There are pros and cons to that. One is the institutional memory stays. And I know, in the UK, you're talking about nine years, which should be pretty big. But when you're talking about family office owned businesses, it does need a very long term, institutional and the family office memory.

But still, they do tend to think about board evaluation. Frequently, it is forced upon them. Either a joint venture person comes in, or the regulator walks in or, the laws change. So, for example, quite a lot of the firms are now mandated in quite a lot of my countries to have a woman director.

And these external forces actually force you to evaluate it. But these are episodic. These are not on a structured way constantly keeping on evaluating whether the board is there. I haven't seen that much. No.

Megan: David, I wonder what you think.

David: So, I think it starts with ourselves as NEDs, whether in a charity board, a public sector board, a company board, private or PLC.

And I think we have to take responsibility for our own continuous professional development.

One of these I've always tried to do in any board role is to get out and to visit parts of the organisation and just to chat very informally, emphasise that this is not some kind of inspection tour or anything like that. It is an opportunity just to see whether what's going on, what people on the frontline are experiencing, what are the kind of issues that that they're facing, all the things you think you've been working on the board for ages, and it's all absolutely clear, and it's all going to be very straightforward. You very often can get some real kind of doses of cold or buckets of cold water when you talk to folk on the front line about how exactly that has been received as being implemented or not as the case may be.

I think it's thinking about, so where are the gaps in your own knowledge? I mean, I really liked the point that Bhaskar was making about that each board role is this what was it? Violently unique and it's morphing very, very regularly. I think absolutely right.

So thinking about where are my particular gaps in knowledge?

What do… you can't obviously know everything. You can't get the same degree of knowledge of as exec director and members of the management team. That's not your role. But having enough of an under understanding of each of the critical issues. So, identifying those gaps and so how could I fill those?

Whether that's going and talking to people who've who are fulfilling a similar role in different organizations, whether it's signing up for lots of the good webinars and things that board intelligence does, but also all the big four, of course, have their corporate governance teams and things and a lot of really good seminars and webinars being put on by those organisations.

And identifying them, where are the areas that you really want to be adding value and how you're going to do some deeper acquisition of knowledge. So in my areas of responsible business and sustainability, obviously, that's my day job as well, but also signed up for great networks like Chapter Zero to make sure I'm keeping on top of things. And when I first took on the latest role, signed up for competent boards, now part of your family, because I thought it would be good to take a fresh external perspective on those issues. So I think, first and foremost, it's our responsibility. When it comes to board evaluations, absolutely, they should be seen as a tool for continuous improvement. And your annual cycle, which should be a kind of a rolling cycle in my view of the kind of the board development programs that you're going to want to run, that should come out of the board evaluations.

Megan: Why do you think so few boards do have structured programs in place?

David: I suppose, you know, for probably for quite a number of people, this sense that there's an awful lot of work being asked of directors already and maybe a nervousness about putting too many extra sessions in the diary. But I think I mean, this is where it comes down to how much is enough in terms of really being committed to your own continuous professional development.

Megan: And I presume your investment in in that pays dividends across all of your board roles and all of you know, it's often learning, and they are skills that you can apply in all of your roles, not just in…

David: Huge really. I mean, that that that kind of cross fertilisation, which is why I'm also very interested in the cross fertilisation across sectors as Scarlett alluded to earlier.

Megan: Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm conscious of time, so I'm going to just move us on quickly to a little bit of a kind of wrap up sort of question if I can. I'm going to try and really oversimplify things because I do love a quick fire question. So, obviously, we're rapidly approaching the end of twenty twenty five, looking with excitement, trepidation. I don't know which side of it you fall on for 2026.

What's the one thing you'd encourage those on the webinar today to prioritise for their board in twenty twenty six? If there was one self improvement activity or one topic for discussion, one way of working that you would encourage people to look at closely next year, what would it be? I don't know who I'm going to pick first. Bhaskar, I'll come to you because you've been quiet since the longest.

Bhaskar: Oh, my. What can I say? There is just such a long list that that you have to worry about.

But if I have to put my finger on something, I think AI would be coming up top of the list. And one thing that has started to worry me substantially this year is not about whether or not my organisations are using AI or where are we. My issue is, does my CEO understand or my c suite understand that their way of working with an AI native organisation is right or wrong.

And I have very little confidence that we have managed to crack that nut.

The hiring, the strategy, the budgeting cycle, the speed at which business models are changing, the risks that are arising, the cybersecurity pieces, the competition, people, financials, investments, investors, I don't think my CEOs, are there. They are still thinking, oh, it's just yet another technology that I need to implement.

And my feeling is that this is no longer about yet another technology. This is pretty much going to change how organisations structurally are.

And that is one thing that I think boards need to be very, very worried about. Forget about the technology. Look at the thinking of their c suite who are sitting around the board table.

Megan: Interesting. And I suppose to engage with that that question, you need to be sufficiently educated, informed, curious about AI itself to ask the question and to understand what you get back as well.

Bhaskar: I actually designed a course for about three hours, and I'm testing it out on some of my CEOs.

They think I've gone completely potty. There's the old man. He's banging on about things. But one of the advantages of being an old git is that I can usually say, shut up? Suck it up, sunshine. You've got to talk about this.

Megan: I look forward to seeing how that goes. David.

David: I will sign up for Bhaskar’s AI course. No question about it. And just to add on what he was talking about AI, I think the other consideration I would just add to what he said was the responsibility of boards in particular for thinking about the ethical and the safety guardrails around AI. And in a previous role as chair of the institute of business ethics, that's something that we started to look at really very, very substantially.

And I’m sure we'll do some more of in the future. But for 2026, the one question I would be trying to organise in a structured way with my board colleagues and with the senior management team is: what's the biggest change that you expect personally to see between now and twenty thirty, and what might that mean for this organization.

That's obviously in in keeping with my passionate belief that we need to be focusing much more on future discussion than analysing past performance.

Megan: Interesting. Super. And, Scarlett, from you finally.

Scarlett: I would build on both of those, actually.

Mine's going to be very similar. It's asking that question. What is going to be facing this organization in the next year, eighteen months, two years, five years? And then when are we going to talk about it?

And are we talking about that in every meeting? And whether that be cybersecurity or risk or the future of the organization or sustainability or a new market we're going into, but when do we actually talk about that, and why isn't it every meeting? That would be it. Make sure it's in every paper, every meeting.

So just building on what the gents said.

Megan: That's great. Well, thank you. Thank you all. Brilliant ideas. A couple of parting ideas from me, I suppose.

Firstly, please do read the reports. If you haven't done so already, they're both available on our website. As I said earlier, I think Ruby shared links in the chat, and we'll also be emailing them to you.

Beyond that, I'd suggest picking one or two questions from today's discussion. Some of those ideas that flagged were brilliant even from the research itself. Anything that particularly resonates with you in terms of what you're most concerned about or where you think your board has the greatest opportunity to refine and enhance its contribution.

Create space for those conversations because they will add value.

And then finally, please do get in touch if you've got ideas for questions we could ask in the next iteration of the research.

If anything about what we do has resonated with you and you can want to explore some practical next steps or explore any ideas with Scarlett directly, please do drop her an email. Drop me an email, Ruby, and so on. And let us know what you thought of the event today as well, the webinar today. We'd love to hear your feedback, and I'm really grateful for it.

I don't think we've been able to get through all the questions in the chat and in the q and a. I tried to squeeze as many as I could in, but we'll definitely come back to you one on one if we can. We can help with answering those. So that just leaves me with a very short amount of time to thank our wonderful panellists.

Thank you so much for your time and for your insights and for all the puns. Always grateful for that. Thank you so much for joining us.

And thank you to everyone at home and at work for dialing in. I hope you found the discussion as stimulating as I did. It's always great food for thought. Have a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you all, and look forward to seeing you at another webinar soon.