In unsettled times, a board might wonder how far to look ahead. The better question is how well-equipped the board is to discuss it.

It can be difficult to tell at moments like this whether an association board is better off developing a five-year strategic plan, a five-month plan, or a 15-year plan. 

Geopolitical unrest. Divisive politics in the United States. Questions over whether AI will cure cancer, play out as just another tech bubble, or—let’s see here—spell the end of humanity. This gives staff leaders plenty enough stress on a day-to-day basis. It’s a further challenge to the board members who are charged with setting direction for the organization. 

And for all that, we know that foresight is still not well-emphasized and well-executed on boards. Part of the anxiety comes from the fear of making the wrong decision—if you commit to this one thing, what other things are you neglecting?

Writing recently at the Institute for Management Development, reinsurance executive Jean-Jacques Henchoz suggests a solution: Instead of treating governance as a means toward a One True Path, boards should focus on developing a range of options. This concept, which he calls “antifragility,” “[builds] in optionality, avoiding excessive dependence on a single forecast, preserving sufficient buffers, and learning from manageable stress before a larger shock arrives.”

In practice, he writes, this means that strategic planning should take a longer view, with boards thinking about emerging trends along with more immediate industry changes. Boards should also stress-test the assumptions that undergird every strategic decision it makes, develop response plans when reality deviates from expectations, and develop a team that’s better equipped to have the difficult conversations such discussions spark.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about all this. Smart strategic thinkers are hard enough to find as it is. It’s difficult to budget around kinda-sorta-maybe strategic goals that may shift with the news cycle. It’s an invitation for board members to squabble over what qualifies as a big enough shift to require lever-pulling. The executive director is likely to get micromanaged over execution. (Or metaphorically executed over management.)

Still, Henchoz does highlight one step that’s relatively easy to implement: Develop a board culture that openly challenges itself. An effective environment is one where “diverse perspectives are actively encouraged, and where difficult conversations are neither postponed nor avoided.”

That recommendation is echoed in another recent piece by a pair of business scholars in the Harvard Business Review, “Building a Board That Fits.” Well-established processes and trust among leaders are good things, but they also run the risk of limiting a board’s scope. “To craft strong strategies in moments of disruption, boards require friction and genuine challenges,” they write.

Their version of “antifragility” is “counterbalancing”—an environment where disagreement is both natural and welcome. That doesn’t mean a team that develops an anything-goes plan; it’s one where a smart and strategic group identifies what kind of foresight makes the most sense for it at the moment. That, they write, requires “selecting members who’ll provide capabilities the organization lacks, creating processes that enable genuine deliberation, and establishing the conditions for collective challenge through the chair’s leadership.” 

That five-year plan may still make sense. But, more than ever, it requires a team of leaders that confidently understands how and why they they arrived at it.   

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