From approval to accountability

It’s easy to feel a sense of momentum in the boardroom when a new strategy is approved. We all enjoy a fresh, slick deck, aligned language, bespoke icons, and the rare pleasure of a unanimous vote. It feels like progress. Sometimes it even looks like it.

Those of us who’ve been around board tables long enough know how comforting that feeling can be. We also know how misleading. Boards can spend serious money on strategies that are beautifully designed, carefully co-designed, and warmly endorsed by everyone who might later be inconvenienced by them.

That work matters. But it is not the work of a board.

The real test of board-level leadership is not how good the strategy looks or how inclusive the process was. It is whether the board can actually govern it.

Too often, boards confuse the one-off act of approving strategy with the ongoing discipline of overseeing whether it is doing what it was meant to do. Without a shared understanding of what success looks like, and how it will be recognised when it appears (or doesn’t), boards risk steering with confidence, but without a compass.

“Approval is an event. Governance is a discipline.”

Key takeaways:

• Strategy approval often creates false confidence
  Signing off can feel like completion, when it is really commencement.

• Activity, performance, and purpose are not the same thing
  Movement is not the same as progress, even when everyone is busy.

• Good governance starts with better questions
  Boards must move beyond what’s happening to is it actually working.

• Governable strategy needs a performance framework
  Success must be defined, measurable, and explicitly linked to purpose.

• Boards are accountable for impact, not just oversight
  Delegating without clarity is not trust. It is abdication.

Strategy approval is just the start

In many organisations, board meetings feature bold strategies that have been carefully workshopped by executive teams and approved with little resistance. They arrive fully dressed: clear mission statements, confident language, glossy design, hopeful projections.

Then, a year later, the board asks for a progress update.

What it often receives is a catalogue of activity. Milestones reached. Initiatives launched. Stories told. All signs of energy and effort. What’s missing is a shared baseline against which any of this can be judged.

The board can see that things are happening. What it cannot see, at least not clearly, is whether those things are aligned with purpose, or whether they are delivering the outcomes the strategy promised. Efficiency is visible. Effectiveness is not.

It’s easy to mistake board confidence for board effectiveness.

Once a strategy has been approved… particularly one that is well designed, collaboratively developed, and unanimously endorsed…there is a natural sense that the hard thinking is behind us. Attention shifts to execution. Updates become frequent. Activity increases. On paper, things look reassuringly busy.

The problem is that busyness is a poor proxy for purpose.

When boards ask for progress updates a year or two later, what they are often presented with is evidence of motion rather than meaning. These are not trivial achievements. But without an agreed reference point for success, they are also difficult to judge. The board can see that work is happening, but not whether it is the right work, or whether it is producing the outcomes the strategy was meant to deliver.

This is where governance quietly thins out.

Much board reporting is activity-heavy and impact-light. Metrics are included, but they tend to reflect what is easiest to count rather than what matters most. Numbers of outputs stand in for outcomes. Momentum substitutes for judgement. Over time, purpose becomes something that sits behind the conversation rather than inside it.

We see in our work that boards are often taught, whether implicitly or explicitly, that their primary responsibilities lie in risk management and financial oversight. These are, of course, essential. But they are not sufficient. Particularly in purpose-driven organisations, the board’s distinctive role is not merely to protect assets, but to steward intent.

Mission drift does not usually arrive as a dramatic departure. It arrives as a series of reasonable decisions, each defensible on its own terms, but collectively untethered from the organisation’s core reason for being. Without disciplined ways of testing whether strategy is still serving purpose, boards can find themselves confidently overseeing organisations that are performing well—just not at the thing they exist to do.

Effective governance, then, is not a matter of receiving more information. It is a matter of exercising judgement.

That requires boards to ask different questions. Not simply What has been done? or Are we on track?, but questions such as How do we know this is working? and Working towards what? These are more demanding questions. They can be uncomfortable. They do not always produce neat answers. Sometimes we don’t know or we’ll never know in full. But they are the questions boards are uniquely positioned—and (dare we say it) obligated—to ask.

For this to be possible, strategy must be governable.

A governable strategy is not defined by how compelling it sounds or how elegantly it is summarised. It is defined by whether it can be tested. In practice, this often looks far less impressive than the original strategy document. It may live in a spreadsheet rather than a slide deck. It prioritises clarity over aesthetics. Its purpose is not to inspire, but to enable disciplined oversight.

This kind of framework makes explicit what success looks like, how progress will be measured, and how assumptions will be revisited when reality does not align. It allows boards and executives to have an ongoing, structured conversation about performance without collapsing into operational detail or retreating into narrative reassurance.

None of this requires boards to manage. It requires them to insist on clarity.

Strategy approval is relatively straightforward. Governing whether that strategy is faithfully serving purpose is not. It demands attention, humility, and a willingness to resist the comfort of apparent progress.

But without that discipline, even the most thoughtfully crafted strategies risk becoming performative artefacts which are approved and admired. With it, boards can recover their proper role: not as passive recipients of updates, but as active stewards of purpose over time.