Journal · The idea
The personal board of directors, and its problem
Assemble a handful of people who see different things, meet them regularly, bring them the hard calls. The idea is sound and old. What breaks is the logistics.
What is a personal board of directors? An informal group a leader assembles for advice on their own decisions and career: usually a mix of a peer, someone further ahead, someone from another industry, and someone willing to be blunt. It has no legal standing and no fixed form.
The concept has circulated in leadership writing for decades, and the reason it persists is that it addresses a real structural problem. The people around a chief executive are structurally compromised as advisers. The team depends on them. The investors have their own downside. The people close to them carry the weight but not the consequence. A personal board is an attempt to assemble the missing category: people with no stake in the answer.
Three things that go wrong
- Availability. Decisions arrive on Tuesday afternoon. Your board is busy, and by the time you have their attention you have already decided and are seeking ratification.
- Drift towards agreement. A board you chose will tend to be people you like, and people you like tend to think somewhat like you. The selection is the failure mode.
- No memory. Each conversation restarts. Nobody tracks that this is the third time you have run at the same problem, or what you assumed the previous two times.
The scarce resource is not good advice. It is good advice available on the day the decision is in front of you.
The complementarity problem
The instinctive move is to recruit people you admire. The useful move is to recruit for what you do not do. A fast, optimistic operator does not need four more fast optimists; they need someone who asks what would make this wrong, someone who insists on a base rate, and someone who runs the second-order consequences. The board that flatters you is comfortable and does very little.
This is also the honest limit of the idea in practice: most people compose their personal board on affinity, then wonder why it never surprises them.
What software can and cannot replace
It cannot replace a person who has run your exact situation and will take your call at ten at night. It can be available on Tuesday afternoon, it can be composed deliberately for what you lack rather than what you like, and it can remember every previous decision with its assumptions attached. Those are the three things human boards struggle with most.
Five Peers editorial note. Sources named in the text.
The board you need, available on the day you actually decide.
Compose my board