Eight questions on how your board actually functions when it matters: decision clarity, evidence quality, challenge culture, risk visibility, agenda discipline, information quality, follow-through and independent input.
Board evaluations tend to assess composition and compliance. This assessment scores something harder to see from inside: whether the board changes outcomes, or arrives after them. Eight questions, three answers each, scored in your browser with nothing stored.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
For the decision heading to your board, commission confidential input from selected senior operators who have made it elsewhere.
Get independent perspectivesAnswer against the last four board cycles: what happened in the room, not what the governance manual describes.
On these answers the board is a ratification body: decisions arrive settled, packs are built to reassure, and dissent has a price. The danger is not daily (management may be competent) but conditional: when management is wrong about something large, nothing in this system will catch it.
The forms of governance are present and the substance is intermittent: challenge happens on safe topics, risk is tracked but not confronted, and follow-through depends on individual directors' memories. The board adds value at the edges of decisions and misses the centre.
This board does real work: decisions arrive open, challenge is survivable, and commitments are tracked. The remaining vulnerability is homogeneity of input: a capable board hearing one well-prepared version of reality will make confident, aligned, occasionally wrong calls, and its own competence makes the wrongness harder to spot.
These answers describe a board that governs rather than attends: open decisions, honest papers, institutional challenge, tracked follow-through. What no internal practice can fully protect against is collective conviction: a strong board that has agreed on the world can be wrong about it together, at scale.
Standard board reviews audit composition, committees and compliance: necessary things that say almost nothing about whether the board affects outcomes. A board can satisfy every governance code and still ratify a doomed acquisition, because the codes measure structure and the failure lives in behaviour: what the papers hide, what dissent costs, what happens after approval.
Eight behavioural questions, each with three answers worth 0, 5 or 10 points; the total is normalised to 100 and mapped to four bands. It is unashamedly a perception instrument, which is why the interesting output is disagreement between directors, not the number itself.
Have every director and the chair complete it independently, then put the question-level spread on one page. Where the chair sees open decisions and a newer director sees ratification, that gap is the finding; discussing it question by question is a sharper evaluation than most facilitated reviews, and takes an hour.
It is a complement, not a substitute. External evaluations satisfy governance requirements and examine structure; this scores the decision behaviours those reviews rarely reach, and can be run in an hour, between formal cycles, whenever a major decision approaches.
Yes, separately. Executives experience the board as an audience; non-executives experience it as a working body. The systematic gaps between those two pictures, especially on evidence quality and challenge culture, are the most actionable output.
Evidence the board obtains on its own initiative rather than through the executive pipeline: unfiltered customer or market contact, advisers it selects itself, or confidential perspectives from operators who have made the decision in question elsewhere. The defining feature is that management did not choose the message.