The board was composed for the company’s old business
A regulated utility had committed to a transition program running over a decade, and its board was well run. Nobody around the table was underperforming. The problem was that the board had been composed for the business the company had been, and the questions the company now had to ask sat outside the experience of the people asking them.
A board can only challenge an executive on ground it understands. The transition program was the one area nobody around the table had worked in, so the executive team was getting hard questions about the old business and easy ones about the new. A non executive director sits inside the board, votes and carries responsibility, which set a high bar for whoever filled the seat.
We defined the seat around the capability it needed
We specified the appointment by the gap it had to close, then searched among people who had delivered transition programs rather than overseen them: former program leads, regulated utility executives and serving non executive directors. The search reached into adjacent regulated sectors where comparable transitions had already run, and into businesses that had already been through one.
Screening deliberately weighted delivery of a program above prior board service. A capable operator picks up governance craft more readily than an experienced director picks up transition experience. That is not the usual weighting for a board appointment, and it was right here because the gap was specific rather than general. Candidates cleared our compliance framework before introduction, with sector conflicts checked carefully.
The challenge in the room got sharper
The utility appointed a non executive director who had direct experience of delivering a comparable transition, from a business that had already been through one. It showed in the quality of the challenge. The executive team was questioned specifically on sequencing and deliverability, where the conversation had been general before.
The reporting changed too, which arguably mattered more over the length of the program. The information the board received was rebuilt around the program it was actually overseeing, rather than around the business the company used to be.
