Board Intelligence has published its third Board Value Index, a survey of more than four hundred directors across four regions. It is a serious piece of work, and the field is better for it. Its central finding deserves attention: eighty-four per cent of directors report a delayed, rushed, or poor decision in the past six months, arising from how their boards handle information. Research like this is expensive to conduct and generous to share, and it moves the whole conversation forward. We want to carry one of its findings a step further.
A problem the market has now measured
The survey ranks three barriers above the rest: the decision-making process itself, clarity of roles, and the quality of information reaching the board. Nearly two-thirds of directors feel their board could add more value than it currently does. For most, strategy and growth took up less board time than they would wish. These are not our figures. They come from directors describing their own boards, gathered by a firm that has done important work in this field. We need no longer assert that boards are under pressure. It has been measured, carefully, and we are glad of it.
What the numbers describe is not a failure of awareness. Directors can name where the difficulty lies. The question the research opens, and it is a good one, is what boards should do in response.
What better tools solve, and what they open onto
The report points, reasonably, to better instrumentation of the reporting process: papers that are clearer and shorter, packs made more digestible, information supplied in a form a board can actually use. This is a real advance. A well-structured board pack is a genuine good, and the tools that produce one address a problem directors have felt for years. We would not argue otherwise.
We would only observe that the report’s own data reaches past the part that tools resolve. The barriers it ranks highest, a rigid decision process, unclear roles, the reliability of what the board is told, are not, at root, problems of supply. A cleaner pack is a better instrument. It is not yet a surer judgement. The report itself gestures at this when it turns, near its close, to director development and the quality of thinking in the room, and there it names the deeper work that no tool completes.
The instrument and the hand
Here is the distinction we would add. The difficulty in the boardroom is seldom that directors cannot read the pack in time. It is knowing what within it can be relied upon, what must be tested, and where the board’s own responsibility begins and ends. Better information supports that work. It does not perform it.
The navigator is the closest figure we know. A finer instrument gives a clearer reading of position, and every navigator is grateful for one. It does not choose the passage, weigh the near shore against the open sea, or answer for the vessel and the people aboard. The instrument informs the judgement. The hand on the helm remains a human one, and accountable. A board well served by its tools is better placed to govern. The governing is still its own.
What advantage rests on
There is a further reason to look past the tools, and it is a matter of advantage rather than adequacy. Every board in this survey can acquire the same systems. That is the nature of good tools: they become available to all, and so they become the standard rather than the edge. What cannot be acquired so easily is the memory a board carries, the learning it compounds, the practised judgement of directors who have weighed evidence like this before, and the discipline to question what is fluent but thin. Tools are procured. Advantage is earned.
This is the work we mean by Qualified Board Intelligence™: not more information, better arranged, but reliance that has been tested, so that a board’s confidence rests on something it has examined. The Board Value Index shows a market that knows its problem clearly and is right to reach for better instruments. Our own contribution begins one step further on, where the instrument has done its work and the judgement must still be made.
The Board Value Index, Summer 2026, is published by Board Intelligence, and we recommend it. The figures cited are their findings; the reading offered here is our own.
