When Experience Becomes a Blind Spot
Every Chair will eventually face a situation where previous experience provides valuable guidance, but where that same experience may also limit the options being considered.
The challenge is not to ignore experience. Experience is one of the greatest assets a board possesses.
The challenge is knowing when experience should guide a decision, and when it should be challenged.
I experienced this tension first-hand during the Covid-19 crisis.
When international travel came to a standstill, my first instinct was immediate cost reduction.
Years earlier, after September 11, that same approach had helped protect our business through one of the travel industry's darkest periods. Experience had taught me an important lesson: when a global crisis strikes, preserve cash, reduce expenditure and protect the organisation's ability to survive.
Our board discussions naturally followed that logic. We focused on liquidity, scenario planning and the difficult decisions required to safeguard the company.
Looking back, I remain convinced those discussions were necessary and responsible.
However, one question continued to occupy my thoughts:
Were we solving the right problem, but with an incomplete solution?
International travel had stopped. But had demand for travel disappeared, or had it simply moved?
Instead of assuming survival depended only on reducing costs, we explored another possibility. Could residents, unable to travel abroad, rediscover their own country? Could we develop a domestic opportunity while maintaining the financial discipline required to protect the business?
At the time, this approach felt counterintuitive. Everything my previous crisis experience had taught me pointed towards conserving resources. Investing during uncertainty seemed to contradict the very lessons that had helped us survive before.
The board debated both perspectives carefully.
The easy answer would have been to focus exclusively on cost reduction. The inspiring answer would have been to invest everything in building something new. We chose neither.
Choosing both was not comfortable. We froze hiring, reduced discretionary spending, postponed investments, and asked every department to operate with fewer resources. At the same time, we redirected part of our team's focus toward the domestic tourism market, building on capabilities, relationships, and technology we already had. It wasn't a choice between survival and innovation. It was a daily effort to create enough space for both.
Looking back, I believe that decision helped cushion the impact of the crisis on our business. More importantly, it taught me that organisations often possess far more capabilities than they recognise. Crises rarely create those capabilities. More often, they reveal strengths, talents and opportunities that were already there, hidden beneath established routines and assumptions. That reinforced an important lesson for me: even during periods of uncertainty, boards should be careful not to assume that protecting today's business and creating tomorrow's opportunities are mutually exclusive.
1. Experience is a valuable asset, but it can also become a blind spot
Boards rely on experienced directors because experience brings judgement, pattern recognition and the ability to navigate uncertainty.
However, the assumptions most worth questioning are often not the new ones. They are the assumptions that have worked successfully for many years. New ideas naturally receive scrutiny. Proven ideas often receive less scrutiny because they have already demonstrated their value.
The governance challenge is recognising when a successful assumption has stopped reflecting reality.
Kodak remains one of the most frequently discussed business examples. The governance lesson is not that its leaders lacked intelligence or information. The company understood digital photography early. The challenge was recognising when assumptions that had supported decades of success no longer reflected the environment that was emerging.
Past success can quietly transform a useful assumption into an unquestioned belief.
2. Good governance balances protection with opportunity
During a crisis, protecting the organisation is one of the board's primary responsibilities.
Liquidity, resilience and risk management cannot be compromised.
However, effective boards also ask a second question:
While protecting today's business, are we still creating tomorrow's opportunities?
In our case, cost discipline was essential. But it was not sufficient. The stronger solution came from combining protection with exploration. That balance would not have emerged without challenging our initial assumptions.
3. Constructive challenge strengthens decisions
Boards are expected to project confidence. Investors expect it. Employees look for it. Stakeholders rely on it.
But confidence outside the boardroom should be earned through the quality of discussion inside it.
Directors should feel comfortable challenging assumptions, testing recommendations and expressing different perspectives.
This does not mean endless debate. Boards exist to make decisions. The objective is not more discussion. It is better discussion.
Curiosity should strengthen decisions, not postpone them.
Practical tools for Chairs
Over the years, I have found that simple governance practices often improve the quality of strategic discussions more than lengthy debates.
- Conduct a premortem. Before approving a major strategic initiative, imagine that it has failed two years later and ask: “What most likely caused that failure?”
- Nominate a constructive challenger. For significant strategic decisions, ask one director to deliberately test the prevailing recommendation. The purpose is not to oppose the proposal, but to ensure that its key assumptions have genuinely been examined before the board commits.
Finally, I reserve five minutes before closing an important agenda item for one last question:
“What might we be overlooking?”
Most of the time, nothing changes. Occasionally, everything does. Either way, the decision leaves the room stronger because it has been tested rather than simply accepted.
Final reflection
No board can guarantee that every decision will be correct.
The responsibility of a Chair is different.
It is to ensure that important decisions benefit from experience, diverse perspectives and the willingness to challenge assumptions before commitment.
In an increasingly complex world, boards will not be judged only by their ability to predict the future. They will be judged by their ability to adapt when reality changes.
A Chair's role is not to eliminate doubt from the boardroom. It is to ensure that the right doubts are heard before the board decides.
About the Author
Yasser Noman is Executive Chairman of the Rayna Group and Chairman and Partner of Rayna Europe in Switzerland. With more than three decades of executive and board-level experience across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, his career spans strategy, organisational transformation, mergers and acquisitions, crisis leadership and corporate governance, including his tenure as CEO of Kuoni Destination Management, where he also served on boards in Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and South Africa.
A graduate of the University of Florence with a Master's degree in Tourism and Hospitality, he has furthered his executive education at Henley Business School and Hult Ashridge Executive Education in Corporate Governance, and is currently pursuing doctoral research. Through his articles and The Boardroom Dialogues, Yasser writes about how boards can make better decisions by asking better questions, guided by the conviction that organisations rarely fail because they lack intelligence; they fail because they stop questioning their own assumptions.
Translation note
The original text was written in English. The French version was produced with the support of AI. In the event of any divergence in interpretation, the English version shall prevail.
Disclaimer
Dieser Artikel ist Teil der Reihe "Network Briefs", Reflexionen und Impulse von Mitgliedern des SwissBoardForum». Die Inhalte geben die persönliche Meinung der Autorin oder des Autors wieder und entsprechen nicht zwingend der Position des SwissBoardForum. Ziel ist es, aktuelle Fragen aus der Praxis von Verwaltungsräten aufzugreifen und unterschiedliche Perspektiven aus dem Netzwerk sichtbar zu machen: persönlich, relevant und anregend für die Mandatsarbeit. Die französische Version dieses Artikels wurde mithilfe eines Tools der künstlichen Intelligenz erstellt. Der Originaltext wurde auf Deutsch verfasst. Bei Abweichungen in der Auslegung ist die deutsche Originalfassung massgebend
