This week in Saint Kitts and Nevis, we have been teaching restorative approaches to a room that includes people from the Attorney General's office, the police, social workers and the judiciary. Between them, they cover almost every point at which the state decides whether something was right or wrong. Each of them has been trained to exercise judgment in keeping with the law. 

This room is the same room I sit in with boards but the people around the table have different job titles.

A chair gets the call alerting them to a safeguarding failure, a data breach, an executive accused of bullying, whatever it is. Within the hour, the lawyers and the auditors are in the room, and the first question on the table is "what's our exposure." By the end of that hour, the whole situation has been reframed around that question. The press statement, the internal investigation, who gets interviewed and in what order, what gets disclosed and what doesn't; all of it runs from that starting point, because no one had challenged the framing at the outset.

It is rarely a deliberate decision. It's simply what happens when the first professionals through the door are trained to minimise risk in one way only.

In Saint Kitts this week, the equivalent question was framed around the offence and its criminality. Of course this is the right question for the Attorney General's office to ask. But it is not the only question, and our presence is a direct result of the government of the day recognising the importance of having different pathways. When only one question is asked an opportunity is missed to find out what the people involved on every side of the case need from what happens next.

In the boardroom, it is vaguely known that people will be affected by that safeguarding failure, that data breach, that bullying complaint, but rarely considered that they are sitting with questions of their own. What happened to me? Does anyone here actually understand what this did to me? Will this happen again? Why hasn’t anyone taken responsibility? The board doesn’t do the type of risk assessment that would address these questions, but they don't go away. These questions sit underneath every staff survey, every resignation, every "no comment" that lands badly. They find themselves in terse exit interviews for years afterwards.

This is where an outside perspective earns its place in the room. When I am invited in to advise a board, I’m not there to overrule the lawyers, or to tell the board not to worry about its exposure. I am simply there to ask what the people affected by this need right now. That question doesn't compete with "what's our exposure." But if nobody asks it before the exposure question has shaped everything else, it never gets a real answer, because by then the organisation has already decided what it's prepared to say. The distance between what the organisation said and what people actually needed becomes the first thing that has to be repaired, and it’s usually the last thing prioritised because it’ll all blow over eventually, right?

It’s in that deprioritisation that your next crisis will emerge. 

If the people affected by whatever your organisation has been through haven't been asked what they need, that may be a conversation worth having. Email  [email protected]. 

This week:

⬆ Up (who hit the mark this week)

The Ministry of Defence lost its Secretary of State and its Armed Forces Minister yesterday after both concluded the department's funding settlement was inadequate to the threat it is meant to defend against. Healey wrote that the plan "falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time". Carns wrote that "officials and ministers who know the truth are not always rewarded for telling it". 

Ofcom wrote to online platforms on 10 June 2026 warning of legal consequences under the Online Safety Act if their services were used to incite the violence spreading through Belfast, where masked men burned families out of their homes following a knife attack. 

⬇ Down (who missed the mark this week)

FIFA opened the 2026 World Cup a day after its president was publicly challenged on a referee denied entry to the US, ticket prices reaching the tens of thousands, and the organisation's closeness to the US administration. The response: "Maybe sometimes it's good as well to just chill, relax… we are not the kings of the world who can rule over governments and police forces".

Adobe announced on 11 June 2026 that its CFO, Dan Durn, is leaving to join a rival, just three months after long-serving CEO Shantanu Narayen said he would step down once a successor is found. The announcement came the same day Adobe posted record quarterly revenue and raised its full-year guidance, and the shares still fell around 5% after-hours. Adobe has offered no explanation that connects the two departures, and investors did not wait for one. 

xAI is being sued at the High Court by Labour MP Jess Asato, who says Grok was used to generate sexualised deepfakes of her, including a video depicting her being assaulted. "Its ability is not an accident, nor misuse, it is a design choice by its creators," she said. SpaceX, which now owns xAI, has set aside more than $500m for litigation arising from Grok's misuse. 

Everton FC has lost its legal dispute against Burnley FC after breaching Premier League rules. Everton has been ordered to pay Burnley around £35m–£40m over its admitted breach of the Profitability and Sustainability Rules in 2021/22, which Burnley argued cost them their place in the Premier League. Everton's response was not to accept the ruling but to call it "fundamentally flawed in both law and fact" and warn it sets "a dangerous and unworkable precedent for English football," while confirming an appeal.

Ultra Electronics entered a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the Serious Fraud Office on 1 May 2026, paying just over £10m in penalties plus £4.8m in costs after admitting it had failed to prevent bribery connected to public-sector contracts in Oman and Algeria. The SFO's director said: "Public services and critical national infrastructure depend on business being carried out honestly and lawfully".

Amazon disclosed for the first time, on 11 June 2026, how much water its global data centres use: 2.5 billion gallons in 2025, alongside claims that it is "seven times more water-efficient than the industry average" and 75% of the way to a 2030 "water positive" target. Google, Meta and Microsoft have published equivalent figures since at least 2020. For years, communities near Amazon's data centres, many in water-stressed regions, have raised concerns about local water use without access to the figures Amazon held and did not share. The disclosure came only once public pressure made silence more costly than speaking. 

👁 Watch (who we're watching this week)

Clearsprings Ready Homes gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on 9 June 2026 as part of its ongoing asylum accommodation inquiry. The session sits alongside unresolved questions about £17.1m in "consultancy fees" paid by the company's parent to a firm registered in the UAE since 2018/19, payments that could not be verified against the UAE's own corporate register. One committee member said the scale of the sum and the absence of any trace of it abroad meant "something has gone wrong" and that an investigation was needed.

Microsoft is the subject of a Competition and Markets Authority investigation into whether it should be designated with "strategic market status" over its business software ecosystem, examining bundling, interoperability and default settings. The consultation closed on 4 June 2026. The CMA has been careful to say that opening this investigation "does not assume wrongdoing," which leaves the actual question, whether the rules that apply to everyone else still fit a company this size, for the decision due by February 2027 to answer.

Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Nissan, Stellantis and others are defendants in one of the largest consumer group actions in English legal history, brought by over 1.6 million claimants who allege the manufacturers used unlawful "defeat devices" to manipulate emissions tests. A liability judgment from the High Court is expected this summer, with a quantum trial listed for October 2026. Whatever the court finds, it will turn on whether what these vehicles were tested on was the truth.

On 11 June 2026, SpaceX, which absorbed xAI earlier this year, priced shares at $135 each, raising $75bn at a valuation of roughly $1.77tn. It is the largest IPO on record, more than double Saudi Aramco's previous benchmark. The prospectus discloses that Musk's Class B shares carry ten votes each, giving him 82.4% of voting power, enough that no other shareholder, individually or combined, holds sufficient votes to remove him as CEO.

So when a company publishes a prospectus confirming there is no intention to comply with governance best practice, and the market responds with a record valuation, who has turned a blind eye to governance: the board, or the public?

And what does this decision mean for every future IPO candidate?

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Led by Leah Brown FRSA, The WayFinders Group supports organisations under pressure to repair the internal damage a crisis leaves behind so they emerge more robust.