There is a moment most board members will recognise, even if they have never spoken about it. The papers land in your inbox on a Wednesday evening. Agenda item six is a performance review. And the executive whose performance is under review is the same person who told you, over dinner in March, that their marriage was falling apart.

You read the numbers and you know the picture they paint. The board meets on Thursday, and at item six it will look to you, because you are the one who has worked most closely with this person, and you are the only one at that table to whom they felt able to say what they have been carrying since January. So you sit with two things that will not reconcile: what the numbers ask of you, and what you know about why they look the way they do.

It is obvious that performance has slipped but the call is whether you, of all the people in that room, can be the one to say so without disclosing why. 

This is what overfamiliarity does to a board. Not in a single catastrophic moment, but in the quiet accumulation of things that were never meant to sit inside a governance relationship. A health scare shared on the way out of a strategy day. A family crisis mentioned in a tea break. A financial worry disclosed over drinks because the room felt safe and the people in it felt like friends. None of it was wrong to share. But once it is shared, it does not stay where it was put. It travels into every subsequent meeting, every appraisal, every moment where someone has to be challenged, managed, or in the hardest cases, removed.

The chair who knows too much about an executive's home life cannot unknow it when that executive's judgment is questioned. The chief executive who has confided in a board colleague cannot then assess that colleague from a clean position. Each confidence was a kindness in the moment it was given. Together they leave a board where the people best placed to make the difficult call are the very people too close to make it.

What gets left behind is not a scandal. It is something harder to repair: a room where challenge has been softened by affection, where the difficult question does not get asked because the person who should ask it knows too much to ask it cleanly. Staff beneath the board feel this long before they can name it. They notice that certain conversations never seem to go anywhere, that the same standard is not held to everyone, that closeness buys a quieter ride. They draw their own conclusions, and those conclusions take on a life of their own.

By the time an organisation calls us in, the presenting problem is rarely described as overfamiliarity. It is a performance issue that was allowed to drift, a decision nobody can quite explain, a departure that left more questions than answers, a team that has stopped believing the people at the top are playing it straight. The overfamiliarity is not the crisis. It is the condition that made the crisis possible, and made it harder to address once it arrived.

What I find when I am in that room is that nobody chose this. Relationships grew because the people involved are decent and human and found common ground. The disclosures happened because the room felt safe, which is not a bad thing in itself. The difficulty is that trust between individuals and trust in an institution are not the same thing; and when the first is allowed to crowd out the second, the institution pays for it.

The repair work is not about making boards cold or transactional. It is about helping a board see what has accumulated, where the lines moved without anyone deciding to move them, and what it would take to make the difficult call possible again. That work can be done. But it needs someone in the room whose only obligation is to the organisation, not to the relationships inside it.

I have been the colleague who knew too much. I have sat at agenda item six holding something the rest of the room did not know, and felt how much easier it would be to let the moment pass. It is also why I think an outside perspective earns its keep here. When I am at that table, the person who has to make the difficult call is no longer making it as someone compromised by what they know, because there is someone present whose only job is to ask what the organisation needs.

Boards do not lose their grip on their own people in a single decision. They lose it one kindness at a time, until the day a call has to be made and everyone who could make it is too close to call it.

If your board has become a room where some things are too complicated to raise, that may be worth examining before the complication becomes the story. Email [email protected].

ICYMI: Every organisation stands for something and communicates it publicly. The test is what it does when standing by that becomes costly or embarrassing. The entries below are this week's examples of organisations meeting that test or failing it. When one fails, the behaviour and the promise are moving in opposite directions, which creates damage that does not fix itself of its own accord.

⬆ Up (who hit the mark this week)

The Competition and Markets Authority fined StubHub UK £889,200 on 23 June and ordered it to refund more than 50,000 customers a total of over £590,000 after finding the platform added mandatory service and delivery fees at the final checkout stage rather than including them in the price shown at the start. StubHub UK admitted breaking the law, engaged constructively with the CMA throughout, and settled early, receiving a 40% reduction on its penalty as a result. A regulator using its strengthened powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act to enforce pricing transparency and return money to consumers is doing exactly what enforcement exists to do. 

The Solicitors Regulation Authority referred former Post Office General Counsel Jane MacLeod to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal on 25 June. The SRA has confirmed it has 20 live investigations into firms and solicitors connected to the Horizon scandal. More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully prosecuted on the basis of the faulty Horizon system. MacLeod oversaw the Post Office's legal defence of the group litigation and previously declined to give oral evidence to the public inquiry. The specific allegations are not yet public; the SDT will determine them. That a General Counsel now faces professional consequences has significant implications for the legal sector.

⬇ Down (who missed the mark this week)

The ICO confirmed on 19 June that John Edwards had resigned as Information Commissioner after an independent workplace investigation concluded there was a case to answer and that his behaviour fell short of the conduct expected of a public official. Edwards had indicated as recently as February that he expected to become Chair of the new Information Commission once the governance transition took effect; his resignation now vacates that chair-designate role as well. The person appointed to uphold information rights and data protection standards could not meet the standards of conduct his own office sets for public life. The ICO is now without a Commissioner at the precise moment it is mid-transition to a new governance structure under the Data (Use and Access) Act. 

PPE Medpro's liquidators filed a High Court claim on 23 June against Baroness Michelle Mone, Doug Barrowman, and nine other individuals and companies, seeking to recover the roughly £122m the collapsed company owes the government after its surgical gowns were found not to be sterile. PPE Medpro held less than £1m on its balance sheet when it was wound up in December 2025; the liquidators are pursuing the people who stood behind it personally. A criminal investigation by the National Crime Agency continues alongside a £75m CPS asset freeze. Mone has said she and Barrowman were deliberately scapegoated. The personal liability claim is newly filed and unproven. What is established is that public money paid for equipment that could not be used, and the company contracted to supply it no longer exists.

👁 Watch (who we're watching this week)

The Serious Fraud Office announced on 22 June an investigation into Internet Mobile Communications Limited, a collapsed UK telecoms company based in Chelmsford that processed millions of voice and SMS transactions annually before its abrupt collapse in 2024, leaving creditors in debt. The allegations concern suspected fraud, false accounting, and money laundering. The SFO is working in parallel with the New York District Attorney’s Office. Restructuring experts had previously been unable to account for a £15m gap in the company’s accounts. A company that presented itself as one of the largest virtual telecoms marketplaces of its kind is now the subject of coordinated investigation on two continents.

The Ockenden review published on 24 June found systemic failings in maternity and neonatal services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust across thirteen years, covering 2,505 cases of death and serious harm. The trust issued an unreserved apology the same day. Families say they have zero faith changes will be implemented without a full public inquiry, and that question is now squarely in front of ministers.

The Charity Commission opened a statutory inquiry into St Andrew’s Healthcare on 22 June, escalating from a compliance case opened in March, amid ongoing concerns about safeguarding, financial viability, and trustee governance. Northamptonshire Police continues to investigate allegations of assault, wilful neglect and ill treatment at its Northampton hospital, alongside a separate corporate manslaughter investigation. The charity received £201m in government grants last year; whether it continues to exist in its current form is now a live question. 

PPE Medpro's liquidators are suing the company’s directors personally after the company no longer has assets to pursue. Creating distance between someone "connected to the company" and  someone "responsible for its debts" is usually the whole rationale for incorporation. But when the connection is close enough, and the corporate structure thin enough, the law can reach through it to achieve equity.

So the question this week is: how close is too close? At what point does the relationship between a person and the company they stand behind stop being an asset and start being a liability?

Tell him the campaign. Viktor pulls last quarter's performance from Meta and TikTok, scrapes competitor ads, drafts the brief, posts it for review. You edit, he ships the creative requests to your designer. Inside Slack.

Get Started for Free

Led by Leah Brown FRSA, The WayFinders Group supports organisations in repairing the damage that stops them doing what they said they would do.