Nobody in that room is going to say it. Well, I might. But most people don’t. 

Not the director who stopped following the finance discussion twenty minutes ago. Not the trustee who nodded along to the risk report without understanding a word of it. Not the non-executive who has been around long enough to know that asking a basic question at this level carries a social cost nobody talks about but everybody feels the weight of.

So they say nothing. And because they say nothing, you assume they understood. And because you assume they understood, the decision gets made on the basis of a consensus that never actually existed.

This happens in every boardroom. In Royal Colleges and regulators, in member-owned organisations and publicly-funded institutions, in the kinds of boards where every person around the table has a title that signals they should absolutely know what is going on. The more credentials are around the table, the higher the (perceived) cost of admitting you are lost.

The problem is not that your board members are incapable. The problem is that nobody has made it safe to say "I'm not following." And if one person around that table isn't following, the chances are high that two or three others aren't either; and the person who eventually makes the decision is working with a fraction of the scrutiny the decision actually needed.

This is how consequential decisions get waved through. Not through malice or negligence. Through a room full of capable people who decided, in the moment, that the cost of speaking up was higher than the cost of staying quiet.

After a crisis, this gets worse. Pressure changes the dynamics in a room in ways that don't show up in the minutes. People who would once have pushed back stop pushing. Questions that would once have been asked don't get asked. The board continues to function on paper. But the intelligence in that room, the collective scrutiny that governance actually depends on, has evaporated.

The chair is not exempt from this. A chair who has learned to read the room may also read it wrongly; perhaps taking the absence of challenge as the presence of understanding, moving the agenda forward because the silence feels like agreement rather than because it is.

I am frequently invited to give feedback to brilliant experienced chairs. Usually the agenda is crisp, the timekeeping is on point, and the decisions under consideration are clear. But after the meeting, a board member mentions something that should have been said in the room and wasn't. When I ask them why, they explain there wasn't a moment because the chair moves so fast and it feels rude to slow things down.

The difference between a chair who leads well and a chair who merely presides is often exactly this: whether they have created the conditions in which someone around that table can say, without career consequence, that they have lost the thread. That is not a soft skill but a structural precondition for scrutiny. A room that only challenges when it is safe to challenge will stop challenging the moment pressure is applied. And in the aftermath of a crisis is precisely when you need people to speak up the most.

If you need your board to speak up, we should talk: [email protected]. 

This week:

⬆ Up

EFRA Committee — The cross-party Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, chaired by Alistair Carmichael MP, is doing the harder, less visible work of checking whether the commitments extracted from the water sector under pressure are actually being kept. Most select committees produce reports but this one is producing consequences.

Ofcom — Youngtek Solutions Ltd, the Cyprus-registered operator of four pornography sites, were fined £500,000 for failing to deploy effective age assurance under the Online Safety Act, and a further £100,000 for missing its information deadline. The Online Safety Act was deliberately drafted with extraterritorial reach. Registration in Cyprus is no longer a viable strategy for avoiding UK enforcement. 

⬇ Down 

BP plc — On 26 May 2026, the board unanimously removed chairman Albert Manifold with immediate effect, citing serious concerns about governance standards, oversight and conduct. Ian Tyler has been appointed interim chair. Manifold disputes the characterisation entirely and by 28 May had replaced "I dispute this" with a single word: lies. At the April 2026 AGM, Manifold was elected with only 81.8% support (an investor rebellion as 100% is the norm) mere weeks before his removal. Two management resolutions also failed to reach the required threshold and a capital-discipline resolution drew unprecedented support. Something isn’t right and the question is whether the board has the integrity to name it.  

Home Office — Commander Stephen Clayman of the Metropolitan Police warned this week that Operation Olympos, the criminal investigation into the Post Office Horizon scandal, faces a five-year delay without approximately £16.5m in additional funding. Clayman was direct: "We do not have the luxury of time and must provide answers as soon as possible to those who so desperately deserve them." The projected budget for 2026/27 is £19.3m against a Home Office grant of £2.8m. Police currently hold 8 million documents and have interviewed 13 of 53 persons of interest. What does this say about the integrity of a state that won't fund the truth about its own failure?

Centrica / British Gas — Ofgem confirmed this week that British Gas has agreed to pay £20m into its Voluntary Redress Fund and write off up to £70m of debt owed by vulnerable customers, following its forced installation of prepayment meters between 2018 and 2023. The failings were flagged in an external review in 2018 and an internal audit in 2021. They kept happening. CEO Chris O'Shea said: "What happened should never have happened." He is right. It also did not need to happen twice.

👁 Watch 

Ofwat — apparently negotiating an arrangement under which Thames Water would avoid new fines until approximately 2030 in return for binding commitments on leakage, infrastructure and environmental performance. Existing penalties would not be removed. More than 80 MPs have publicly opposed the reported terms and a coordinated letter from 24 Thames Water-region MPs was sent to Ofwat and has received a formal response. Will the deal, when published, reflect what Ofwat claims it stands for.

On 26 May 2026, BP's board unanimously removed chairman Albert Manifold with immediate effect, citing serious concerns about governance standards, oversight and conduct. This is not the first time BP's boardroom has produced a story nobody can quite agree on. BP is now on its third chairman and third CEO in under three years. 

Manifold responded the same day: he disputed the characterisation entirely and said he had been removed without warning and without explanation. By 28 May he had replaced "I dispute the characterisation" with a single word: lies. Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported complaints about aggressive behaviour, mishandling of sensitive/privileged information, and attempts to bypass the board. Reuters cited four sources and a whistleblower report establishing a pattern of unacceptable behaviour. Save for Manifold, the sources who say otherwise have not given their names.

So, when a named individual is the latest in a slew of persons removed from a major public role on the basis of anonymously-sourced allegations, who do you believe? And why?

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