Boards today are expected to deal with an increasingly broad range of complex business and societal challenges while meeting stakeholder expectations. In addition, the composition of boards is becoming more socially complex and diverse.

However, despite these changes and many boards making significant progress in addressing their internal dynamics, there is a lack of understanding of the actions that take place outside the boardroom which influence effectiveness inside the multi-dimensional environment. There is also no generally accepted ‘how-to’ framework, or even a term to describe the people aspect of board effectiveness, with varying expectations from regulators and markets.

While the importance of board dynamics has long been recognised, a structured approach to enable boards to come together effectively as collective decision-making bodies has been missing.

Look beyond skills and diversity

All too often, commentary around board success is focused on decision-making, diversity and skills. However, this focus does not necessarily address the increased complexity of today’s boardroom.

Research has shown that board effectiveness is driven equally by the combination of people acting together and decision-making tasks.

Although parameters and principles exist, practice, regulation and academic resources do not adequately explain or provide guidance on how to bring boards together as socially complex groups.

To address this limited knowledge, we undertook deep-dive research with the aim of better enabling boards. The evidence highlighted that, as boards become more diverse and deal with more complex problems, they need greater understanding of how to get the most out of their dynamics. Ambiguity over how to facilitate the board coming together also creates obstacles for effective process deployment: a key issue emphasised in our discussions with 600 practitioners as part of the research.

Changing boardrooms

Corporate boardrooms today are very different from those of the last century, in two key aspects:

1. Issues and topics to manage are more complex and ambiguous than in previous generations. Boards are expected to address global challenges whilst under increasing external pressures and facing stakeholder scrutiny.

2. Boards themselves are more socially complex and dynamic in their composition today, with heterogeneous demographics creating further complexities.

We must address these levels of complexity to understand board interaction and, subsequently, their onward performance. This means looking at more than diversity and skills alone. Continuing to focus solely on these elements means we are addressing only the more visible part of the board—decision-making.

Board behavioural dynamics

Through our comprehensive research we gained key insights into boards and their advisers which enabled us to plot the current architecture in use and create the Board Behavioural Dynamics Handbook, which was launched on 1 July 2025.

The handbook addresses that important levers are missing to enable boards to come together as collective units—what we refer to as board behavioural dynamics.

Our research highlights that it is critical to recognise that boards operate within a complex ecosystem. The board is continually affected by interdependent chair-led processes, contextual pressures from the external and internal environment, and the board’s expected and actual outcomes.

We define the board itself as having four core elements: demographic diversity, expertise, interpersonal relationships, and structure. Importantly, these should be seen within the complex ecosystem and not as standalone areas of impact.

To address the missing levers, the handbook presents a process benchmark using three maturity approaches for six core processes.

Maturity maps provide the ability to plot contextual pressures, procedural steps and outcomes across the three approaches, thereby allowing tailored best-fit proportional response.

Strategic next steps

Creating a clear process for understanding behavioural dynamics is just the start. To ensure continued board success, strategic frameworks need to become embedded and implicit in board design.

To take our research even further, the next phase will explore how boards are strategically enabled. By interviewing chairs and board members, we will gain specific insights into how to strategically deploy the architecture. This will allow us to delve deeper into the findings that only a handful of boards are applying explicit and proportional design and demonstrating increased levels of facilitation around interpersonal relationships.

Although initial findings indicate the importance of understanding behavioural dynamics to the success of the board, there is more work to be done to ensure strategic frameworks become the norm and boards get the most out of their collective members.

Loretto Leavy, a company secretary, is a researcher at the University of Exeter Business School. Ruth Sealy is a professor of leadership at Henley Business School. They are the authors of the Board Behavioural Dynamics Handbook.