A CEO once described his executive committee to me with a phrase that stays true month after month : “We have the best minds in the company around the table, and yet we’ve been going in circles on the same topics for two years.”
This observation is far from exceptional. Most competent boards eventually run into this paradox : the more intelligent and committed the leadership team, the more capable it is of producing sophisticated analyses of its own blockage — without ever getting out of it.
The problem isn’t the analysis. It’s what you do with the analysis.
The Palo Alto school documented this mechanism as early as the 1970s under the name “attempted solution.” The idea is simple, and counter-intuitive : what keeps a problem in place is almost never the problem itself. It’s the solution you keep repeating to solve it.
In a board, this attempted solution often takes the same form : more meetings, more reporting, more upstream strategic alignment to avoid debates in the room. Each measure is rational. Each, taken alone, seems the right response to the problem noted the previous time. And yet the committee keeps going in circles — because these measures treat the symptom (the visible disagreement) without touching what produces it (the relational system that prevents disagreement from being said clearly, once, and settled).
What blocks isn’t in the meeting room
A board is not a sum of competent executives. It’s a relational system in its own right, with its history, its loyalties, its unspoken tensions — and often, one or two structural tensions never explicitly named : an old rivalry between two departments, a fundamental strategic disagreement never settled at the top, a place left vacant since a poorly digested departure.
As long as this relational system isn’t looked at as such — and not as a mere sum of individuals to align — the same disagreements will resurface in different forms, meeting after meeting. The topic changes; the loop stays identical.
The lever isn’t to argue better. It’s to interrupt the loop.
This is where systemic intervention differs from a classic strategic audit. It isn’t about bringing a better analysis — the board usually already has an excellent one. It’s about identifying the precise point where the system repeats its attempted solution, and introducing, at that exact place, a different movement.
Concretely, this can be : naming in session, with the committee, what everyone perceives individually but no one dares to state collectively. Redistributing an informal role that has frozen without anyone deciding it. Or simply slowing down a decision that the system accelerates precisely because it’s uncomfortable to settle.
This isn’t work on people. It’s work on what circulates — or no longer circulates — between them.
What it changes concretely
A board that has recovered its capacity to decide doesn’t become a board without tension — strong tensions are often the sign of a team with real stakes to address. It becomes a board where tension produces a decision, rather than a loop. It’s this seemingly minimal difference that changes everything else : decision speed, the consistency of downward messages, and ultimately, the organization’s trust in its leadership.