Untangling competing priorities

Oxfordshire, April 2026

Boards don’t need more debate. They need clearer first moves.

I work with lots of Boards and executive teams, and one of the hardest parts of any meeting is making a decision. Or, more accurately, agreeing exactly what decision has just been taken, because once you start trying to agree the wording, the debate opens up again.

That is not because people are unwilling to decide. It is because decisions at board level are rarely as clear-cut as they first appear.

Very often, I see people bring papers to the Board asking for an either/or decision, where the alternative to the proposed course of action is “do nothing” and, either stated or strongly implied, be out of business within a year. If only it were really that simple. Trade-offs are rarely either/or. The data needed to make the decision is usually incomplete. You definitely are not going to make everyone happy.

But these trade-offs are rarely properly understood, or even explored.

I was recently asked to help a team shape the strategic response to a scenario that literally every person around the table understood differently. As a result, they all wanted to rush to action, but they had fundamentally different views on which direction to rush towards.

That is where I think many leadership teams go wrong. They move too quickly into solution mode before they have properly framed the problem. Research shows that leaders and their teams often devote too little effort to examining and defining problems before trying to solve them, which limits their ability to design innovative and durable solutions.

That is why I have had such good results with the Binder and Watkins E5 approach: Expand, Examine, Empathise, Elevate, Envision.

It gives teams a disciplined way to slow down just enough to think properly before they act:

• First, expand the frame. What else might be going on here? What assumptions are we making? What are we not seeing?
• Then examine the problem more deeply. What is driving it? What are the root causes, not just the symptoms?
• Next, empathise. Who is affected by this decision, and how are they experiencing it? What would this look like from their point of view?
• Then elevate. What does this issue mean in the wider organisational context? How does it connect to strategy, structure, culture, and politics?
• Finally, envision. What does success actually look like, and what are the first moves that will get us there?

That last point matters. Strategy is not just about setting a destination. It is about turning competing priorities into a clear sequence of first moves.

Boards and executive teams do not need a long list of ambitions. They need a roadmap that makes it obvious what comes first, what comes next, and – vitally – what has to be left behind.

But even the best strategy can fail if the decision-making process itself feels threatening, confusing, or opaque.

That is where neuroscience offers a useful lens.

My experience of Brain-Based Coaching has shown me the importance of recognising the triggers that will create a “towards” response and the very many more that will, often unintentionally, create an “away” or “threat” response. 

If leaders want commitment, not just compliance, they need to make decisions and help others come to their own conclusions (“insight”) in a way that is brain friendly. The SCARF framework is a simple but powerful reminder of what people need in order to engage well: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.

When a decision threatens status, removes certainty, strips away autonomy, weakens connection, or feels unfair, people naturally resist. When the process is handled well, people are far more likely to stay open, contribute honestly, and commit to the outcome even if they did not get everything they wanted.

So, in practice, the job of the Board is not simply to reach an answer. It is to make sure the question has been properly framed, the trade-offs have been named, and the first move is clear.

That is how strategy becomes executable, how leadership teams move from debate to direction, and how they take their teams with them.