Most board information tells you where you've been. Employee engagement scores from last quarter. Revenue figures from last month. All valuable for governance, but none of it helps you see what's building on the horizon.
This is the challenge of executive intelligence: spotting signals before they appear in your performance data.
The Rear-View Mirror Problem
Think about driving. You need a bigger windscreen than you do a rear-view mirror. What's ahead matters more than what's behind. And yet boards typically work with information that shows what's already happened rather than what's coming.
Take a recent example. An organisation's engagement score was healthy and improving. The presentation moved to the next region. But when we looked at the same data differently, a significant proportion of staff were signalling intention to leave — and the concentration was in populations the organisation couldn't afford to lose.
The board's response: "How has no one noticed this?"
The headline metric hadn't revealed the problem because it was averaging across the wrong boundaries. The improving score masked an emerging retention crisis in critical talent.
. By the time traditional metrics signal a problem clearly enough for board reports, it's often too late for the most effective response.
What Executive Intelligence Actually Means
Executive intelligence isn't about having more data. It's about having different information that reveals patterns before they manifest in standard metrics.
A few years ago, I worked with a team in Nairobi. They'd engaged IBM to analyse their digital data: search patterns, social media, online behaviour. The analytics were impressive. Themes emerged. Trends were identified.
But the meaning? IBM could tell them what people were searching for. What they couldn't capture was why those things mattered or how they connected to strategic challenges. The difference between knowing a phrase is trending and understanding what it means is the difference between data and intelligence.
Understanding Context Through Experience
The information is usually already there — it's just not surfaced in standard reporting. Sometimes that means examining how people describe their actual experiences. Sometimes it means segmenting existing survey data by population rather than averaging across the organisation. The method matters less than the shift: from reporting what's measured to revealing what's happening.
Back to that organisation with the emerging retention risk. When we examined people's experiences, we could identify departments with inspirational leadership where people felt genuinely engaged. We also found departments where people talked about relentless workload increases and leadership that communicated through directive rather than dialogue.
The organisation was about to launch a restructure involving redundancies. The board could now see exactly where that would land well and where it would trigger an exodus of critical talent.
This is executive intelligence in practice. Not predicting the future, but understanding the patterns that shape how events unfold.
Working With Organisational History
Organisations inevitably compare new leaders to predecessors. Every action gets interpreted through historical lenses, whether leaders know it or not.
I saw this at Sun Life during vision work. Some people heard "reorganisation" and nodded calmly. Others went on high alert. When we dug in, we realised people from a previous merger had learned that "reorganisation" meant 20% redundancies. Meanwhile, people from the original organisation just thought it meant musical chairs.
If you understand how people make sense of history, you can work with it deliberately. Use language that resonates with positive examples. Reference outcomes people valued. But you can only do this if you've done the work to understand how people think you got here.
Building Forward-Looking Capacity
The boards that see patterns early work with information differently. They ask what's surprising, not just what's measured. They look for weak signals rather than waiting for aggregate confirmation. They create space to explore what's emerging alongside rigorous oversight:
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Starting Points
Where do you need the earlier signal? Employee sentiment before it affects retention? Customer perception before it hits revenue? Operational patterns before they become structural?
The question isn't whether the information exists. It's whether you're set up to see it.
The goal isn't certain. In complex environments, that's impossible - and not the point. The goal is developing the capacity to see more of what's happening now, understand it in context, and make better decisions as a result.
They're the ones seeing what's building before it shows in the numbers.
Image Source: Canva
Information is to behaviour change as spaghetti is to a brick
When Departments Don't Talk: Making Sense of Organisational Complexity
