In Robert Connolly’s Force of Nature (2024), the Australian sequel to The Dry, five colleagues from a finance firm set out on a corporate team-building hike in the fictional Giralang Ranges, filmed in the parklands of Victoria. Their boss, Jill, put the group together and walks with them. Among the others are a pair of sisters and two childhood friends, and old grievances come along too. After a fight over their only map, it falls into a river. Without it, the group disagrees about which way to go. Later they find an abandoned cabin. When one colleague, Alice, raises concerns about staying there, the others dismiss them and vote to spend the night. Four of the five walk out of the forest, and Alice is missing.
However, a film is a story, and a team-building hike is a long way from a boardroom. What strikes me and connects the context is how much of that vote at the cabin was settled before the walk began. Who was in the group, the boss walking beside her staff, and the friendships and grievances each of them carried were all set in advance. When the vote came, rank and history were part of it, constraining the framework and the interplay. In the moment, the group could only work within the design options it had.
A board meeting works the same way, albeit at a gentler pace. Before anyone in the room has spoken, the agenda has decided which items get time, the order they come in and what the board is asked to do with each. I have written before about linking each item to purpose and treating the board’s attention as a budget. Design also reaches inside each item, into how the board thinks together once the item is open.
The agenda on paper is only one of the agendas in the room. In our survey of 185 Australian directors, reported in the new Elgar Encyclopedia of Wisdom Research, Justin Brienza, Vince Murdoch and I found two forms of attention in the boardroom. Embodied Mindfulness is a director’s attention to their own inner state in the meeting. Group Attunement is a felt sense of the board as a whole, including what sits beneath the discussion. Both forms were linked to wisdom.
So every meeting runs on two agendas. One is printed at the front of the pack. The others arrive with the people around the table, in their concerns, their loyalties and the positions already taken. The five colleagues in Force of Nature carried theirs into the forest. Directors carry theirs into every meeting. A mindful agenda is designed with both in view.
These findings come from directors describing themselves, and our measure of Group Attunement is still being refined. However, the distinction is clear enough to use when planning a meeting.
In our chapter we describe mindfulness in organisations as being about presence, and also about “attending to the wider environment and the underlying purposes that shape attention and action.” (King, Brienza & Murdoch, 2026, p. 386) For a chair, the purpose of an item shapes how the item is run, along with whether it even earns a place on the agenda.
Inside each item, order shapes judgement. When the chair asks for positions early, every later argument has to move people off a view they have already stated in front of their peers. When positions come last, the board can examine the evidence while minds are still open.
A simple sequence helps.
First, frame the item. The chair states the question before the board and what the board must do with it, whether that is to decide, discuss, seek assurance or note.
Second, explore. Directors test the evidence and the assumptions, say what is uncertain and ask who will carry the consequences, before anyone declares a view.
Third, decide. Positions come last, and the chair records what needs to return to a future agenda.
The agenda and related papers can support each stage. A paper written for decision sets out the choices , the reasoning behind the recommendation, the principal risks and the questions on which directors’ judgement is sought. It gives the exploration something solid to work on.
An agenda gives the meeting its structure, and the chair’s conduct turns that structure into governance. In a separate paper on Mindful Chairship, presented at EGOS 2026, Vince Murdoch and I describe the chair as the steward of the board’s collective attention. The chair keeps the practice of governance aligned with the purpose it serves.
During the exploration, the chair can notice where the discussion has gone, which assumptions remain untested and which part of the evidence the board has yet to discuss. Uncertainty belongs in that conversation. A director who says they need extra evidence is giving the board useful information.
In our Elgar chapter, Justin Brienza, Vince Murdoch and I wrote that the balance between self-awareness and social awareness “creates the psychological conditions for wise reasoning to emerge in the collective.” (King, Brienza & Murdoch, 2026, p. 393) Some items will need a decision on the day. Others will need a defined next step, a person responsible for gathering evidence and a date to return to the board. The agenda can support both.
Both kinds of outcome feed the next meeting. The minutes record decisions and actions. The chair can also take a few minutes at the close to ask what the printed agenda missed.
From those answers, the chair records one change to the next agenda and the reason for it. Over time, part of the second agenda moves onto the first, where the whole board can see it.
Before you circulate or accept your next agenda, read it as a design for the board’s thinking. Can every director see what each item asks of them, when they will be asked for a view and how the meeting connects to the organisation’s purpose? If they can, the board has a sound place to begin.
Discover your Director Score. It is an individual survey of your own mindful practice as a director, 18 questions that take under ten minutes. Button link https://boardmindfulness.scoreapp.com
King, E. L., Brienza, J. P., & Murdoch, V. (2026). A new framework for measuring two key dimensions of mindfulness in the boardroom. In D. Rooney, J. P. Brienza, A. Intezari, & E. L. King (Eds.), Elgar encyclopedia of wisdom research (pp. 380–398). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035302628
King, E., & Murdoch, V. (2026, July). Enacting collective wisdom: The practice of Mindful Chairship in the integrated boardroom [Conference paper]. EGOS 2026 Colloquium, Sub-theme 53: Responsible Management-as-Practice in More-than-Human Organisations, Bergamo, Italy.
Connolly, R. (Director). (2024). Force of nature: The dry 2 [Film]. Roadshow Films.