Governance scholarship has given us a detailed account of what boards are made of: their composition, their independence, their committee structures, and the formal processes that surround board decision-making. This piece turns to what boards actually do, in the moment when directors, papers, screens, advisers, and the room itself combine into a judgement. How collective wisdom is produced at the apex of the organisation, under conditions of uncertainty and competing pressure, is the question it takes up.
The article relocates the more-than-human turn in organisation studies to the boardroom. We argue that governance at the apex of the organisation is a more-than-human achievement, in which collective wisdom emerges from the entanglement of directors, materials, technologies, and the room itself. The Chair is its mediator: the figure who attunes the human and material elements of the board into the conditions under which collective wisdom can emerge. We call this practice Mindful Chairship.
The board as a more-than-human assemblage
A board paper is a representation that selects, frames, and shapes what the board can attend to. The technologies that summarise risk, the artefacts that carry a recommendation into the room, the arrangement of the room itself: these participate in the production of board judgement. The board is a hybrid achievement, an assemblage of directors and the material elements through which the organisation becomes knowable to them.
A substantive account of mindfulness meets the demand this reading creates. Mindfulness, here, is attention to experience held with presence, context, and purpose, a capacity that is at once individual and collective, and that connects attention to ethical discernment. Attention, on this account, is something a board achieves together, across its human and material elements, and something that can be tended by the figure who holds the room.
The Chair who turns the Wheel
Mindful Chairship draws on the Wheel of Mindfulness, which maps mindful practice across two dimensions: what mindfulness is of, ranging from individual to collective, and what mindfulness is for, ranging from instrumental to substantive. These axes produce four arenas: individual mindfulness, collective mindfulness, individual wisdom, and collective wisdom. The board does its highest work in the arena of collective wisdom, and it arrives there through practice.
Tending carries specific weight here. It names the relational work of keeping an assemblage in condition: attending to its state, noticing when elements fall out of attunement, and acting to restore the conditions under which collective action is possible. The Chair tends the conditions under which the assemblage can attend well and reach judgement that has been genuinely tested. Collective wisdom remains a property of the whole. The Chair holds that whole in the attunement that makes it possible.
Four modes
The practice can be characterised through four modes, each tending a different arena of the board's attention:
- The Strategist tends substantive direction, holding the board's attention on where the organisation is headed and the contradictions it must hold.
- The Steward tends collective purpose, holding the room within its interdependence with those the organisation affects.
- The Connector tends the relational fabric of the assemblage, the conditions under which dissent and uncertainty can be voiced and heard.
- The Executor tends material discipline, the agenda, the papers, the routes through which information arrives, so the board attends to what matters in the form in which it can be acted on.
These are positions on the Wheel, rather than fixed types of person. A Chair moves between them as the governance season demands. The Executor is the ground condition of the other three, which is why it runs as a continuous thread through every season.
What this means for boards
The work of the Chair holds two faces of the assemblage at once: the quality of collective attention, including the conditions under which dissent and uncertainty can be voiced and heard, and the design of the material setting, the agendas, the board papers, and the routes through which the organisation becomes knowable. The four modes give chairs a vocabulary for reading what a governance season requires and for moving the board's attention into the arena the situation demands. Distributed organisation has a tender, and the tender's work can be identified, practised, and studied.
A note on the research
The four-mode framework presented here is developed more fully in the authors' academic work, "Mindful Chairship: Tending the More-Than-Human Boardroom," presented at the European Group for Organizational Studies Colloquium, 2026. Quotations are drawn from the public statements, interviews, and published reflections of senior Australian chairs.
About the authors
Dr Elizabeth King is a researcher and advisor on mindful leadership and board governance at the University of Sydney Business School. She works with chairs and boards on the practice of collective judgement and has spent two decades studying how leaders attend, decide, and hold responsibility under pressure.
Dr Justin Brienza is a researcher in management at the UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, where his work focuses on wisdom, judgement, and decision-making in organisations.
Vincent Murdoch is a governance practitioner and founder of Governance for Good, advising boards on the conditions for sound collective decision-making.
