When the Board Loses Touch with Everyday Reality

Originally published on Digoshen, December 2025
Reflections from a Swedish CEO Magazine interview

When the Board Loses Touch with Everyday Reality explores the often-overlooked gap between boardroom decisions and the lived reality of executives, employees, and stakeholders. Drawing on insights from a Swedish CEO Magazine interview with Liselotte Engstam, Marlene Jegeborn, and Mathias Krümmel, the piece examines how governance can drift away from value creation—and how that gap can be closed.

Key insights from the piece include:

• The gap as a systemic issue — not a communication failure
The article reframes the board–management gap as a consequence of ways of working, unclear mandates, and misaligned expectations between owners, boards, and CEOs, rather than missing information or reporting quality.

• Structural bias toward control over progress
Boards are often shaped by regulation and tradition to look backward—toward reports, history, and formality—rather than forward. Without conscious effort, this bias makes boards reactive instead of guiding.

• When boards lack their own external perspective
If boards do not actively sense changes in the external environment—market shifts, AI, geopolitics, supply chains—they risk being surprised by issues management has been navigating for months.

• Board meetings as exams rather than shared work
When CEOs feel they must “report to” the board, meetings become tests to pass instead of forums for joint exploration of strategic dilemmas. This undermines trust, slows decision-making, and drains energy from value creation.

• From reporting to real dialogue
A key practical shift is separating reporting from board meetings, freeing time for future-oriented discussion, strategic trade-offs, and collective sense-making.

• Governance as a relational practice
At its core, effective governance is about relationships—trust, curiosity, and shared responsibility across the owner–board–CEO triangle. When boards reflect on how they work, not just what they decide, the gap to everyday reality narrows.

The message:
Governance is not strengthened by more control.
It is strengthened by presence, perspective, and partnership.
When boards stay connected to lived reality, they become stewards of renewal—not obstacles to it.

About Liselotte Engstam, Digoshen & Novisali

Liselotte Engstam is an explorer of perspectives, an adventurer of ideas, a pathfinder of meaning, and a guide of timeless transitions. She bridges the worlds of board leadership and art, helping organizations and individuals navigate disruption while nurturing creativity and reflection.

As founder of Digoshen, she works with boards and leaders to expand future insights and reduce digital and sustainability blindspots. Through research, networks, and executive programs, Digoshen supports responsible value creation in the digital and sustainable age, contributing thought leadership via books, articles, events, Digoshen Exploring Leaders podcast, and blogs.

She also serves as Chair of the Boards Impact Forum in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Climate Governance. The Forum convenes board members, thought leaders, and experts in dialogues, webinars, and collaborative events, accelerating action on climate, AI, and sustainability.

Through her artistic practice as Novisali, Liselotte explores creativity and meaning. Her watercolors, digitally reimagined, invite reflection and renewal, offering perspectives that connect head, heart, and hand, and complementing her work with leaders and boards.

→ Discover more at www.Digoshen.com
→ Learn more at www.BoardsImpactForum.com
→ Find more about Liselotte at www.liselotteengstam.com and her Google Scholar page
→ Explore Liselotte’s art and reflections at www.novisali.com and follow on Instagram @novisali_arts