No board decides to overlook disruption. And yet it keeps happening. Kodak invented the digital camera. Nokia had the engineering talent and market share to win the smartphone war. BlackBerry defined the professional mobile phone. And in Denmark, we had TimeSystem. None of them lacked capability or resources. They reacted too late to something they could actually see — they simply misjudged it.
That's the key point: the next versions of these stories will not necessarily be caused by poor leadership. They happen when capable leaders react too late.
Why is it so hard to see in time?
Because disruption rarely arrives as a finished conclusion. It arrives as weak signals: a competitor experimenting with something that looks immature. A shift in customer behaviour in a niche nobody takes seriously. A technology that isn't "good enough" yet — until suddenly it is. By the time the change is clear enough to be a board agenda item with an obvious answer, it is often already reshaping the economics of the industry.
That places a different demand on the board than most governance processes are built to handle. Annual cycles, quarterly reporting and risk matrices are good at managing known risks. They are worse at catching something that doesn't have a name yet.
What I've learned from standing in it myself
When I returned to Conecto as an investor and chairman, it wasn't because the company faced a dramatic technological disruption — it faced something more ordinary: direction, leadership and pace that had stalled. But the mechanism is the same. The longer you wait to act on a signal you can already see, the more expensive the fix becomes, and the fewer options you have left. We changed leadership, rebuilt the board and found shared direction — not because it was comfortable, but because it became clear it was necessary.
Internationalising SMS PASSCODE taught me the inverse version of the same lesson: being early in a niche others didn't yet take seriously was exactly what made it possible to build a position before competitors caught up. Our competitors took us seriously too late — we were already moving at full speed while they were still leaning on conservative assumptions about how things are done.
What a board can actually do about it
You cannot systematise your way out of blind spots, but you can make them more likely to surface:
- Don't just ask "is anything threatening us." Ask "what are we dismissing as immature or irrelevant — and why do we believe that?"
- Put technological and behavioural foresight on the agenda as its own item, not as a subsection of IT updates.
- Pay attention to who in the organisation sees the signals first — it's rarely top management, and rarely the people who speak loudest to the board.
A modern board must protect today's business while understanding when it needs to be challenged. This isn't about being right all the time. It's about reacting while there is still time to act.
— David Hald