Future-fit boards: Who belongs at the table for the next decade?

If your board were built today for the next decade, who would still be sitting at the table? In an environment shaped by accelerating change, it’s a question no board can afford to ignore.

Succession is a mechanism for anticipating the future, not preserving the past, but most boards are still planning for orderly replacement. How can they move beyond static skills matrices toward dynamic capability planning, and turn succession into strategic advantage?

Organisational resilience and competitive edge will be defined by the robustness of its succession planning. To be fit for the future, your next board will not look like the last one.

However, the challenge is that succession planning remains an under-leveraged strategic tool in Australian governance. The process typically focuses on the orderly replacement of directors, but planning based solely on skill preservation may leave boards exposed in a future of growing complexity.

Paul Smith, “board futurist” and founder of Future Directors, describes the planning aspect of succession as “often undercooked”.

“If there is a skills matrix in place, the conversation tends to be, ‘Who are we losing and what do we need to replace because of that?’” he says. “Instead, we need to be asking a much more strategic question, which is, ‘Who do we need on this board and why, given the capabilities the organisation will need?’

“Historically, we’ve rewarded finance and legal expertise, industry experience and the proven CV,” he continues. “That’s what we’ve recruited for in the boardroom. But I’m not convinced that’s what we need going forward.”

Behavioural matters

Succession planning is a valuable mechanism for anticipating the future, but regulators such as the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) identify it as a source of weakness for many Australian boards.

In June this year, the financial safety watchdog began the final phase of its governance review with updated requirements designed to strengthen governance across banking, superannuation and insurance. While an initial proposal for mandatory early engagement between significant financial institutions and APRA on succession planning will not proceed, boards are required to take reasonable steps to ensure they have the skills, experience and behavioural attributes needed to effectively perform their role. They must also demonstrate how they are addressing any current or future skill and capability deficiencies.

APRA says the regulator commonly observes gaps in board succession planning, noting it “is not sufficiently integrated with other governance processes, such as maintaining a skills matrix, identifying current capability gaps and future skill needs, and using the outcomes of board and director performance reviews”.

Research from the EY Global Centre for Board Matters also reveals looming gaps in skills and behaviours across Australian boards. Along with a shortage of digital literacy, it shows boards to be light on “soft skills” such as behavioural science, which shape how directors work and interact with others.

“Because we’re moving at such a fast pace, the differentiator going forward is that mindset and behavioural traits will become more important than someone’s CV,” says Michelle Gardiner, managing partner for board practice at executive and board search firm Derwent. “You need people who can quickly learn something, unlearn something and relearn something [else] in response to changing tools, roles and ways of working.”

Domain experience will remain important, but in an environment marked by increasing uncertainty, future boards also require directors comfortable with ambiguity. While such behavioural traits are hard to identify from a CV, they can emerge through conversation, reference checking and psychometric testing.

“That means appointment processes need to go deeper and so can interview questions that ask candidates to reflect on decisions that didn’t go well,” says Smith.

“Reflective individuals tend to discuss what they learned and what they would do differently. Others simply explain why it wasn’t their fault. It’s about understanding how people behave in real time.”

Who’s at the table?

A breadth of perspectives is also required to inform boardroom decision-making, especially at a time of increasing geopolitical uncertainty, rapid technological change and rising community expectations. Data from the 2026 Board Diversity Index – produced by Watermark Search International, Deloitte Australia and the AICD – shows that while women now represent 38 per cent of ASX 300 directors, only 6.5 per cent of directors are from non-Anglo Celtic backgrounds, down from 8.1 per cent in 2025. Only five directors across the ASX 300 openly identify as LGBTQ+, just four identify as First Nations, and none have disclosed a disability.

“We need to broaden our thinking about whose voices should be represented,” says Smith. “Which stakeholders need to be heard? Which perspectives should be brought into the room, rather than assuming we already speak for everyone?”

Building a future-looking pipeline of talent also requires moving beyond static skills matrices toward dynamic capability planning.

“I can usually tell within about two seconds whether a skills matrix is useful,” says Steven Bowman FAICD, managing director of board advisory Conscious Governance. “The first thing I look for is whether it’s firmly embedded in the emerging risks, strategic priorities and vision of the organisation – 90 times out of 100, the answer is no. The framework itself is usually quite useful, but how it’s used is often much less useful. It’s not much use having a column that says, ‘strategic thinking’. Strategic thinking about what?”

Gardiner thinks future-focused boards must question what it means to be “board-ready”. “Historically, directors were expected to have completed their executive careers before joining boards,” she says. “Increasingly, contemporary expertise may justify bringing executives onto boards earlier, particularly where they possess capabilities organisations urgently need. The contemporary skills agenda is helping accelerate change. As organisations seek expertise in areas such as AI, cyber and transformation, they’re naturally broadening the profile of who they consider board-ready.”

Smith also questions how “proven governance experience” is measured. “At the moment, we often measure it by the number of boards someone has served on and the number of years they’ve spent there,” he says. “But is that really proof? There are plenty of directors with supposedly proven governance experience who aren’t necessarily showing up in the right way.

“I understand why organisations take comfort from those traditional indicators. The greater the regulatory, reputational or public scrutiny, the more inclined organisations are to choose the safer option. But I’m not convinced the evidence supports the assumption that this always leads to better outcomes.”