In times of distress, businesses can often reap the rewards of efforts they made during calmer periods. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)'s consultation on operational resilience ensured that this idea has dominated senior conversations since last year. As a result, most businesses had taken the first, crucial steps to setting their organisations up to survive a shock before this recent crisis arrived. These steps included identifying and mapping crucial business lines, setting and testing impact tolerances and learning from identified weaknesses. From a governance perspective, the ease of communication between critical business lines and senior management had been analysed, and areas of improvement noted.

However, few had yet had the opportunity to consider the learnings from this project in great depth. Even fewer had time to make the procedural and cultural changes required to ensure that senior decision-making, action and communication processes were agile and effective enough to survive times of acute stress.

Now we find ourselves in the eye of the storm, decision makers must return to first principles. To navigate any major challenge, boards and leadership teams need two things: clear information and robust communication protocols that keep stakeholders informed about what is happening. In a crisis, they need these to operate at great speed. In other words, businesses need great governance to survive.

Management needs the board's support when evaluating alternative courses of action. The board must ensure it infuses short-term, pressured executive decision-making with appropriate long-term perspective. Neither management nor board are aided by laboured reporting processes, reams of unclear management information and day-long meetings.

Decision-makers and their governance teams must rapidly reassess the organisation's priorities, adapt meeting agendas to support those critical missions and simplify decision-making processes to make sure things happen.

Clearly defining organisational priorities align the board and executive to the same purpose, which in turn makes it easier to pull in the same direction. Adapting meeting agendas to spend enough time on the most important issues, removing administrative items and regular updates, ensures priorities get the airtime they deserve. Reducing management information to only what is relevant, accompanied by appropriate insight, will engender dynamic discussions, allowing rapid collaboration, decision and execution.

To learn how others are rapidly pivoting their board agendas, simplifying their board papers and implementing secure leadership technologies, you can access further resources and contact the author via Board Intelligence's webpage.