There is a sentence I have written before, and one I will write again, because the more I observe Nigeria’s public institutions, the more convinced I become that this sentence carries the weight of an unspoken law.
‘Every institution is designed to achieve the result it does.’
If a parastatal is failing, it was designed to fail. If a regulator is performing, it was designed to perform. If a development bank is drifting, it was designed to drift. None of these outcomes are accidents. They are the predictable result of how the institution was put together, who was placed inside it, what they were asked to do, and how they were held to account.
This is the central principle of organisation design. It applies to companies, to government ministries, to civil society bodies, and to nations. And it applies, with full force and almost no exception, to boards.
In the last column, I argued that fixing public sector boards in Nigeria is the most powerful reform lever no one is pulling. Today I want to make the argument one layer deeper.
‘Most public sector boards in Nigeria are not underperforming by accident. They are underperforming by design.’
They were assembled, structured, briefed, and operated in a way that makes anything other than underperformance unlikely. If we want different results, we must change the design. There is no way around this.
The seven disciplines of a high performing board
In a wide-ranging conversation with PUNCH Newspaper a few years ago, I laid out what I called the seven transformational disciplines of running government like a business. Purpose. Strategy. Structure. Roles. People. Culture. Systems. The argument then was simple. These seven disciplines, applied with rigour to government, would shift government from politics first to performance first.
The same seven disciplines apply to boards. In fact, they apply with even greater force, because the board is the highest decision-making body of any public institution. If these seven are wrong at board level, they will be wrong everywhere else in the institution. If these seven are right at board level, almost everything else becomes possible.
Let me walk through each of the seven, as they apply to the boardroom, and let the reader judge their own board against them.
Discipline one: Purpose
A performing board knows why it exists. Not in the legalistic sense of what the enabling Act says about its functions, but in the much sharper sense of what the country needs this institution to deliver, and what role the board plays in making sure that delivery happens.
Most public sector boards in Nigeria cannot answer this question with clarity. Asked what their board is for, the typical answer drifts toward describing the institution itself, or restating the appointment letter, or invoking generalities about oversight. The board’s own purpose, as distinct from the institution’s purpose, is rarely articulated. As a result, the board has no anchor against which to measure whether it is doing its job. It cannot fail because it never named what success would look like.
The remedy is unglamorous but essential. Every public sector board in Nigeria should be able to state, in one sentence, what it exists to do, and what would constitute failure of that purpose. Until that sentence exists, the board is drifting.
Discipline two: Strategy
A performing board sets the direction of the institution. It does not rubber stamp the management’s strategy. It does not approve the strategy document after the fact, having read it on the morning of the meeting. It interrogates the strategy, shapes it, returns to it across the year, and holds the Chief Executive accountable for executing it.
Most public sector boards in Nigeria do none of this. Strategy is treated as a management matter, brought to the board for ceremonial endorsement, and then filed. The board’s role in setting direction is reduced to a quarterly review of how the management’s plans are progressing, which is not strategic direction at all. It is operational reporting dressed up in a strategic costume.
The remedy here is to put strategic direction back where it belongs, at the top of every board agenda for the first hour of every meeting, with management present to be challenged, not to present.
Discipline three: Structure
A performing board is structured to do its work. It has the right number of directors, the right committees, the right cadence of meetings, the right access to information, and the right relationship with management. None of these are accidental. Each is a design decision.
Most public sector boards in Nigeria are structured by inheritance rather than by design. The number of directors was fixed in the founding Act decades ago, and may bear no relationship to the work that needs doing. The committee structure is often identical across institutions of wildly different mandates, because someone copied the template. Meetings happen quarterly because the law says so, regardless of whether quarterly is enough. Information packs run to hundreds of pages because no one has the standing to insist on a shorter, sharper, decision-oriented format.
I have seen boards of eleven members where the work would be done better by seven. I have seen boards of seven where nine were needed to cover the range of expertise. I have seen audit committees that exist on paper and have not met meaningfully in years. I have seen risk committees with no risk professionals on them. The structure was set by default, not by intention. The result is predictable.
Discipline four: Roles
A performing board is clear about who does what. The role of the Chair is different from the role of the Chief Executive. The role of the non-executive director is different from the role of the executive director. The role of the audit committee chair is different from the role of the company secretary. Each role has its own work, its own boundaries, its own accountabilities.
Most public sector boards in Nigeria suffer from what I once called role pollution. The Chair behaves like a second Chief Executive. The Chief Executive treats the board as advisory rather than supervisory. Non-executive directors drift into operational matters they have no business in. The audit committee chair confuses oversight with operational involvement. The company secretary, in too many cases, takes minutes and does little else, when the role demands a constitutional discipline that can be the difference between a functional board and a dysfunctional one.
When roles are polluted, decisions are slow, accountability is diffused, and nothing meaningful gets done. Cleaning up roles, in writing, at the start of every appointment cycle, costs nothing and would change everything.
Discipline five: People
This is the discipline I will return to repeatedly across this column, because in my view it is the single most important of the seven. A performing board is composed of the right people. The wrong people, no matter how well intentioned, cannot produce the right results.
The right people on a public sector board in Nigeria are those who bring three things. They bring competence, by which I mean the technical, financial, strategic and sector knowledge to engage with the institution’s work at a serious level. They bring independence, by which I mean the standing and the disposition to disagree with management and with each other when the situation demands it. And they bring commitment, by which I mean the willingness to do the homework, attend the meetings, ask the difficult questions, and put in the unglamorous work that board service genuinely requires.
Most public sector boards in Nigeria are not composed with these three criteria in mind. They are composed with political balance, zonal representation, party loyalty, and personal obligation in mind. These may all be legitimate considerations within limits. But when they crowd out competence, independence and commitment, you have built a board that cannot do its job. The design is wrong before the first meeting is held.
Discipline six: Culture
A performing board has a culture of candour. Directors say what they think. They disagree without it becoming personal. They challenge management without it being read as disloyalty. They sit with difficult truths without rushing to resolve them. The Chair models this culture in how she runs the room.
Most public sector boards in Nigeria have a culture of caution. Directors say what they think will be received well. Disagreement is read as factional. Challenge of management is rare, and when it happens, it is delivered so softly as to be missed. Difficult truths are avoided. The Chair, by default and not by intention, models a culture of comfort.
Culture, in board terms, is not soft. It is the most consequential of all the disciplines, because it determines whether the structure, the people, and the systems actually produce the conversations that lead to good decisions. A board with a culture of caution will fail to deliver, no matter how well it is structured. A board with a culture of candour will deliver, even when other elements are imperfect.
Discipline seven: Systems
A performing board runs on systems. There is a system for setting the annual board calendar. There is a system for preparing and circulating information packs. There is a system for inducting new directors. There is a system for evaluating board performance, separate from management performance. There is a system for renewing the board, for managing succession, for handling conflicts of interest, for documenting decisions, for following up on resolutions.
Most public sector boards in Nigeria run on body language. Important matters are settled informally, between meetings, in conversations that are not recorded. Induction of new directors is patchy at best. Evaluation of board performance is annual at most, and is usually filed rather than acted upon. Decisions are taken but not always followed through, because no one owns the follow through.
When a board runs on body language rather than systems, it depends entirely on the personalities currently in the room. The day those personalities leave, the institution loses its capacity to govern itself. This is the structural fragility of most public sector boards in Nigeria, and it is fixable.
The proof of design
I keep returning, in this column, to NAFDAC under Dora Akunyili, because her tenure is the clearest Nigerian example of what becomes possible when these seven disciplines are taken seriously. NAFDAC’s purpose was sharpened. Its strategy was direction setting, not direction following. Its structures were rebuilt for performance. Roles were clarified, ruthlessly. People were selected for competence and commitment. The culture was reset, from the top, with candour at its centre. Systems replaced personalities as the engine of the institution. The result was not magic. It was design.
The same potential exists across every public sector institution in Nigeria today. The boards of our DFIs, our regulators, our infrastructure agencies, our universities, our pension funds, our revenue authorities. Each of them could be a NAFDAC moment in their own sector. What stands in the way is not policy. It is not funding. It is not technology. It is design.
And design is something we can change.
The work ahead
Over the coming columns I will go into each of the seven disciplines as they apply to boards, in greater depth, with the frameworks, the diagnostics, and the practical guidance that this short column cannot accommodate. I will spend particular time on People, because, as I have said, this is the discipline that matters most. Get the people right, and the other six become tractable. Get the people wrong, and the other six will not save you.
In the meantime, I leave every reader of this column with a single exercise. Take the board of any public institution you know well. Score it against the seven disciplines. Purpose. Strategy. Structure. Roles. People. Culture. Systems. Give it a mark out of ten on each. Total it out of seventy. Ask yourself, honestly, where the institution currently sits.
Most public sector boards in Nigeria score below forty out of seventy on this test. Some score below thirty. A handful, the genuinely well-designed ones, score above fifty-five. The gap between the well designed and the poorly designed is not luck. It is design.
The board sets the ceiling. The seven disciplines determine where the ceiling is set. Fix the design, and the ceiling rises. Leave the design alone, and the ceiling stays where it is, no matter what reforms are attempted elsewhere.
The boards we build are the country we get.
Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.
