What makes a board fit for the future?
7 October 2025 - CISL Africa Director Richard Calland explores how do we measure ‘sustainability competence’ if it is not always formalised?
The dramatic decision by tourism minister Patricia de Lille to disband the board of SA Tourism has brought the leadership and governance responsibilities of boards into the spotlight.
Clearly, being a member of a board is not for the faint-hearted. But beyond a thick skin and a predisposition towards independence, what other skills and attributes are required?
A study by Just Share provocatively asks: “How cool is your board?” But behind the catchy headline lies a sobering and important message for SA’s corporate sector: our boardrooms are not sufficiently equipped for the climate and other systemic sustainability challenges that define this era of poly-crisis.
The report’s findings are stark. Out of 487 board seats across the JSE top 40, only 5% are occupied by individuals with any formal qualification in sustainability. A staggering 22 of the 40 companies have not a single such qualified director. The conclusion is inescapable: most of our top listed companies are flying blind when it comes to sustainability oversight.
The logic is straightforward. In governance, as in any professional sphere, expertise often correlates with formal education. We wouldn’t appoint a CFO without a finance qualification, or a general counsel without legal training. So why do we tolerate boards claiming “sustainability expertise” without a shred of evidence?
Yet while I value the premise that underpins Just Share’s approach, I wish to offer a broader — and perhaps slightly contrarian — view. As director of the Africa Programme at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and head of its board leadership programme, I now spend ample time inside boardrooms, working with board directors across the continent and globally. I also serve on the board of Chapter Zero Southern Africa, which supports nonexecutive directors to engage with climate risk.
What I’ve learnt is that formal qualifications are important, but they may not be the only, or even the most important, ingredient for effective board governance. The sustainability crisis is not just a technical one. It is a crisis of leadership, values, systems thinking and courage. Above all, it calls for “cognitive diversity” — the ability to bring different world views, disciplines and lived experiences into the boardroom.
Indeed, at CISL, our Future of Boards research (undertaken in partnership with global law firm DLA Piper) identified four essential attributes of a future-fit board:
- Contextual intelligence — the ability to understand the shifting operating environment, including climate, social inequality and geopolitical volatility.
- Ethical clarity and purpose — a clear compass for decision-making in complexity.
- Systems thinking and long-term vision — seeing beyond quarterly results to long-term resilience — the notion of “competitive sustainability” as CISL CEO Lindsay Hooper has branded it.
- Courageous stewardship — the bravery to lead transformative change, not just incremental compliance.
None of these attributes can be reduced to a single certificate or diploma. Some of the most insightful board directors I’ve encountered have never studied “sustainability” in a classroom. But they bring decades of grounded, strategic experience — as investors, regulators, scientists, or civil society leaders — and the curiosity to learn continuously, alongside the humility to accept that the modern board director is not there to primarily “transmit knowledge” but “to be a sparring partner with the executive in figuring out answers to wicked problems”, as one CEO of a global pharmaceutical company put it to me the other day.
This leads us to a critical governance challenge: how do we identify and recruit for these attributes? How do we measure “sustainability competence” if it is not always formalised? And how do we avoid tokenism or box-ticking in the process?
First, boards must interrogate their own composition with honesty. The Just Share report rightly challenges the over-dominance of finance and law backgrounds (a combined 74% of board qualifications in the top 40). Where are the development economists? The ecologists? The social entrepreneurs? The next generation of tech-savvy, climate-literate, African talent?
Second, we need new board recruitment practices that go beyond the golf club and the spreadsheet. Board nominations committees must cast their net wider — geographically, generationally, intellectually. As one board chair recently told me: “We keep appointing the same people, just in different jackets.”
Third, as the King IV and V frameworks rightly insist, boards must embrace sustainability not as a sideshow, but as a core strategic priority. That means ensuring the social and ethics committees are not just populated with insiders or retired executives, but include directors who bring sharp insight into climate, biodiversity, inequality and social risk.
It is astonishing — and disappointing — that in half of the top 40 companies where a director does have a sustainability qualification, that person doesn’t sit on the social and ethics committee.
Finally, we need to invest in board education, but of the right kind. Not just more “continuing professional development” boxes ticked, but deep, experiential programmes that equip directors with the strategic foresight and ethical literacy to govern in an age of disruption.
CISL’s board leadership programme challenges directors to reimagine the role of the board itself: as stewards of long-term value, fiduciaries not just to shareholders but to society, and to the future.
Formal qualifications may be useful, but let’s not stop there. The real prize is a new kind of boardroom: one that reflects the complexity of the world it governs; one that listens, learns and leads with purpose; and one that earns its licence to operate not just through compliance, but through courageous, visionary leadership.
In this age of compounded risk and opportunity, that’s what truly makes a board “cool”.