Sujata Deshmukh on The Boardroom Question Nobody Is Asking: Can Your Organisation Tell You the Truth?

In my experience of working with 500 organisations, these questions often matter more than they appear to. Because the effectiveness of a board ultimately depends not just on the quality of the questions it asks, but on whether the organisation is willing and able to bring the uncomfortable answers to the table.

I remember standing outside a conference room once, after sitting in on a top team meeting. The strategy presentation had been sharp. The numbers were tight. The CEO was confident, and fielded every question with ease. People nodded. Nobody interrupted. Everyone looked attentive. The meeting even closed twenty minutes early, which the room seemed to take as a good sign.

Afterwards, I asked one of the directors what he thought. There was a long pause. Then he said quietly, “Honestly? I had two questions I didn’t ask.” When I asked why, he just shrugged. “It didn’t feel like the moment.” It never does. That, to me, is precisely the point.

We spend a great deal of time on board oversight of strategy, of capital allocation, of succession. We spend far less time on something quieter and, I would argue, more consequential: whether the truth is actually reaching the top table, and whether it feels safe to disagree once it does.

Almost every serious stumble I have watched unfold from the sideline.. a product recall, a compliance failure, a strategy that quietly unravelled two years after it was celebrated had an earlier moment somewhere in it. A moment where someone knew, and said nothing. Or said it so softly that it never registered.

As Indians we are unafraid of having a good argument. Turn on any news debate and you’ll find opinions delivered at full volume, with total conviction, by people who have clearly never doubted themselves in their lives. We’ve been arguing about scripture, philosophy and politics around dinner tables for centuries. Voice is not something we lack.

But there is a real difference between speaking and speaking up. In many of the boardrooms and leadership teams I’ve worked with, hierarchy still carries genuine weight. Questioning a chairman, a promoter CEO, or a founder who built the company out of nothing, is not the same as debating a colleague over dinner. There’s respect in that, sometimes affection, and often, if I’m honest, plain fear of consequence.

The “power distance” gets in the way. So people find other ways to register what they cannot say aloud: a slower pace of execution, a project that quietly loses steam, whispers in the corridor, a resignation that arrives “out of nowhere.” Boards tend to read these as operational issues. In my experience, they are usually something else entirely… unspoken disagreement that has simply run out of road.

Over the years, I’ve come to see this play out as two opposite polarities, and I’ve sat inside both. At one extreme are the organizations I’d call overtly harmony-seeking everyone agrees with everyone, rather too easily, and decisions move fast. Suspiciously fast, in fact. I once sat through a leadership meeting where a multi-crore decision was signed off in eleven minutes flat, with more time spent on where to order lunch from than on the decision itself. Nobody was lying. They just weren’t disagreeing, which is its own quiet kind of dishonesty.

At the other extreme sit the organizations that have made everything about rigour, where every proposal must be cross-questioned, re-questioned, and litigated across four more meetings before anyone commits to anything. I’ve watched teams debate the order of speakers, or the wording on a slide, with the intensity most people reserve for a merger…skeptical of almost everything that comes up. It looks like the healthier of the two cultures, because at least people are talking. But argument without end is not the same as honesty either. It’s often just a more exhausting way of avoiding a decision, and, I suspect, avoiding the accountability that comes after one.

Both extremes, oddly, produce the same silence I opened with. In the harmony-seeking room, nobody says the hard thing because it would break the mood. In the argue-till-eternity room, everybody says everything except the one thing that matters, because it’s safer to relitigate the process than to own the call. Boards tend to reward whichever extreme feels more comfortable to them, the swift room looks decisive, the argumentative room looks thorough, without asking the one question that actually predicts trouble: when something genuinely goes wrong here, who is the first to know, and how long before it reaches the top?

This, I believe, is the real risk boards need to sit with as they head into 2026. Not whether the strategy is right. Most strategies, in my experience, are directionally right, or right enough. The harder question is whether the organization is structurally capable of telling its leaders when something is going wrong, early enough for it to actually matter. A board can approve the finest five-year plan in the country, but if the CEO only ever hears agreement, and the CEO’s direct reports only ever hear agreement from their own teams in turn, that plan is being built on information nobody has ever stress-tested with an honest word.

We already have mechanisms designed to address this: vigil mechanisms, annual board evaluations that ask about the quality of debate, and sessions where independent directors meet without management. On paper, the architecture is there. But these mechanisms can become exercises in compliance rather than genuine tests of candour. A questionnaire completed once a year cannot tell you whether people feel free to challenge power. And a whistleblower channel designed to catch fraud is unlikely to capture the quieter moments when someone has a serious concern but decides not to raise it.

The real signals are often much simpler. How often is the CEO genuinely surprised by something the organisation already knew? Do the same three voices dominate every board discussion? Do independent directors ask their difficult questions in the room, or save them for the corridor afterwards, as mine did that day?

I don’t think the answer lies in more frameworks. Boards have quite enough of those already. I think the answer is simpler, and in its own way, harder: leaders and directors willing to build rooms where disagreement is not merely tolerated but actively invited, and who notice when a meeting has gone unusually smoothly, and treat that, correctly, as a signal to look closer rather than relax.

The CEOs I admire most, across three decades of this work, are rarely the ones with the most persuasive strategy decks. They are the ones who, at the end of a meeting where everyone seemed to agree with them, feel a small flicker of unease, and go find someone afterwards to ask, “Did that feel right to you?” That single habit of staying gently suspicious of consensus, may do more for a company’s future than any strategy offsite ever will.

Boards will spend all of 2026 talking about AI, about capital, about the next wave of disruption.

All of it matters, and none of it is wasted conversation. But I suspect the organizations that come through the year stronger will be the ones whose leaders kept asking a different, less comfortable question all year long not “what is our strategy,” but “who in this room isn’t telling us something, and why.”

That, to me, is the agenda nobody is writing about. It might just be the only one that decides how all the others turn out.

For those boards and institutions that are doing it right, may your tribe increase. For the rest, there is much work to be done. And it is one of the key drivers that take you from ‘Successful Organization’ to ‘Institution.’

Sujata Deshmukh is the founder of Tutul Consulting, a boutique organizational development firm based in Mumbai. Over three decades of consulting, she has worked with 500 organizations across sectors, and her practice spans institution building, culture transformation, leadership development, and top-team effectiveness. She has coached and assessed leaders at the APAC and global level. In the past she has served as an Independent Director on the board of a public limited company, and been part of the National Executive Board of the National HRD Network. She is a Visiting Faculty at B-Schools and keenly involved in contributing to the social sector, particularly in the health care space.*

Email: sujata@tutulconsulting.com

Website: https://www.tutulconsulting.com/

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