Alison Gill is a behavioural psychologist, triple Olympian and the co-founder of Bvalco, a board evaluation consultancy focused on helping boards become fit for the future.
Acknowledge anxiety to enhance board decision-making
Rather than pretending these feelings of anxiety don’t exist, or pushing them away, it’s important that we use these feelings to enhance decision-making. Emotion is a vital source of information.
There is substantial evidence that we make better decisions if we intentionally assess our emotional state prior to making a decision. So adopting a ‘feel-think-act-review’ cycle ensures that boards can leverage all the information available, including emotional information.
Share this article on LinkedIn!
The FTSE Women Leaders Review 2026 celebrates significant and positive change in addressing gender imbalance in the board room, with public and private companies in the FTSE 350 at or near a 40% target for appointing women onto boards.
Writing in The Financial Times (15 November 2025), Chief Features Writer Henry Mance suggests that the BBC is “too big not to fail”, at least sometimes. Mance illustrates the scale of the organisation, with over 10 years’ worth of content on iPlayer alone. “Inevitably, there are mistakes,” he says. The article sets out
