Can boards look past short-term crises to think about long-term mission?

This reactive spiral contains the seeds of organisational decline. For boards, the uncomfortable truth is that organisations which never get out of firefighting mode eventually burn down anyway.

“We’ve become brilliant at crisis management,” one housing association chief executive told me recently, “but we’re in danger of forgetting what we’re managing towards and what we are here for.”

Their board’s reports had become a litany of immediate fixes – emergency repairs, short-term funding gaps, staff retention bonuses. Strategic thinking had been quietly relegated to ‘when we have time’ – a time that somehow never seemed to arrive.

The challenge for boards isn’t choosing between immediate crises and long-term thinking, it’s developing what is sometimes termed ‘dual vision’: the ability to address today’s crises while understanding how they connect to tomorrow’s challenges.

The most successful leaders use such events as strategic intelligence, rather than treating them as distractions from strategy. Think back just a few years ago to the Covid pandemic: the most successful organisations not only adapted their current working practices, but also recognised new patterns of activity and behaviour that would have a long-term impact on residents and staff.

“The challenge for boards isn’t choosing between immediate crises and long-term thinking, it’s developing what is sometimes termed ‘dual vision’”

Balancing the important and the urgent is the essence of governance. These seven questions can help.

1. Have we had a proper conversation about the future lately?

Boards should audit their recent agendas. How much time has been spent on forward-looking discussion versus crisis response?

Strategic amnesia creeps in gradually, with one deferred planning session drifting into six months of operational reaction and strategic inaction. The question isn’t whether today’s crises are real – they are. It’s whether boards have created deliberate space for horizon-scanning, even if just 20 minutes per meeting. Without this discipline, organisations lose their sense of direction entirely.

2. What do current crises tell us about our future operating environment?

Every operational challenge contains strategic intelligence. Staff shortages aren’t just today’s headache, but signal changing labour markets, competitive positioning and the attractiveness of the organisation. Energy costs reveal long-term sustainability pressures. Damp and mould highlights climate adaptation needs.

Boards should ask their executive teams to translate each major crisis into strategic insights, asking: “What does this tell us about the world we’re heading into?” This transforms putting out fires into strategic research and analysis.

3. How resilient is our financial strategy?

Finance is where short- and long-term pressures collide most visibly. Using reserves to cover immediate gaps may keep the lights on, but repeated reliance on reserves erodes resilience.

Conversely, boards that cling too tightly to reserves or delay urgent investment may compromise today’s services and staff morale. The question is not whether to prioritise the present or the future but how to do both.

Boards should test financial plans against different scenarios, asking how they protect solvency in the next 12 months while enabling sustainability and mission delivery over the next 20 years. What happens to long-term viability if the board focuses exclusively on immediate stability? What risks are created by investing in tomorrow at the cost of ignoring today’s pressures?

4. Are we building adaptive capacity or just fixing immediate problems?

Leaking roofs, mould in homes and staff shortages demand rapid responses. But every operational decision should also be tested against the organisation’s long-term mission. Does the way we address maintenance backlogs advance our commitments to tenant well-being? Does temporary recruitment support the development of a sustainable workforce strategy? Does an urgent procurement choice align with sustainability goals?

There is often synergy to be found in solutions that address today’s problems while at the same time building resilience for future challenges. Energy efficiency investments address current cost pressures while building climate resilience. Digital infrastructure reduces today’s operational costs while enabling future service innovation. The trick is to recognise the long-term opportunities alongside the short-term costs.

To enable this ‘dual vision’ approach, boards should require their executive teams to evaluate the efficacy of key investments based on immediate necessity and long-term value. Investments that score highly in both categories should be prioritised, while those serving only immediate needs should be restricted and time-limited.

5. How do we embed future-focused thinking into every meeting?

Too often, strategic thinking is treated as an annual exercise at a board away-day. In practice, crises never respect calendars, so long-term conversations shouldn’t be pushed back. Instead, boards should make horizon-scanning a regular item in meetings.

Scenario-planning exercises, horizon-trend updates and talks from external experts can help boards keep an eye on the future. Embedding this discipline ensures that even in difficult times, decisions are shaped by strategy, not urgency.

Every decision made by the board contains assumptions about a future yet to unfold. Hiring strategies assume certain conditions about the labour market. Investment priorities assume a level of regulatory stability. Service models are based upon expectations of tenants remaining broadly unchanged. Another lesson from Covid is to factor elements of dynamic uncertainty into scenario planning, which in turn will inform the board’s future decisions.

6. If we only focus on today’s problems, where does that leave us in 2030?

This question forces boards to confront the fact that mere satisfaction with last year’s results and the last decade’s service models may ultimately lead to decline and atrophy. An organisation can excel at immediate crisis management while slowly becoming irrelevant, outdated or overwhelmed by changes it failed to anticipate. 

Boards should ask executives to paint this picture honestly: what happens if we continue our current trajectory? Where are the blind spots? And what are the next challenges coming down the line that we are not yet thinking about?

7. Where are the opportunities to innovate for the long term?

When the environment is tough, leaders can sometimes get locked into a cyclical mindset which breeds excessive caution and a myopia towards opportunity and innovation.

Rising energy costs might catalyse investment in green retrofits. Recruitment challenges might prompt creative workforce strategies. Boards should thus ask executives not only about threats but also about potential breakthroughs.

How are we positioning ourselves to take advantage of new funding streams, digital solutions or community partnerships? By asking about opportunities, leaders can be encouraged to look beyond the horizon and think expansively, even at the most difficult moments.

“Boards must dedicate a fixed percentage of time in every board agenda for horizon-scanning, not confine these conversations to annual retreats"

Boards that ask the right questions must also turn them into tangible actions. They must institutionalise forward-looking sessions, by dedicating a fixed percentage of time in every board agenda for horizon-scanning, and not confining these conversations to annual retreats. The amount of time allotted will differ for each board, depending on the scope and complexity of its operations, but once agreed and established, the chair should treat it as sacrosanct and protected time in the board’s agenda.

Boards must integrate crisis learning into strategy, establishing a systematic process for translating operational challenges into strategic intelligence. For every major crisis or operational issue, board discussions should include: “What does this tell us about our future environment?” Create a simple template that connects immediate problems to long-term implications, building an organisational memory that prevents repeated surprises.

We also need to stress-test decisions against a range of scenarios. When approving major strategies or investments, ask open-ended questions such as: “How would this look if energy costs stay high for five years? What if staff costs increase by 20%? What if new climate regulations emerge?” Building basic scenario-planning into the decision process will enable all board members to raise questions about resilience without relying on complex modelling which only the board’s financial experts will understand.

The roofs may be leaking, but organisations that never look beyond the current storm will find they’ve been so busy fixing problems that they forgot to build for the future. In governance, as in navigation, those who never lift their eyes from the immediate obstacles are more likely to the miss the route towards the next destination.

Boards can never avoid crises occurring, it is their job to navigate them. Good governance is about holding two horizons in tension, together, attending to the leaks while preparing for the future storms that will rise.

By asking these questions and embedding them in their board’s discourse and practice, housing leaders can protect tenants today while safeguarding the mission for the decades ahead.

David Levenson, founder, Coaching Futures