An executive committee cannot afford to react to every technological development as if it were an instruction. Its decisions can change how thousands of people work, put years of investment at risk and, in a listed company, influence the confidence with which the market interprets its direction.
Yet the context in which that committee must decide changes faster than conventional planning cycles. New capabilities, suppliers, promises and warnings appear every week. Everything seems urgent. Almost everything comes with a convincing demonstration. Very few proposals explain what would have to change inside the organisation to turn that possibility into sustained improvement.
At Monreal & Meadow, we run mentoring sessions with executive committees from multinational organisations such as De'Longhi, SEAT, Almirall and DAMM, across sectors as varied as household appliances, pharmaceuticals, food and drink and automotive manufacturing.
The initial contribution is rarely a tool or an off-the-shelf solution. It is clarity: helping the leadership team distinguish what matters, what must come first, what the organisation needs to learn and what can wait. The result is better-informed decisions, more realistic roadmaps and a way forward that does not depend on chasing every new development.
The pressure to answer can hide the question
When a technology occupies the public conversation, the most common question is direct: what should we do with it?
It is an understandable question, but it comes too soon. It assumes the technology is already the right object of the decision and all that remains is to choose a use case, a supplier or a budget. Sometimes that is true. Often, the real problem lies elsewhere.
Perhaps the organisation takes too long to transfer a decision from leadership into operations. Perhaps it has data but no clear ownership of it. Perhaps critical knowledge is concentrated in too few people. Perhaps two departments pursue incompatible objectives. Or perhaps the main risk is not falling behind, but scaling an initiative before enough has been learnt.
In a mentoring session we do not try to gain speed by responding immediately. First we work to get the committee on firmer mental ground. That means observing the decision from various perspectives, making its assumptions visible and turning a general concern into a set of questions that the organisation can govern.
A mental model serves precisely that. It is not a prepared answer. It is a lens that allows us to see a part of the problem that, under the pressure of the moment, could be left out.
See the whole system before moving one part
The first lens expands the field of vision.
In one of these sessions, the executive committee of an Italian multinational—joined by the managing director of its Spanish business—reached a conclusion that changed the order of the conversation. Before deploying new tools or extending training, they needed to map the company's principal processes.
This was not documentation for its own sake. The map had to show where material decisions were made, what information each process required, which knowledge and tools already existed and where gaps appeared. Only with that view could they distinguish which need could be addressed through training, which required a tool, where a capability was missing and which problem called for the process itself to be revised.
Until that point, training the entire organisation might have seemed like an obvious way forward. But doing so without that map meant putting many people in motion without having defined why. The company could say that it was doing something in the face of technological change, but not what specific need each training covered, what priority it addressed, or how it was connected to real work.
The conclusion was not to stop learning. It was to give learning a purpose and a sequence: first understand the system; then decide what the organisation should learn, incorporate or change.
A technological transformation is never merely technological. It changes information flows, responsibilities, timings, controls, incentives and expectations. It changes which tasks people perform, what knowledge they need and what happens when the system encounters an exception. Even a technically small intervention can shift work or risk elsewhere in the organisation.
That is why we help leadership teams navigate the whole system. If this decision is accelerated, which area will receive the additional load? If this step is automated, who will resolve ambiguous cases? If data is centralised, who will preserve local context? If one capability improves, will the bottleneck appear at the next point?
This way of looking avoids one of the most frequent traps of transformation: optimising a part and presenting its improvement as if it were an improvement of the whole. One department can produce more and at the same time make the entire process perform worse. A tool can save many people minutes and create a dependency that no one is prepared to govern.
Clarity appears when the committee stops arguing about an isolated piece and can anticipate the consequences of moving it.
Find what really limits progress
The second lens narrows the focus.
Large organisations always contain more opportunities for improvement than they can address. If every possibility becomes a priority, transformation becomes scattered across pilots, training programmes, committees and projects competing for the same attention.
Not everything that can be improved limits the result. And improving something that does not limit the system can produce activity without producing progress.
In mentoring, we look for the constraint that is genuinely shaping the next step. It may be technical architecture, but it may also be a decision no one has the authority to make, a process that accumulates exceptions, a capability that does not yet exist or legitimate mistrust between those designing the change and those who will have to operate it.
This changes the order of the conversation. Instead of asking where a new technology could be used, the committee can ask what prevents achieving a relevant result today and whether that technology helps remove the impediment. The difference seems small, but it separates an initiative that seeks justification from a problem that seeks proportionate intervention.
Prioritising is also about accepting what will not be done yet. A realistic roadmap is not the complete list of the organisation's aspirations placed on a calendar. It's a sequence: what capability opens up the next, what learning must precede an investment, and what conditions have to be met before expanding the scope.
Decide without pretending that we know the future
The third lens works with uncertainty instead of hiding it.
An executive committee does not need to predict exactly which technology will dominate three years from now. It needs to make decisions today that remain reasonable across more than one plausible future.
This tension is not abstract. In October 2025, Harvard Business Review described an environment in which leaders have more information than ever while facing greater complexity. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and geopolitical change means major decisions depend on shifting variables and create effects across multiple interdependencies. The article draws an important distinction: neither waiting for complete clarity nor relying on intuition alone provides a sufficient basis for decision-making: Harvard Business Review — “Make Better Strategic Decisions Amid Uncertainty”.
To do this we separate what we know from what we are assuming. We name the conditions that would make a decision good or bad. We compare scenarios. We distinguish commitments that are difficult to reverse from those that allow learning at a controlled cost. And we agree on what signals would justify maintaining, correcting or stopping an initiative.
Thus, uncertainty ceases to be an excuse to wait and also ceases to be a reason to rush. It becomes a design variable.
A reversible decision can be made early if it generates relevant learning. A structural decision—for example, about architecture, talent, or operating model—requires a better understanding of its dependencies and second-order effects. In both cases, the goal is not to eliminate risk. It is to understand which risk is being taken, why, and for how long it remains reasonable.
Leadership does not need artificial certainty. It needs to know what can be decided today, what must be learnt tomorrow and under which conditions the course will be reviewed.
Move from acquiring tools to building capability
The fourth lens asks what the organisation should be able to do when the initial enthusiasm has worn off.
Buying access to technology is relatively easy. Integrating it into decisions, processes and responsibilities is another matter. Sustaining change requires people who can interpret results, frame good problems, recognise exceptions, question a recommendation and connect the new capability to real work.
That is why a central part of mentoring is prioritising training and capability. It is not about training everyone in everything. It is about deciding what understanding the committee needs, which knowledge must exist in technical and operational teams, where depth is lacking and where a common language is enough for effective collaboration.
It also forces a choice about where knowledge should live. If it remains only with one supplier, the company may have a solution without having capability. If it is concentrated in a small innovation team, the organisation can produce prototypes without changing its operation. If it is distributed without clear responsibilities, everyone participates and no one governs.
The useful question is not how many people have received training. It is what decisions the organisation can now make that it could not make before, with what degree of autonomy and with what control mechanisms.
Mentoring does not replace the managerial decision
Our job is not to take the place of the committee or to reduce a complex decision to a reassuring recommendation. Responsibility remains where it should be: with those who know the business, are responsible for its results and will have to bear the consequences.
What we do is improve the quality of the ground on which they decide.
We offer the committee different ways of reading the same problem. We help reveal dependencies, constraints, assumptions and effects that may have remained hidden. We introduce sequence where everything seemed simultaneous. And we create a shared language so that technology, operations, business and people are not discussing different decisions under the same words.
In many cases, the result of mentoring is not a concrete solution. It is clarity about where to go next.
That may mean stopping an immature project, reducing its scope, investing in data first, training a critical group, changing governance, or running a reversible test before committing to a major transformation. It can also lead to a specific Monreal & Meadow intervention, if the organisation asks us to help design and implement it. But that conversation comes later, when the problem, the sequence and the conditions for success are already better defined.
Calm is not slowness
During a noisy period of technological change, staying calm may seem conservative. It is not.
Executive calm means not confusing movement with progress. It allows a team to act without being governed by the latest announcement, hold a priority long enough to learn and change course when the evidence demands it—not whenever the public conversation shifts.
Organisations driven by a fear of being left behind end up accumulating initiatives. Those that advance wisely build capabilities that reinforce one another.
That is the result we seek in executive mentoring: a committee leaves with less noise, better questions and an order of decisions it can explain to the rest of the organisation. It knows what matters, what comes first and what it needs to observe before taking the next step.
Technology will continue to change.
The ability to decide well in the midst of this change has to remain.
Evidence
Source cited
- Harvard Business Review — “Make Better Strategic Decisions Amid Uncertainty”, Ania W. Masinter, 2 October 2025.