Transforming a traditional board starts with one appointment: a technology member who can bring the board and the CEO up to speed in plain language, free of jargon. The expertise that made your directors successful now limits the organization’s future. Honoring that legacy while demanding change is the central paradox of board renewal, and it can be solved.

The legacy paradox

Your current board members built remarkable careers and companies. They deserve respect for their achievements and the wisdom that came from them. Yet the very expertise that made them successful can now limit the organization’s future. That is the legacy paradox: how to honor the past while embracing the future, how to respect achievement while still demanding transformation.

The solution is not replacing experience with youth, or stability with chaos. It is orchestrating a deliberate transition in which traditional directors become transformation champions, legacy becomes a launching pad, and wisdom guides innovation rather than restricting it.

It does not always end gently. I have watched, within two years, an entire board and its chief executive be replaced, because it was the only route to a healthy future for that company. Their thinking and their incentives were too old, and barely a meeting passed without an agenda item about a payout to someone in the board or the leadership group for their good work. When that is where a board spends its attention, it is not governing the future.

If your board spends its time on discussions that mainly benefit the board or the CEO, you are sitting on a legacy board: one that is unprepared for what AI has already changed, and poorly positioned for what newer technologies will change next. If most of this feels unfamiliar, that is the clearest sign of all. The broader pattern backs this up: S&P 500 boards appointed just 374 new independent directors in 2025, an 8% drop and the lowest number since 2016, with only half of all boards adding a single new director all year, according to Spencer Stuart’s 2025 US Board Index.

So how do you know whether your board can cope with the disruption working against your business model? A good sign is that the meeting runs hours over and nobody minds. The conversation keeps breaking into small groups, with rough drawings and competing but creative ideas that build on the original point. If that is your typical board meeting, your board is at the tip of the spear. If instead the meeting lives and dies by the agenda and spends most of its time on the budget, you are on a legacy board. The budget matters, but the company will only ever have expenses, and no new revenue, unless the board is pushing the CEO and the leadership group toward new thinking.

What to do? Your board needs a technology member who can bring the directors and the CEO up to speed on the past, the present and the future in simple terms, stripping out the jargon. The chairman then has to set a culture that is receptive, open and willing to learn. The learning state is the hardest part. Many legacy boards are full of members who are there for what they learned decades ago, not to learn what will define the decades ahead. Any rejection, or anyone not paying attention, has to be addressed at once.

Your board must not be passive

Most board meetings sit early in the morning or late in the evening. That should be a reason to make them worth attending: interesting, full of new perspectives, and energizing rather than draining.

I once joined a board where every meeting was the same meeting. Same agenda, same running order, only the numbers changed. Anything new, any real question about where the company was heading, sat right at the bottom, so if the meeting ran long it got five minutes or nothing at all. So I asked that we flip it and start with the hard, new things while everyone was still fresh. It was not popular. Most people came to a board meeting expecting to sit for two hours, have a coffee and go home, and I had just asked them to think. But that is the whole job. A board today, with AI moving this fast and the ground shifting under every industry, should walk in knowing the meeting will be uncomfortable in a useful way. That is a good board meeting, not a quiet one.

So ask yourself the uncomfortable question. If AI can take over most routine, rule-bound work, is a board whose main activity is working through an agenda drafted weeks in advance doing anything a machine could not? The honesty of that answer is the whole point. It is time to move your board from legacy to leadership.

This article is part of the Boards Need Innovation series.

Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor, keynote speaker and author of Intro to Artificial Intelligence. He has delivered over 450 keynotes across 30 countries for organizations including IBM, the WHO, the World Governments Summit and the European Commission. He founded the IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer at the Oslo Cancer Cluster and closed over $500 million in enterprise transformation deals as CTO and Chief Innovation Officer at Cognizant.