I take seats where my technical reading of risk would otherwise be missing from the room. Most boards are good at finance, decent at legal, and structurally weak on the engineering reality of the decisions they sign off. I'm useful when the consensus is comfortable and probably wrong.
The recurring pattern in my non-executive work is the same one I run as a CTO. The room agrees on a direction. The agreement is warm, well-meaning, and built on a model of how the technology works that nobody has stress-tested out loud. I ask the uncomfortable question. Sometimes too honestly. The question is rarely about the answer; it's about whether the room actually understands what it has just decided.
There was a procurement decision I voted against on a board where the rest of the table was aligned and ready to move. The vendor had built something elegant; the integration assumptions had not been tested against the data we actually held. Six months later we were unwinding the contract. I would rather be the person who slowed the meeting by twenty minutes than the person who let that go unsaid. [Replace with a specific board moment you can name without breaching confidence.]
What a technically literate director changes in a room is the quality of the questions, not the speed of the answers. I read architecture diagrams as governance documents. “We'll fix it in the next sprint” reads to me as a risk register entry that nobody has logged. Translating that to a chair or an audit committee, without condescension, without the engineer's reflex to perform expertise, is most of the job.
The boards I'm interested in operate in regulated sectors: social housing, the NHS, and the parts of public service where a technical decision and a governance decision are usually the same decision. I'm most useful when independent challenge is genuinely wanted, not just tolerated for the optics.
For board enquiries: richard.sutcliffe@gmail.com.