Dare your board to answer these ten questions
AI has made almost every company faster at making work. Whether any of that speed reaches a customer is a different question. Most boards have never asked it.
Rob Anderson
Two companies buy the same tools in the same quarter. Both give every team an AI assistant. Both get the same first month: faster drafts, faster analysis, more good work out of each person.
A year on, one has shipped three things its customers noticed. The other has shipped one, late.
Same talent. Same tools. Both companies made the same speed. The difference is how much of it survived the trip out of the building.
Gross speed and net speed
Gross speed is what a board pack shows. Launches. Cycle times. Tickets closed. Time to first draft. All real, and all a record of how fast work is made rather than how fast anything arrives.
Net speed is what the customer gets. It is what is left after the company has taken its cut: the decision made twice, the work redone because two teams built to different plans, the project that ran nine months and quietly stopped.
In a slow company that gap is a nuisance. In a fast one it widens every quarter. Double what people can produce and you have not doubled what you deliver. You have doubled the load on every point the work must pass through, and those points are where the speed is lost.
AI makes the parts of a company faster. It does nothing for the joins between them. Speed does not fix what is broken between the parts. It finds it, and it charges you for it.
None of which is a case for going slower. It is a case for knowing your ceiling, and then going exactly that fast on purpose.
The ten questions
No score. Nothing to grade yourself against. These are simply the questions that produce the longest silence in a room of senior people, and the length of that silence is itself the finding.
Read them alone first. Answer them on paper. Then decide whether you have the nerve to put them to your board.
On how fast decisions get made
- Take the last big decision this company made. How long was it between the people closest to it knowing the answer and someone with the authority saying so out loud?
- Of the decisions that reached the board last quarter, how many needed to?
On whether decisions stick
- Which decision from the past six months have we made more than once?
- When we announce a decision, how do we know it has landed rather than just been sent?
- Roughly what share of last quarter's work was doing something for the second time?
On whether motion turns into delivery
- Of everything we started last year, how much of it reached a customer?
- If every team got twenty per cent faster next quarter, what would arrive sooner? Name the thing.
- Which live initiative could we stop this week without anyone outside the building noticing?
On how much change we can take
- How many separate changes is a front line manager being asked to hold right now? Who in this room knows that number?
- When we added the most recent initiative, what did we take away?
What the silence means
Struggling to answer is not proof of a badly run company. Question 6 is hard to answer in a good one, because almost nobody tracks the whole path from decision to delivery.
The answers you cannot get tell you more than the answers you can. If nobody can find a number for question five, that is not a reporting gap. It means rework is nobody's job to see, so nothing holds it in check.
Question 7 is the sharpest of the ten, because it assumes the speed works. A senior team that cannot name the thing that would arrive sooner has just found out that output was never what was holding it back. That is expensive to learn after the AI spending case has been signed off, and cheap to learn before.
Ask two levels down as well. Where the answers split is where to look first. People there are rarely arguing about what was said. They are arguing about what was decided.
The dare
Boards are good at asking whether the company is moving fast enough. It is a comfortable question, because the answer is always more, and more is always fundable.
The harder question, and the one worth an agenda slot this quarter, is how much of the speed you already have is reaching anyone. That question has a real answer. It can be measured, it moves before the numbers do, and unlike most of a board pack it points at something you can still change.
Ten questions. No score. Nobody has to admit anything to anyone.
If they are easy, you have bought reassurance for the price of an hour. If they are not, you have found the gap between what your company makes and what it delivers, which is the one place a real step change in speed is still open to you.
Most boards will not put these on the agenda. That is roughly the point.
Rob Anderson is co-founder of Stillness Partners and co-author of The Stillness Dividend (2026). He works with executive teams on execution coherence: the gap between the speed a company generates and the speed it keeps.