Unlock the Hidden Forces Driving Boardroom Decisions

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OnBoard’s latest Atlas Leadership Series webinar, “The Neuroscience of Decision-Making & Boardroom Psychological Safety,” unpacked why some boards make sharper, faster, and safer decisions, while others stall or stumble. The session featured Carolyn Grant, CEO of People Plus Science, who translates cognitive neuroscience into practical tools that lift performance and resilience.

Across a brisk hour, Grant connected the science of how brains work under pressure with what really happens around a board table, and showed how psychological safety underpins governance quality, risk management, and corporate outcomes.

Carolyn began by aligning definitions. “When I’m talking about psychological safety, I’m talking about the belief that you can speak up, that you can challenge, admit mistakes, or raise concerns without fear, ridicule, or humiliation,” she said. Crucially, she added, this is not code for being soft. “It doesn’t mean we’re just being nice. It means we are very clear about what is expected of us, and I feel safe to speak up and challenge.”

Drawing on Dr Timothy Clark’s staged model, she described the continuum from inclusion and learning to contribution and challenging the status quo: “It’s about being able to contribute and participate, not just give your opinions, but also give thought leadership and actually look at challenging the status quo,” Carolyn said.

What the Data Say

Carolyn shared findings from People Plus Science’s latest Boardroom Psychological Safety Index, based on 944 participants and building on a 2021 baseline. The topline: Psychological safety remains patchy. Only four in 10 respondents feel psychologically safe in their boardroom or decision-making team most of the time, and that drops to two in 10 when it comes to feeling safe to challenge.

Respect and trust are similarly uneven. Only three out of 10 trusted their fellow board members or their fellow decision makers in an ELT team.

Boards that self-identified as high performing told a different story. They reported roughly three times more psychological safety, were three times more effective on customer and culture outcomes, and evidenced stronger accountability frameworks with “due diligence with trust, not over-trust.”

Carolyn noted that high performers also identified far fewer psychosocial hazards and biases, and showed smaller perception gaps between board, executives, and the frontline.

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Hazards That Derail Decisions

Psychosocial hazards, i.e. stressors that affect how people think and feel, are now a legal obligation to manage across Australian jurisdictions. Left unaddressed, they don’t just harm employees; they undermine governance. From the latest index, four themes stood out:

Conflict. Eighty-three percent reported conflict at board or ELT level most of the time. The difference between high and low performers? Facilitation. “It’s a good conflict, it’s constructive, but at the end of the day everyone goes away feeling like they’ve been valued and heard,” Carolyn said.
Workload and time pressure. Many boards felt they lacked the time and space to interrogate assumptions, request a pause, or revisit decisions. Carolyn highlighted research showing that time pressure is a leading driver of poor behaviour: “The biggest issue there was around time,” she said.
Disrespectful environments. Seventy-two percent cited concerns about whether contributions are genuinely heard and valued — an ingredient directly linked to trust dynamics and challenge culture.
Low trust in leadership judgement. Carolyn clarified this wasn’t in the personal sense, but in the tension between personal goals and organisational goals, especially where “over-trust” substitutes for verification.

The downstream effects show up as yawning perception gaps. Boards widely believe direct reports feel safe to raise incidents. Frontline data suggests otherwise. Likewise, while 81% of boards say they encourage diverse opinions and seek external input, only about one-fourth of frontline or middle-management respondents perceive that behaviour in practice.

The Brain in the Boardroom

Why does this happen? Neuroscience helps. Elevated cortisol from relentless workload and fraught relationships nudges people into “I-mode”: excluding, judging, withholding information, and striving to be right. When teams deliberately cultivate oxytocin-rich interactions (recognition, sharing, and development), decision quality rises alongside candour and cohesion. The aim is not to abolish stress but to channel it: sharpened attention and due diligence without sliding into threat states that silence dissent.

Carolyn also flagged vulnerable cohorts: newly appointed directors (who are often still hesitant to challenge even 18 months into their tenure), minority-group directors pigeonholed by skillset (“the marketer only talks marketing”), and compliance or risk leaders who often feel least safe delivering “bad news” upwards. Delay is costly; Carolyn referenced evidence that it can take roughly five months for boards or ELTs to hear about serious issues because managers try to “fix it first” before reporting.

Biases That Blind

Across interviews and free-text responses, Carolyn’s team coded a familiar rogues’ gallery of cognitive biases:

Authority bias (deference to a powerful chair, founder, or CEO),
Groupthink (silence interpreted as consent),
Loss aversion (continuing doomed transformations because “we’ve come this far”),
Normalisation (explaining away churn as “non-regrettable leavers”),
Optimism and confirmation bias (over-reliance on “we’ve never been pinged before” and information that fits the preferred path).

Her warning was blunt: “We actually even created a whole section around smart people doing dumb things,” she said.

The root cause, too often, is a process gap: “Without some deliberate challenge mechanisms within our policies and our procedures, our biases go unchecked and that’s probably the biggest danger of silence around that boardroom table or that decision-making team,” Carolyn said.

Practices That Work

Grant showcased practical mechanisms to institutionalise constructive challenge:

Bright lines (non-negotiables like “no software changes that violate emissions laws”),
Silent or blind voting with written rationales,
RACI and traffic-light behaviour indicators,
Pre-mortems and black-hat roles explicitly assigned (and explained) to avoid mistaking challenge for obstruction,
Advisory boards and independent exit interviews to surface absent data.

On that last point, Carolyn offered an enduring heuristic: “Don’t look at what’s visible, look at what’s missing,” she said. The World War II survivorship-bias story (armouring the parts of aircraft that didn’t show bullet holes on returning planes) maps neatly to governance: Scrutinise silence, not just speech; track under-reporting, not just incident counts.

The Commercial Case

Psychological safety is not a “nice-to-have”; it’s a value-driver and a compliance requirement. Carolyn cited casework showing rapid productivity gains when organisations seriously engage their people on psychosocial hazards, along with sizeable reductions in WHS and regulatory risk.

The kicker: “An ROI when you’re proactive and actually doing things correctly is around 492%.” Higher margins, stronger employee and customer engagement, and more autonomous problem-solving follow when teams feel safe to surface problems early.

Q&A Highlights

Asked what surprised her most, Carolyn pointed to the conflict paradox: high levels of reported conflict coexisting with strong psychological safety in top-performing boards. The reconciler is facilitation quality: “It sort of turned conflict into constructive feedback or conflict into that intellectual friction that allowed the best decisions to be made,” she said.

On building trust, she didn’t overcomplicate it: “It takes a long time to build it, but it’s very quick to lose it,” she said. Repeatedly, the differentiators were whether people felt listened to and whether they left interactions feeling valued.

On recruitment, capability now extends beyond technical chops: “I think the recruitment is extremely important,” she said. Boards should assess (and crucially, support) social intelligence and self-awareness, not just résumés. Where selection isn’t perfect, structured development and performance conversations need to be the norm, not a last-resort after long tenures.

Finally, on barriers to action, Carolyn named optimism bias, normalisation, and most of all, awareness. Many leaders are expert in financial or legal compliance, yet unfamiliar with psychosocial obligations. The message for directors is clear: Managing psychosocial risk is part of the licence to operate, not a discretionary add-on.

Carolyn’s overarching message fused science with governance pragmatism: Psychological safety is the precondition for rigorous challenge, sharper risk oversight, and better decisions. When boards engineer the conditions for people to speak up and build processes that expect dissent, speed and quality can rise together. Or, as she urged, learn to ask the question that changes the conversation: What are we not seeing?

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About The Author

Adam Wire: Adam Wire is a Content Marketing Manager at OnBoard who joined the company in 2021. A Ball State University graduate, Adam worked in various content marketing roles at Angi, USA Football, and Adult & Child Health following a 12-year career in newspapers. His favorite part of the job is problem-solving and helping teammates achieve their goals. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and two dogs. He’s an avid sports fan and foodie who also enjoys lawn and yard work and running.