Europe's Boards Solved Diversity. Foresight Is the Next Frontier.

ecoDa and Ethics & Boards just publish a barometer of European corporate governance: boards are getting more diverse, more independent, more international. Women now hold 41.4% of STOXX Europe 600 board seats, up from 30.8% in 2018. Boards average 3.7 nationalities. Independence is up.

Then, on page five, the tone shifts.

Only 10% of European boards have a formal innovation and technology committee. A further 24% handle it through another committee or the full board. Committees with an explicit mandate for geopolitics exist at just 0.8% of companies. And only 22% of boards have a single director with formal geopolitical expertise — diplomatic, military, or senior public-office experience. On average, that expertise makes up just 3.5% of a board’s collective profile, next to 49.6% with CEO backgrounds.

ecoDa’s chair, Maria Pierdicchi, put it plainly: “Europe has built strong governance foundations, particularly in diversity and board structures... The challenge now is to catch up with the US and ensure boards are equipped to manage complexity and emerging risks effectively.” The comparison stings a little: 93% of S&P 100 boards report committee-level oversight of technology; in the STOXX Europe 600, it’s 34%.

It’s tempting to read this as a hiring problem: recruit a few more technologists and diplomats, the way boards recruited more women and more nationalities. But diversity was a representation problem — add the right people, the room changes. Technology, cyber, and geopolitical risk aren’t solved by one more seat. A single director with a diplomatic background doesn’t give a board an early-warning system for how a supply chain reroutes around a crisis, any more than one cyber veteran gives it a live picture of its attack surface.

What the Barometer is really measuring, underneath the language of “expertise,” is whether boards have a process for sensing change before it becomes a balance-sheet event. On that count the numbers are starker still: just 0.8% of boards have a structure whose job is explicitly to track geopolitical risk on an ongoing basis. That’s not a hiring gap. That’s the near-absence of an institutional capability.

This is the line between expertise and foresight. Expertise answers “do we understand this domain.” Foresight answers “do we have a standing practice for noticing what’s changing, imagining how it unfolds, and adjusting strategy before our options narrow.” A former ambassador on the board doesn’t help if their knowledge never becomes scenario work or board agenda time. A disciplined horizon-scanning process, by contrast, doesn’t depend on one person’s judgment in one meeting a year.

The US comparison is instructive precisely because it isn’t about deeper talent pools. Since 2022, SEC guidance has effectively required a board or committee to own cyber and technology risk oversight, with disclosure attached. The gap closed because the structure was mandated — the same lesson the diversity numbers already taught: institutional design moves governance faster than voluntary awareness.

Applied to foresight, that means the fix isn’t one high-profile hire. It’s board infrastructure: a standing mandate, a recurring cadence of scenario and horizon-scanning briefings, and directors who are long-term literate even when their formal background is finance or operations.

Europe proved, over eight years, that governance can be re-engineered deliberately when the mandate is clear. Technology, cyber, and geopolitical readiness deserve the same treatment — not a search for the right unicorn director, but a deliberate build-out of the board’s capacity to see further than the next earnings cycle.

If 2025 was about who sits at the table, 2026 is a quiet challenge about what the table is built to do. Boards that treat that as a foresight question — not a recruiting question — will be the ones actually ready for what Pierdicchi calls “complexity and emerging risks.”