Directors are increasingly expected to pay attention and act on foreseeable risks. Without a crystal ball, how do directors and boards do this? When change does come, and it will, how do you respond? Even a well-prepared board will face challenges it did not expect.

In this episode, Dentons Chair and Partner Hayden Wilson talks to the Institute of Directors New Zealand Chief Executive Officer Kirsten (KP) Patterson.

What they will cover:

• Who are you as a board? Do you have a diverse range of voices and experience? Will the voices you have around the board table be the ones you need tomorrow?
• How do you operate? This is a question in the largest sense: not in terms of whether you use Teams or Zoom, but in terms of, for example, issues that come to the board. How are they determined? Does the board drive them, or management, or both?
• How well do you know your business? Most people would say pretty well (or they shouldn’t be in the role), but what about your suppliers’ business? Do you have a back-up if you suddenly can't get a vital ingredient from your usual supplier?
• Do you practice your crisis management plans, or are they in a folder in the third drawer down in the archives room?

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About the guest

Kirsten Patterson
Chief Executive Officer, Institute of Directors New Zealand

Kirsten Patterson (known as KP) is the Chief Executive of the Institute of Directors and is a Chartered Member of the IoD. She is a qualified lawyer and a Distinguished Fellow of the Human Resources Institute of New Zealand, Chair of the Global Network of Directors Institutes (GNDI), and a member of the New Zealand External Reporting Advisory Panel (XRAP).  She serves on the Boards of the mental health charity, Voices of Hope, is Chair of the Brian Picot Ethical Leadership Advisory Board at Victoria University in Wellington and an Ambassador for the Wellington Women’s Homeless Trust.

A strong advocate of diversity, KP is a member of Global Women New Zealand and was one of the founding members of Global Women’s ‘Champions for Change’, a group of senior executives and directors who commit to diversity in the workplace. KP was the founder and is Executive Sponsor for Chapter Zero New Zealand – the New Zealand Chapter of the World Economic Forum’s Climate Governance Initiative - hosted by the IoD NZ to mobilise, connect, educate and equip directors and boards to make climate-smart governance decisions, thereby creating long term value for both shareholders and stakeholders.