Optimist’s Operating System – Board Sessions
One day. Ten beliefs. The clarity that usually takes three strategy cycles to surface.
From £8,000
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The chair and the CEO rarely disagree in the boardroom. They disagree in the margins of the papers, in the private conversations after the meeting, in the six months of execution that follow a strategy nobody fully believed in. The most expensive misalignment in business right now is not between management and the market. It is between what a board believes and what management is building.
AI has made this worse. Every board has a member who sees it as a fundamental shift and a member who counsels caution. Every CEO has been asked a version of the same question by the chair: "What are we actually doing about AI?" The honest answer is often: "We are doing what we think you want us to do."
The problem is rarely capability. It is belief. What does this company actually believe AI means for how we work, how we compete, and what we owe our people? Until a board has answered that question together, out loud, it cannot set strategy. It can only ratify the strategy that was already in motion.
The session
01
Pre-session belief survey
Each board member completes a short belief assessment individually and anonymously before the session. This surfaces where the board is aligned, where it is divided, and which beliefs have never been named aloud. Mike reviews the aggregate picture before the room convenes.
02
Facilitated board day
Mike works through the Ten Beliefs with the full board. Each belief is tested: where are we united? Where are we split? Where are we avoiding the question? The conversation is structured enough to reach conclusions and open enough for the real disagreements to surface.
03
Belief statement and misalignment map
The session closes with two outputs: a board belief statement that can inform the next strategy cycle, and a one-page misalignment map showing where management execution and board belief currently diverge. One page. No caveats.
Right moment
Who runs the session
Mike has spent 15 years working at the intersection of strategy, technology and culture. He built the Optimist’s Operating System after years of facilitating strategy sessions where the real question was never the one on the agenda. The Ten Beliefs framework gives boards a structured way to surface the assumptions that are already shaping their decisions.
In April 2026, The System webinar drew 63 senior leaders from Google, IBM, Block, Philip Morris International and Kraken for a 90-minute session built on the OOS framework. The quality of that audience reflects the quality of the conversation the framework creates.
Mike is a BIMA 100 Tech Pioneer and a published author (BCS, 2024). He has worked with Nike, Google, Meta, Gucci, BMW, P&G, EA, Netflix, Sony, TikTok, McLaren and Unilever.
hello@mikelitman.me · From £8,000