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SPECIAL REPORT

The Golden Thread

An extract from The Golden Thread: a special report from the Chief of Staff Association's March 2026 Executive Education Programme at the University of Oxford

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Business has changed. Have you?

You might think the question ‘What is a business for?’ involves a complex answer. Historically, this hasn’t been the case. In the 1950s, Peter Drucker proposed that business existed to create and keep a customer, not to amass profit, which was just an outcome or part measure of business success.[1]In the 1970s, Milton Friedman wrote that its purpose was to increase profits legally and within the rules of fair competition. Friedman’s model, which actively negated socialor environmental responsibility, defined corporate governance for a generation and many boards still operate in this mode.[2]By 1984, R. Edward Freeman made a different case. His stakeholder theory argued that a business should create value not just for shareholders, but for all stakeholders including employees, customers, suppliers, communities and investors. His position did not argue against profit: it argued that profit at the expense of the stakeholder was ethically insufficient and strategically short-sighted.[3]The debate between shareholder (Friedman) and stakeholder (Freeman) business models continues today, but the historical moment has moved on, not least in an era defined by climate emergency, disproportionate wealth divide, demographic changes and a shifting economic leaderboard. In 2019, the US Business Roundtable (representing 181 of the largest companies in the US) adopted Freeman’s model, conceptually at least. In the UK, the British Academy Future of the Corporation programme (chaired by Professor Colin Mayer CBE) ran from 2017 to 2020 with a more detailed proposition building on Freeman:
We use the term “purposeful business” to summarise a system in which the purpose of business is creating profitable solutions for problems of people and planet, and not profiting from creating problems.’ [4]
As a thought experiment, you might ask which model your organisation works within and what the role of a chief of staff might be in this dialogue. You also might question whether the Friedman and Freeman models need be mutually exclusive? Can we profit our share-holders, people and planet at the same time, even if governments, regulators, investors and customers are not making us directly accountable? This was a key prompt delivered by Professor Mayer to chiefs of staff at the CSA’s Executive Education Programme. The purpose of business, whatever theories you subscribe to, has changed. Have you changed with it?

The gap between intention and reality

Most organisations take pride in publishing their values in corporate communications and strategy. But how are these values embedded in organisational execution and operations?The gap between what a business says it stands for, and what it rewards and does, is acutely visible from the chief of staff’s position.Chiefs of staff are close enough to leadership to observe the conversations that result in decisions being made, and close enough to the organisation to see how these decisions play out. Often, as a proxy for the principal, the chief of staff is directly tasked to monitor the ways in which actions adhere to stated values.In his session at Oxford, to help chiefs of staff in this undertaking, Mayer introduced the cohort to the S.C.O.R.E framework.[5] Devised by Rupert Younger for the Enacting Purpose Initiative (where Mayer is co-chair), S.C.O.R.E. was developed to help boards, senior stakeholders and shareholders ensure that purpose is enacted in practice.The framework has five elements: Simplify, Connect, Own, Reward and Exemplify. Each one addresses a different place where purpose tends to drift from intention to reality. Is your purpose simple enough for everyone to understand and act on? Is it connected to every decision the organisation makes? Does the board genuinely own it? Are the behaviours that advance it being rewarded and measured? And does leadership exemplify it, including when things go wrong?For a chief of staff each of these five elements represents a place where the gap between intention and reality can surreptitiously begin to stretch, and where early and honest intervention can prevent it from widening.This might mean auditing whether incentive structures genuinely reward the behaviours the organisation claims to value. Or it might mean clarifying to your principal, privately and clearly, when their decision pulls against the organisation’s stated purpose. This will be familiar to chiefs of staff who are accustomed to asking the question that nobody else in the room wants to voice, particularly when short-term pressure starts to push long-term commitment aside.Participants in our cohort found Mayer's session on the purpose of business clarifying and practically useful. One described it in terms of how it changed their day-to-day thinking:
This session gave a really clear perspective on what purpose means in practice, not just as a concept. It made me think more carefully about how decisions connect back to a bigger direction.
This shift, from purpose as an abstract value to purpose as a lens for evaluating individual decisions, is where the chief of staff's role becomes tangible and necessary for their principal. Another participant described the direct impact on their work with their CEO:
Mayer’s brilliant take on the purpose of business really hit home. It has given me the tools to bring more depth to my work, allowing me better to support my principal through more informed and critical thinking.
What is striking about this response is not its enthusiasm, but the practical application of S.C.O.R.E. in the CoS-principal partnership. Taking concepts and turning them into practices is what CSA executive education is designed to do. Information is good and beneficial. But reorientation is equally powerful, and practical tools especially so.Using the S.C.O.R.E. framework is not the work itself; it’s a tool for providing the insight that an organisation and principal need for estimating where their operations are succeeding (or flagging) with respect to their stated mission and purpose (here we might return to the purpose of business set out above).The S.C.O.R.E. framework also gives the chief of staff a rigorous approach to assessing drift; it can be used at multiple times during their principal’s tenure to track improvements (or regressions) and gives the chief of staff a language, or way of defending their findings to the principal, shareholders, board and wider employees.

The limits of forecasting

Aligning business purposes withday-to-day operations is important. Understanding the conditions in which your business operates is equally so, given that one may impact the other. These conditions, however, are constantly shifting, and becoming harder to read by conventional means.Climate emergency; regional conflict in the Middle East; global trade protectionism; volatile energy and commodity markets; disrupted supply chains; retaliatory tariff wars; inflation; technological disruption; AI—this menu of risk and uncertainty is one that every organisation must reluctantly choose from if they have not done so already.The Oxford cohort had the opportunity to address this under the guidance of Dr Cho Khong, who opened his session Navigating Uncertainty and Scenario Planning with a distinction that many in the room had not fully considered before: there is a fundamental difference between risk and uncertainty.
The S.C.O.R.E. framework can be used at multiple times during their principal’s tenure to track improvements (or regressions) and gives the chief of staff a language, or way of defending their findings to the principal.
Risk is calculable. It has historical precedent, a probability curve and a range of known outcomes. Uncertainty has none of these things. It is genuinely unknown, not just difficult to measure but impossible to model from existing data. Most corporate scenario planning treats uncertainty as if it were a risk. But this, Khong argued, is one of the most common and costly mistakes leadership teams make. Khong impressed on his audience that they operate in turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous (TUNA) conditions that cannot be mitigated by a risk assessment. Instead, a different model is needed: the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach (OSPA). Originally developed by Khong’s colleagues Rafael Ramírez and Angela Wilkinson in their book Strategic Reframing: The Oxford Scenario Planning Approach (2016), the OSPA strategy enables strategists to become more capable and flexible thinkers who can frame future contexts to strengthen leadership judgement for when crises emerge.[6] The goal here is not to predict, but to prepare. A chief of staff, despite their principal’s wishes, does not have a crystal ball to turn to. But they can develop the mindset to prepare for when a crisis emerges.Put another way, in TUNA conditions, a single-point forecast is not just unreliable, it creates a false sense of security that can leave an organisation dangerously exposed when reality diverges from the plan, which, in a TUNA environment, it reliably will. The question is not whether your forecast will be wrong. It is whether your organisation is built to survive being wrong. This distinction between forecasting and scenario planning landed clearly with participants. One put it simply:
I didn't understand the difference between scenarios and a forecast before Khong’s teaching, but now I am able to differentiate the two terms.
This might sound like a modest insight, but its implications are meaningful. The moment a leadership team stops asking ‘what will happen?’ and starts asking ‘what could happen and are we ready for it?’ the quality of strategic conversation changes considerably.For a chief of staff, that shift in question is often the difference between a leadership team that is merely reactive and backfooted, or one that is agile and prepared.

Building multiple features

Specifically, OSPA asks chiefs of staff to construct several plausible versions of a scenario and then test their strategy against each one. The method works by identifying two high-impact, highly uncertain driving forces, and plotting them against each other on a two-by-two matrix. The result is four divergent but coherent scenarios, each representing a different possible world. The organisation then asks: does our strategy hold up across all four? If it only works in one, it is fragile. If it holds across all four, it is resilient. Shell's use of scenario planning,one of the most cited examples in the field, shows that organisations willing to think in multiple futures are better placed to respond when circumstances change dramatically.[7] The value is not necessarily in predicting which scenario will emerge. It is having thought through the implications of each one before the pressure switch is activated.Crucially, as Shell demonstrates, this scenario planning allows leaders to challenge assumptions about the future, as well as to generate ideas for fixing problems today.For chiefs of staff, this approach has immediate practical applications. Much of the role involves helping a principal make decisions under conditions of incomplete information and time pressures. Scenario planning does not eliminate these pressures: it reduces the number of decisions that must be made from scratch in the middle of a crisis, because the thinking has already been done. One participant described exactly this dynamic:
As an organisation, we've explored forecasting and worst case events, but we've stopped short of building multiple, coherent scenarios. Implementing this session's takeaways will help me answer key questions around balancing long-term initiatives with short-term reactive responses to our contextual factors and inevitable surprises.
The phrase ‘inevitable surprises’ is worth pausing on. It captures something important about the chief of staff's role in strategic planning: that part of the job is helping the organisation prepare for things it cannot yet name, so that when they arrive the response is considered rather than reactive.What distinguished Khong's session, by many accounts, was its practical immediacy. The methodology was taught through application, participants working in small groups to build scenarios relevant to their own organisations and sectors. For some, that shift from abstract framework to live exercise was where the real learning happened:
I absolutely loved the scenario planning with Prof. Khong. The hands-on exercises were incredibly effective and allowed for a complete shift in how I approach future-thinking. It was one of the most practical and thought-provoking sessions of the programme.
This response points to something broader about how chiefs of staff engage with new thinking. The chief of staff role is inherently applied.Frameworks, such as S.C.O.R.E., or the TUNA mindset, earn their place when they can be picked up and used immediately. Scenario planning, done well, is exactly that kind of tool: rigorous enough to be credible in a boardroom, flexible enough to be adapted to almost any organisational context.Taken together, Mayer and Khong make a complementary argument. Mayer asks whether your organisation knows what it is for. Khong asks whether it knows what it is heading into. Both questions sit at the heart of what it means to read the environment clearly and both land directly in the chief of staff's territory. Not because the chief of staff owns the answers, but because they are often the person best placed to ensure the right questions are being asked. In a world that does not stay still long enough to be forecast, S.C.O.R.E. and OSPA are valuable tools for preparing for all weathers.References[1] Drucker, P.F., The Practice of Management (Harper and Row, New York, 1954)[2] Friedman, M., ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits’, The New York TimesMagazine (13 September 1970)[3] Freeman, R.E., Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (Pitman Publishing, Boston, 1984.Republished by Cambridge University Press, 2010).[4] The British Academy, Policy and Practice for Purposeful Business (The British Academy, London, 2021), p. 6.[5] Mayer, C., Eccles, R. and Younger, R., Enacting Purpose within the Modern Corporation (The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, September 2020)[6] Ramírez, R., and Wilkinson, A. Strategic Reframing: the Oxford scenario planning approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)[7] Bentham, J., ‘The scenario approach to possible futures for oil and natural gas’, Energy Policy, Volume 64, 2014, pages 87-92.

The Golden Thread

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