Read time: 3.8 min.

{{First Name | My friend}},

Some news stories settle quickly. You read them, absorb what happened, and move on.

Others don't. The ones that stay with me longest tend to be the ones where something remains shrouded, where the public record tells you what happened but not quite why. To me, the gap between those two things grabs my attention and makes the story worth examining.

Let's just say that my curiosity radar was activated on the day I read about a decision BP's board announced in May.

On May 26, 2026, BP's board unanimously removed its chair, Albert Manifold, with immediate effect. Manifold had been in the role for approximately eight months. The board cited serious concerns related to governance standards, oversight, and conduct. Senior independent director Amanda Blanc said the board had been "surprised and disappointed" to learn of the issues.

Manifold responded publicly. He disputed the characterization entirely, stating he was "removed without warning and without explanation."

BP provided no further detail. That is the full picture the public record gives us. We'll skip comments provided to various publications by unnamed sources.

BP arrived at this moment already carrying significant leadership strain. A Morningstar analyst described the company as being on its third CEO and third chair in under three years. Each transition arrived with its own set of circumstances, none of them identical.

What the pattern points to sits at the level of the decision system governing the top of the organization. And it starts the moment a chair is appointed.

What I keep thinking about with this story is that when a chair is appointed, a set of assumptions travels with that appointment.

There are assumptions about what the role requires, where the chair's authority ends and the CEO's begins, and what appropriate conduct toward management and fellow board members looks like in practice.

Those assumptions are almost never made fully explicit at the moment of appointment. They tend to be governed instead by informal norms, precedent, and the shared understanding of the people in the room.

At BP, the record suggests the board and the chair were not operating from the same ones.

The board's "surprised and disappointed" language is the evidence. Surprise is a response to discovering that implicit assumptions aren't shared. It's what happens when what each party understood to be the governing standard turns out to have been different all along, without either side fully knowing it.

This dynamic isn't unique to corporate chairs. It surfaces inside leadership teams at every level. And it tends to stay invisible until something forces it into view.

That's why decision architecture at the board level matters as much as it does at the management level. The structural conditions that determine whether roles, authority boundaries, and conduct standards are explicit or assumed don't stop being relevant when you reach the boardroom. If anything, they are more consequential there. The assumptions operating at the top of an organization shape everything beneath them.

One of the details that I keep revisiting, more than I should probably publicly admit, is that Manifold said he was removed "without warning and without explanation."

Whatever the underlying reality of the conduct concerns, that statement names something structurally significant. It suggests that by the time he learned concerns existed, the decision was already made. The concerns surfaced at crisis threshold, not before it.

A defined escalation process, one that creates the conditions for concerns to be raised, examined, and addressed early, likely would have changed that sequence. Its absence is a governance gap.

I want to put a stake in the sand here though by saying that governance structures, however robust, do not substitute for the structural conditions that make challenge and escalation actually function. Those conditions require clarity about what can be raised, by whom, through what process, and under what circumstances. Without that clarity, informal norms carry the weight. And when informal norms aren't sufficient, the gap only becomes visible at the moment it can no longer be ignored.

The board's surprise response is itself evidence that whatever path existed, formal or informal, didn't function before the crisis arrived. That is the structural condition worth examining, not who was right and who was wrong.

The BP story is specific. The structural condition it reveals is not.

Many leadership teams, at the management level and at the board level, carry implicit assumptions about roles, authority, and conduct that have never been made explicit. And many don't have a defined process for surfacing concerns before they require a crisis-level response.

That gap tends to remain invisible right up until it isn't.

I'm curious to know how my reflections on this landed with you.

Until Next Sunday,

Shawnette Rochelle, MBA, PCC
Founder, Excellence Unbounded
Executive Decision Systems That Drive Organizational Momentum

If you’re curious to learn more about my work with executive teams, you can find it here.

If you want to have a conversation to learn more, schedule it here.