Boardroom Science: Lessons Every Leader Should Apply

Nadiia Wyttenbach shares her experience of bringing lessons from Medicine & Life Sciences into the boardroom.

Here are key take-aways:

1) The Quantum Physicist Exercise

• Subatomic rules ≠ everyday intuition -  you can’t just extrapolate from our macro world and understand subatomic forces.

• Same in boardrooms: your prior executive experience ≠ the target you are buying or new expansion. 90% of deals are adjacencies (!)

• Treat each target like “new physics”: assume less, listen and measure more. Confirmation bias is the most reliable way of losing money.

2) There’s Always More Than One Patient

• In medicine, you treat the patient and consider family/system impact.

• In companies, visible issues (e.g., weak finance, weak strategy function) often trace to a second patient: board gaps, owner dynamics, generational friction.

• Find the second patient. That’s where durable performance unlocks.

3) Cognitive Psychology Belongs in Leadership (esp. M&A)

• Doctors are trained in it. Leaders should be too -  not a weekend workshop, but real practice.

• You need three strengths: know yourself, know others, know the terrain.

Cognitive Psychology Is Part of Medicine  -  and Should Be Part of Your Leadership Training

Doctors are trained in cognitive psychology. Because mental health matters as much as physical health. They learn to recognize patterns and biases, to listen for what is said and - crucially - what is not said, and to treat a whole human, not just a symptom.

Business leaders need the same. Cognitive psychology should be part of leadership training. Not a weekend workshop. Years of practice. Real knowledge. Real skill.

Nowhere is this more important than in M&A

In M&A, you need to come prepared with three things: knowing yourself, knowing others, knowing the terrain. Without this, you will lose money. Because the people across the table have mastered all three.

• Know yourself: this is where you need to begin.

• Know others: their incentives, fears, dreams, pressures, personality structures, and decision styles.

• Know the terrain: know the entire value chain of healthcare, from payor to Tools, and where they are going.

A core concept: unmet needs

One of the most useful concepts in cognitive psychology, in my opinion, is unmet needs. Unmet needs shape decisions - often unconsciously. They drive urgency, colour forecasts, and distort decision-making.

With boards, I run the “unmet needs” exercise. Ask:

• What is the unmet need of your organization?

• Is the organization under pressure after a patent expiry in Pharma or market share loss in one of its MedTech divisions?

• Is diversification needed because core markets are slowing and margins shrinking, and you wish to tap into a higher-growth market, such as Cell & Gene Tools?

• Are client segments stagnating, forcing a pivot to higher-growth areas?

• Has a competitor gained an edge through data or AI assets, and you are afraid of being left behind?

  
  

Once you see the unmet need clearly, you can address it. In a way that is beneficial for the firm. Unmet needs that are unseen tend to manifest themselves in the most unhelpful ways.

Identify confirmation bias and unmet needs before they buy you a headache:

• A bioprocessing tools leader overpays for a Cell&Gene acquisition to soothe fears of obsolescence - then learns the platform serves cyclical biotech, not non-cyclical, cash-rich large-cap pharma (as the acquiror). When biotech hits a downturn, the parent experiences cyclicality for the first time.

• A diagnostics MedTech leader buys into another segment – aesthetics - for “growth,” only to see the entire sales team walk out within two months. Revenues declined drastically. The board had extrapolated revenue recurrence from diagnostics to aesthetics and underestimated the contribution from the sales team. That’s not experience; it’s confirmation bias.

• A CRO rushes to buy a “data asset” because a competitor did - then discovers minimal synergy and a business that’s hard to grow.

But in each case, the spreadsheet made sense.