Scaling Resilience Through Strategic Partnerships: How Boards Build Pivotable Ecosystems Amid Tech Tectonics

In Part 1 of this 2026 Boardroom Decision series, I highlighted why corporate Boards must expand their fiduciary duty to encompass gray zone threats, hardware-level vulnerabilities, and fragmented AI policies. In Part 2 of this series, I explored how organizations can operationalize strategic foresight through AI-augmented defense and human-machine partnerships that balance speed with wisdom. Now, in this final installment of the 2026 Boardroom Decision series, I address the existential question that determines whether your investments in governance and operations will scale or stall: how do you build ecosystem partnerships that amplify resilience without creating new vulnerabilities or strategic rigidities?

The answer requires understanding what I call tech tectonics, the seismic shifts beneath the surface of global business that can render yesterday's partnerships obsolete and create tomorrow's opportunities overnight. Boards must architect partnerships that maximize pivotability, the ability to change direction every three to six months as signals change, without abandoning the relationships and capabilities that create enduring competitive advantage.

The Partnership Paradox: Scale Requires Collaboration, But Collaboration Creates Dependencies

Let me start with a paradox that every Board must grapple with. The gray zone threats I described in Part 1 and the operational challenges I outlined in Part 2 are too complex for any single organization to address alone. You need partners: technology vendors who can provide AI-augmented security tools, industry consortia that can share threat intelligence, government agencies that can provide attribution and response capabilities, and academic institutions that can develop the next generation of security talent.

Yet every partnership creates dependencies. Every shared system creates a potential compromise point. Every collaborative relationship creates the risk of decision anchoring, where you continue investing in a partnership even when market signals suggest it is no longer serving your strategic interests.

I have seen this paradox play out repeatedly in my career. At the FCC, we needed to partner with telecommunications providers to secure critical infrastructure, but those same providers were potential targets for the adversaries we were defending against. With the CDC's bioterrorism preparedness and response program, we needed to collaborate with state and local health departments, but those partnerships required sharing sensitive information across systems with vastly different security postures.

The solution is not to avoid partnerships. It is to architect them with pivotability built in from the start.

The Three Pillars of Pivotable Partnerships

Drawing on my experience leading what I call "near impossible missions" and my current work advising organizations on AI governance and geopolitical risk, I have developed a framework for building partnerships that scale resilience without creating strategic rigidities. This framework rests on three pillars: data foundations, demonstration tools, and decentralized governance.
 

Pillar 1: Data Foundations That Support Rather Than Just Inform

In the current era of overlapping technological revolutions, Boards must recognize that the traditional mandate to "educate" stakeholders is no longer sufficient. The first pillar of a resilient partnership strategy is the curation of high-utility, localized data that supports decision-making rather than just providing information.

This connects directly to the concept of decision elasticity that I discussed in Part 2. When I talk about AI detecting anomalies at machine speed while humans provide context and judgment, that human judgment depends on having access to relevant, actionable data. But in most organizations, data sets are stovepiped, jargon-filled, or so voluminous that such data become unusable.

The Agency Paradox I introduced in Part 1 manifests here in a troubling way: while information is abundant, it is often not discoverable or usable for the people who need it most. Frontline security analysts cannot find the threat intelligence that would help them interpret an anomaly. Compliance officers cannot access the regulatory guidance that would clarify whether a new AI system meets requirements across multiple jurisdictions. Executives cannot get clear answers to strategic questions because the data exists in dozens of disconnected systems.

For Boards, this means overseeing the creation of unified data foundations that prioritize the actual questions being asked by end users, not just the data that is easiest to collect or that satisfies regulatory reporting requirements. This is not about building bigger data lakes. It is about building smarter data architectures that make existing information discoverable and usable.

In the context of partnerships, this means establishing data-sharing agreements that specify not just what data will be shared, but how it will be structured, who can access it, and how it will be used to support specific decisions. It means investing in data governance frameworks that can adapt as partnerships evolve and as new regulatory requirements emerge.

Pillar 2: Demonstration Tools That Navigate Complexity

Building on the data foundation, the second pillar focuses on the deployment of demonstration tools that simplify complexity and allow organizations to test possibilities before committing to full-scale implementation.

Let me give you a concrete example from my advisory work. Many organizations face prohibitively inflated costs when trying to navigate complex regulatory requirements like FedRAMP certification or CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification) compliance. External consultants charge fees that can run into millions of dollars, creating barriers that prevent smaller companies from competing for government contracts or partnering with larger enterprises that require these certifications.

The solution is to develop AI-powered demonstration tools, such as chatbots or compliance navigation systems, which can distill complex government PDFs and regulatory guidance into actionable insights. These tools provide what I call a "lean-forward" capability, allowing organizations to explore whether a partnership or certification is feasible before investing significant resources.

This approach embodies the decision elasticity principle from Part 2. By using AI to provide alerts and options while keeping humans empowered to make final decisions, organizations can test possibilities in a nine-month window, showing what is "do-able" before committing to an "all-in" investment.

For Boards, this means investing in demonstration capabilities that allow your organization to evaluate potential partnerships rapidly and rigorously. It means creating sandboxes where new collaborative tools can be tested without putting production systems at risk. And it means establishing clear criteria for when a demonstration should graduate to full implementation and when it should be abandoned.

Pillar 3: Decentralized Governance That Leverages Collective Intelligence

The final pillar of pivotable partnerships involves moving away from top-down leadership and toward a decentralized, networked model that leverages collective intelligence while maintaining accountability.

This is where the gray zone threats from Part 1 become particularly relevant. When adversaries are targeting your ecosystem, not just your organization, you need partnerships that can share threat intelligence, coordinate responses, and adapt to emerging threats faster than any single organization could on its own.

But decentralized governance creates its own challenges. How do you maintain strategic coherence when decision-making is distributed? How do you prevent free-riding, where some partners benefit from shared intelligence without contributing their own insights? How do you avoid the decision anchoring I warned about in Part 2, where partnerships persist even when they are no longer serving strategic interests?

The answer is to establish what I call independent voices and outside advisors who have the permission to "speak truth to power." These are individuals or organizations within your ecosystem who are explicitly tasked with challenging assumptions, surfacing weak signals that might indicate a need to pivot, and providing alternative perspectives that prevent groupthink.

In my work with Boards, I often recommend creating advisory councils that include not just industry peers but also academics, civil society representatives, and even former adversaries who can provide insights into how threats are evolving. These councils should have direct access to the Board, not just to management, and they should be empowered to raise concerns without fear of retaliation or exclusion from future partnerships.

Operationalizing Pivotability: The Three-to-Six-Month Review Cycle

Pivotability is not just a conceptual framework. It requires operational discipline. Based on my experience navigating tech tectonics across multiple sectors, I recommend that Boards establish a three-to-six-month review cycle for all strategic partnerships.

This review should assess three questions:

First, are the partnership's objectives still aligned with our strategic priorities? In a world where geopolitical alignments shift rapidly, where AI capabilities evolve monthly, and where regulatory frameworks change unpredictably, a partnership that made sense six months ago may no longer serve your interests. The review should explicitly consider whether continuing the partnership represents decision anchoring or strategic wisdom.

Second, is the partnership delivering measurable value? This requires establishing clear metrics at the outset, not just qualitative assessments of relationship quality. Are you getting the threat intelligence you need? Are the demonstration tools reducing time-to-market or compliance costs? Are the data-sharing agreements enabling better decision-making? If the answer to any of these questions is no, the partnership needs to be restructured or terminated.

Third, has the partnership created new vulnerabilities or dependencies that outweigh its benefits? This is where the hardware vulnerabilities and supply chain risks from Part 1 become critical. Every partnership expands your attack surface. Every shared system creates a potential compromise point. The review should include a rigorous security assessment that considers not just the partner's current security posture but also how geopolitical shifts might affect their reliability or trustworthiness in the future.

The Whole Exceeds the Sum: Building Enduring Competitive Moats

When Boards architect partnerships using the three pillars I have outlined, something remarkable happens. The whole of your ecosystem's capabilities exceeds the sum of its individual parts. You create what I call an enduring competitive moat, not through proprietary technology or exclusive relationships, but through the collective intelligence, adaptive capacity, and resilience of your network.

This is the opposite of the winner-takes-all dynamics that Ray Wang highlighted in his Davos analysis when discussing AI infrastructure investments. While tech giants and sovereign nations may dominate in raw computational power, organizations that build pivotable ecosystems can compete through agility, contextual intelligence, and the ability to rapidly reconfigure capabilities as threats and opportunities emerge.

Let me be concrete about what this looks like. In my advisory work, I have seen organizations that were outmatched by larger competitors in terms of R&D budgets or market share, but that achieved strategic advantage through ecosystem partnerships that allowed them to:

• Access threat intelligence from multiple sources and synthesize it faster than competitors with larger but more siloed security teams.
• Navigate complex regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions by sharing compliance tools and best practices with partners facing similar challenges.
• Attract and retain top talent by offering opportunities to work on innovative challenges in collaboration with diverse partners rather than in isolation.

These advantages are not temporary. They compound over time as the ecosystem learns, adapts, and builds trust. 

The Board's Role: From Oversight to Orchestration

Throughout this three-part series, I have argued that Boards must expand their role from traditional oversight to strategic orchestration. This is particularly true when it comes to ecosystem partnerships.

Boards cannot simply approve partnership agreements and then wait for quarterly reports on their performance. They must actively shape the partnership strategy, ensuring that it aligns with the organization's risk appetite, strategic priorities, and values. They must establish the governance frameworks that enable pivotability without creating chaos. And they must model the deployment empathy I discussed in Part 2, recognizing that partnerships are fundamentally about people and relationships, not just contracts and technologies.

This requires Boards to ask different questions than they have traditionally asked. Instead of "What is our partnership strategy?" Boards should ask "How quickly can we reconfigure our partnerships if the geopolitical or technological landscape shifts?" Instead of "Are we getting value from this partnership?" Boards should ask "What would it take to replace this partner if they became compromised or unreliable?" Instead of "How do we protect our IP in collaborative relationships?" Boards should ask "How do we build partnerships where shared learning creates more value than proprietary knowledge?"

These are not easy questions, and they do not have simple answers. But they are the questions that separate Boards that govern for resilience from Boards that govern for compliance.

An Invitation to Co-Create the Future

Over the course of this three-part series, I have outlined a comprehensive framework for how Boards can navigate the convergence of gray zone threats, AI-driven cyber risks, and geopolitical uncertainty. I have argued that this requires expanding fiduciary duty to encompass strategic foresight, building human-machine partnerships that balance speed with wisdom, and architecting ecosystem collaborations that maximize pivotability.

But frameworks and principles are not enough. What matters is execution, and execution requires leadership that is willing to wrestle with complexity, embrace uncertainty, and make complex decisions without perfect information.

If your Board is ready to move from reactive risk management to proactive resilience-building, if you recognize that the traditional playbooks are insufficient for the challenges ahead, or if you simply want to stress-test your current approach against the realities I have described, I invite you to engage in a deeper conversation.

My work as a senior advisor is dedicated to helping Boards develop the governance capacity, operational discipline, and partnership strategies needed to thrive in an era of tech tectonics. This is not about implementing a specific solution or following a compliance checklist. It is about building the organizational muscle memory to navigate radical uncertainty while preserving the human agency and ethical judgment that define great companies.

The stakes are existential. As I noted in Part 1, we are entering an era where the nature of work, the meaning of human existence, and the future social order are all in flux. For corporate Boards, the question is whether you will shape that future proactively through strategic partnerships and ecosystem resilience, or whether you will react to it after your competitors, your adversaries, and the market have already moved.

I have spent my career leading organizations through near-impossible missions, and I use that phrase deliberately. The challenges ahead are daunting. But they are not insurmountable. With the right governance frameworks, operational capabilities, and partnership strategies, your organization can not only survive but thrive in the gray zone.

The crucial question is whether your Board is ready to lead accordingly? This 2026 Boardroom Decision series provides essential guideposts for the months ahead. 

Onwards and upwards together. 

Dr. David Bray is both Chair of the Accelerator and a Distinguished Fellow at the non-partisan Stimson Center as well as Principal and CEO at LeadDoAdapt Ventures, Inc. He previously served as a non-partisan Senior National Intelligence Service Executive, as Chief Information Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, and IT Chief for the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program. Business Insider named him one of the top “24 Americans Changing the World” and he has received both the  Joint Civilian Service Commendation Award and the National Intelligence Exceptional Achievement Medal. The U.S. Congress invited him to serve as an expert witness on AI in September 2025. He also advises corporate Boards and CEOs on navigating the convergence of AI, cybersecurity, and geopolitical risk.