Board members usually arrive at a first meeting with a view already forming. It comes from what sits around the formal papers: search results, past interviews, a company website that signals internal discipline or its absence, and the small trail of public decisions that show how someone behaves when nothing is scripted.

What people see as a sudden fall is usually the moment a longer internal drift becomes impossible to ignore. Boards and executives often experience that moment as a surprise because the signals were dispersed, partial or inconvenient.