Optimising Board Composition: A Goal Programming Approach to Balancing Expertise, Governance and Diversity

Abstract How should organisations select board members when they must balance expertise, oversight, diversity, and practical constraints such as board size? This paper introduces a structured decision-making framework designed to support board composition under the United Kingdom’s ”comply or explain” governance regime. The approach first identifies boards that meet minimum requirements for competence, financial oversight, and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), and then selects those that provide the strongest overall balance of skills while remaining appropriately sized. Two contrasting perspectives are examined. The first, Equality of Outcome, incorporates explicit diversity and representation targets. The second, Equality of Opportunity, focuses on merit and fiduciary capability without imposing outcome-based constraints. Using publicly available data on a major listed company, the analysis shows that boards constructed under Equality of Outcome can achieve stronger representation while maintaining, and in some cases improving, overall capability. The framework also provides practical diagnostic tools that allow organisations to test whether excluded candidates could reasonably have been selected, offering a transparent way to assess fairness and potential legal or reputational risk. The approach is implemented in a flexible computational setting and can be adapted to a wide range of board and leadership selection problems.