GET OFF THE DIME!—COURAGEOUS BOARD GOVERNANCE THROUGH SENSEMAKING
© 2002 John E. Perkins
Keep the Change
5201 22nd Ave NE #201
Seattle WA 98105
206 524.4496
http://www.drizzle.com/~newroots/book.html
TABLE OF CONTENTS
[Best viewed using a fixed width font such as Courier.
Click highlighted chapter titles to see excerpts.]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................... i
CH. 1. START MAKING SENSE...................................... 1
CH. 2. EDITING YOUR TALK....................................... 8
CH. 3. A
BIRDSEYE VIEW OF WHAT MAKES A GREAT BOARD............. 13
CH. 4.
DECLARE YOUR NORMS BEFORE YOU NEED THEM................. 17
CH. 5. THE
BOARD HOLDS THE REMOTE CONTROL:
HANDLE
IT WITH CARE................................. 23
CH. 6. THE BOARD HOLDS SOVEREIGN POWERS—IT RULES!.............. 30
CH. 7.
FOSTERING THROUGH APPRECIATIVE ATTENTION................ 36
CH. 8.
MOVING FROM PREFERENCES TO POLICIES
IN THE FACE
OF UNCERTAINTY........................... 43
CH. 9.
COURAGE................................................. 50
CH. 10. IN
TOO FAR TO QUIT?.................................... 54
CH. 11. AN
EXAMPLE OF GROUPWISDOM.............................. 60
CH. 12.
JUST GET OFF YOUR DIME!................................ 66
APPENDIX A:
NO NORMS = THE DEATH OF DISCUSSION................. 69
APPENDIX B:
SIGNING UP......................................... 73
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................... 74
CITATION
INDEX................................................. 78
GENERAL
INDEX.................................................. 79
(Pages 1-7)
CHAPTER 1
START
MAKING SENSE[1]
People are more
confused than we give them credit for.
~
Lynx Douglass ~
Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the
whole staircase,
just take the first step.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr. ~
Welcome to Get Off the Dime!, a fresh way to help boards make better decisions by making better sense of difficult issues.
A board can
get stuck in a multitude of ways. Some board members confuse the interpersonal
aspects of a board with that of a social club and become mired in confusion
when differences of opinion surface; other members lose their grip on their
legal and organizational authority and let the executive director or external
events sway them off course; others drift so far apart from the organization
they are supposed to serve that their every move is questioned and resisted by
important constituents, the director or employees. Sometimes several
difficulties may be occurring at once, but they cannot all be solved at once.
Careful thought reveals that some problems depend on other difficulties for
their continuance, so that solving the more important issue automatically
resolves or simplifies the others.
A spell of indecisiveness can afflict any board. In fact, temporary indecisiveness can be a healthy stage as members grapple to understand policy options; however, chronic indecisiveness eventually takes a toll on the board members as well as on the productivity of the whole organization. Not every issue causes chronic indecisiveness. Progress on most issues glide along well enough, but on The Big Issue a board cannot seem to find its way. Examples of Big Issues could include how to deal with a personnel issue, reviewing the performance of the executive director, or helping a long-term executive director prepare a successor. The Big Issue gets an honored place on the agenda—meeting after meeting. Sometimes an entire retreat is devoted to it, leaving no doubt about its importance with board members, the executive director and others. In a surprising flurry of movement, the board appears to decide, but, somehow, a month or two later The Big Issue is reopened and the whole dreary Sisyphean[2] process starts anew.
Sound familiar? This situation, though widespread, can be remedied. Get off the Dime! will offer you some insights and methods that will help. The remedy is for each individual member to take personal responsibility for making his or her own sense of the Big Issue, using meeting discussions to clarify how the board as a group makes sense of the issue, courageously making a decision, and expressing that decision in a way which makes sense to others. The benefits of doing this are many: board members have confidence that they have provided due diligence, the board as a group feels productive, members of the organization and public see the board professionally managing the hard issues before the organization. Reaching a decision after such a process is a mutually rewarding experience for board members.
The
Ambiguous Side of Boards
Boards are often thought of as the group which leads an organization with a unified vision and clear decision making. In reality, boards teem with ambiguities, uncertainties and risks. Just what you would expect from a peer-based group with the highest legal authority for deciding and setting policy within an organization. It is the board’s role to clarify ambiguities either by allowing current policies to stand or by crafting new ones to meet emergent circumstances.[3] No one tells the board what to do; it must find its own way. Should it cling to the original mission of the organization, enlarge it, or shrink it? Should board meetings and board members be open to direct communication from (and with) constituents and staff or should all communication be filtered exclusively through the executive director? How should it deal with chronically absent members? How much training should be provided to newly recruited members? And so on.
Ambiguity means a statement or situation which can be interpreted two or more different ways.[4] Chronic indecisiveness in a board occurs because a policy proposal means different things to each board member and the board as a group lacks the norms and procedures to sort out the various meanings and select one action. Indecisiveness occurs when:
u The board avoids The Issue;
u The board addresses the symptoms of The Issue rather than The Issue itself;
u Many board members are unsure of what they want in regard to The Issue;
u Board members differ on how to evaluate potential results of alternative courses of action;
u The Issue has confused some members, but they’re reluctant to ask basic questions because they fear being seen as ignorant or inattentive;
u The board is genuinely split on which action to take and has not agreed upon conflict resolution procedures;
u Prior discussions and decisions on The Issue are forgotten.
Sensemaking as Remedy
All roads to clarity, movement and momentum travel through sensemaking.[5] Sensemaking covers those processes, activities and artifacts people use to reduce ambiguity, uncertainty or complexity. They may do so in three ways:
1. Sensemaking processes happen during meetings, including discussions, brainstorming, and so on…
2. Sensemaking activities include paper and pencil assessments, fact-finding trips to gather more information, and the like.
3. Sensemaking artifacts include all paper documents such as minutes and reports, electronically recorded communication such as audio tapes, and records of communication on the Internet, such as webpages and e-mail.
There are three perspectives[6] in sensemaking:
First person sensemaking includes all the ways an individual member can clarify The Issue in private and while alone. It may include making lists or comparison tables, conducting independent research, recalling dreams, or taking long walks to ponder The Issue. It also includes all the prior life experiences and education a particular member consciously or unconsciously draws upon while contemplating The Issue.
Second person sensemaking involves peer-level interactions and alternating cycles of rehearsal and performance. The other person may or may not also be a member of the board. On boards, this happens when a member becomes involved with a subcommittee which leads to a presentation to the whole board. The essential feature of second person sensemaking is participants can speak directly to one another, ask questions, and everyone’s understanding of The Issue moves along at about the same pace.
Third person sensemaking means ways of making sense which affect people who are not part of the sensemaking process in a direct, personally knowable way. It shows two different faces. One face of third person sensemaking subordinates people and their experiences. The influence of this perspective pervades our culture through the domination of the scientific method and the practice of speaking of “truth,” “facts,” and “knowledge” as though they existed independent of human understanding and interpretation.[7] It leads some to prefer impersonal “research” conducted and disseminated by authorities and experts completely detached from the board. These authorities may even be long dead.
The other face of third person sensemaking emerges from first and second person sensemaking to create a participative structure in which others can be invited to join. Members who prefer this mode of sensemaking understand that the theories and practices of others serve only as guides. They know that their specific board faces its own unique and changing factors which it alone must account for when deciding on policy.
Ways of interpreting and applying legal principles illustrate both approaches to third person sensemaking. An example is Justice Earl Warren’s awakening to the realities of discrimination for Negroes (term used during that time) and how that changed him and his approach to the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case.
One story is that before the Court announced its monumental decision in the Spring of 1954, he took a tour of the Virginia Civil War battlefields. Warren's driver, an African-American, dropped him off for the night at a hotel in Virginia. When the driver picked up Warren the next morning, Warren asked him where he had stayed. He had slept in the car, as there were no hotels in the area that accepted blacks. Warren, reportedly, was shocked and immediately ended his tour (Kluger, 699). One can speculate how this experience affirmed his thinking about the case. He was also sensitive to the role he had played as governor in promoting the relocation of Japanese-Americans into detention camps during World War II. The regret he felt about this, which was revealed in the autobiography that was published after his death (Kluger, 661-662), may also have played a role.[8]
The Sensemaking Spiral
An inside or outside facilitator can help guide a board through the sensemaking process. This person will need special qualities to guide a board out of the murky gloom or comfort of indecisiveness into the clear light of confident policy decision making. The facilitator actually guides several sensemaking journeys at once—his or her own developing sense of The Issue, each board member’s individual journey toward a confident clarity about The Issue as well as the members’ collective sense of what other members, “the board,” think, believe, and want regarding The Issue. As the members gather confidence, they can be guided to act collectively in the name of the board and select a policy alternative with a course of action.
Metaphorically, one can picture the process as a large spiral staircase with all members standing on different stairs. Each one stands in the dark. The staircase has enough width that the whole board can actually stand on the same step. At the beginning of the process board members are scattered up and down the staircase, some have raced ahead, perhaps even to the top, and are impatiently waiting for their fellow members to catch up. Others may be lagging far behind, perhaps at the very bottom. Maybe some have a fear of heights, others may be all too familiar with this particular staircase and would prefer a different one. As they stand in the dark trying to figure out what to do, some shout out their positions, some remain silent. The only person with a flashlight is the facilitator.
This
metaphor suggests a method. The facilitator must travel the length of the
staircase and discover the location of every member. Sometimes the members may be
closer than they thought, other times they may be wide apart. Then the
facilitator must communicate in such a way that all members can travel the
staircase together because this unity of process will simplify the task of
deciding. Once the members are all on the same step, the facilitator has only
to illuminate both the step ahead and the one behind and help the members
communicate with one another as they decide which step to take.
A
good discussion facilitator functions much like a clerk in a Quaker meeting. A
clerk tries one way to phrase his or her “sense of the
meeting”—that is, what the clerk believes the decision the
discussion has led the group to; should that lack a consensus agreement among
the meeting’s members, the clerk tries other wording later after
additional discussion. It’s the clerk’s skills with timing, wording
and patient reiteration of his or her “sense of the meeting” which
contributes to the crafting of a unified decision.[9] Sometimes this building of a common agreement
can occur in open discussion of all members of the group, at other times
individual members might have to hold private discussions about their point of
view with the facilitator.
What You
Can Expect
Because many boards meet once a month, this book has twelve chapters. A board can read and discuss one chapter a month and complete the whole book in about a year. This chapter, Chapter 1, has introduced you to the fundamental insight that board members have three levels of understanding to navigate when making decisions.
Chapter 2—Editing the Talk—shows how a board’s process of arriving at a decision is closer to an evolutionary process than a once and for-all-time event.
Chapter 3—A Birdseye View Of What Makes A Great Board—locates the work of your board within the social, political and legal contexts of society. It is a short chapter but essential to creating a common framework for your shared responsibilities as board members. Major terms are discussed in greater detail in the following chapters.
Chapter 4—Declare Your Norms Before You Need Them—considers the equal power and peer relationships among board members. This is one of the subtlest, least understood and under-discussed area of board dynamics.
Chapter 5—The Board Holds The Remote Control: Handle It With Care—deals with the ambiguities created by the separation of the control function of organizations (vested in boards) from the daily executive function (vested in staff and the director).
Chapter 6—The Board Holds Sovereign Powers—It Rules!—looks more closely at the ways your board has been given its power to direct the affairs of its organization.
Chapter 7—Fostering Through Appreciative Attention—looks at your board’s responsibility to learn what is going on externally and internally that affects the success of your organization.
Chapter 8—From Preference To Policy In The Face Of Uncertainty—shows how your board can attend to members’ understanding and confidence in their understanding in order to make courageous decisions.
Chapter 9—Courage—looks at the quality most needed by your board if it is to discharge its responsibilities successfully.
Chapter 10—In Too Far to Quit?—visits one of the most difficult decisions a board can face—closing a declining program or even shutting down the organization.
Chapter 11—An Example Of Groupwisdom—presents the story of how Johnson and Johnson built the pre-conditions for its perfect handling of the Tylenol tampering incident.
Chapter 12—Get Off Your Dime!—wraps up the book and offers some closing thoughts for your reflections.
A note about footnotes and gender. Footnotes serve several functions. Footnotes guide me back to where I researched a particular point or give credit to the sources which influenced my thinking.
Footnotes can lead you to richer discussions on a particular point. The footnote style often used with the author, year and page enclosed in parentheses, as in “(Perkins 2000: 101),” clutters the page. As a compromise, I have used a hybrid system, placing the traditional number reference in superscript with the citation at the bottom of the page in shorthand form. From there you can consult the bibliography.
Men and women serve on boards. Written English still has no accepted means of indicating both males and females with a single pronoun. Repeating “he or she” and “his or hers” would become tiresome to read. Combined forms such as “he/she or “(s)he” can distract your attention. As much as possible I have mixed my use of he and she. This means that within a single chapter I may use “he” in my first reference to a board member’s gender, and next time I may use “she.”
Bringing sensemaking into the picture of successful board self-management is a critical habit for boards to develop. It adds a new and welcome awareness of how to address the natural confusion which sometimes affect a board’s handling of an issue. An awareness of sensemaking processes, and how to enhance them, gives board members, executive directors, and consultants a powerful tool to use when faced with chronic indecisiveness.
What E. L. Doctorow said about writing novels applies to how a board can start making sense and work its way out of a difficulty, “Writing a novel is like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights let you, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Questions To Consider: (As an aid to your understanding, I will offer some questions at the end of each chapter keyed to First, Second, and Third Person Sensemaking.)
First Person Sensemaking
1. Do you set aside enough time to read and reflect on the board related materials sent for your review?…
Second Person Sensemaking
4. Are minutes or notes of meetings detailed enough to help members understand the nuances of thought and opinion shared during discussions?…
Third Person Sensemaking
7. Are decisions of the board passed on to the executive or other staff with sufficient explanation to help them understand the board’s intent?…
(Pages 9-10)
CHAPTER
2
EDITING YOUR TALK
The
greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been
accomplished.
~ George Bernard Shaw ~
Half my life is an act of revision.
~ John Irving ~
… This book focuses on the decision-making role of boards, though boards serve other functions for its members, such as socializing, networking, information sharing, career enhancement, etc.[10] A board is working well when it makes good decisions based on its member’s confident and collective understanding of the available information and resources of the organization. A decision gives punctuation to an issue; it marks the transition from discussion to action. It marks this transition with a vote or other procedure where members state their choice and the results are tallied and entered into the minutes. It is both a public expression of each member’s personal preference and an official decision of the whole board sitting in official and formal session. Though a brief moment, a decision may be preceded by months, or even years, of research and discussion. Little might be at stake or the fate of the whole organization may hinge on the decision.
Some boards step up the challenge and decide with confidence. Other boards shy away from the harder work and make decisions but on trivial matters. And still other boards decide nothing and meet and study and talk as if waiting for some magic new information to make the task easier.
Boards seldom openly discuss what limits their ability to decide. Some issues have the potential of literally splitting the board in half. Board members fear that conflicts may emerge which they feel unable to handle. Bringing such issues to a vote is avoided out of concern that the losing members will take their complaints public, resign, or attempt to put it back on the agenda with the hope of getting another vote.
Board members seldom discuss their level of confidence about an issue. Perhaps they have not understood the briefing materials and discussions but feel too embarrassed to ask questions. Perhaps they feel unsure that the decision will be implemented well. Perhaps they suspect a proposed plan is too big for the resources of the organization.
A group decision can be a fragile thing. It takes care to do it right. A board in a hurry can delegate a decision to a single person or a committee, and then ratify what that person or sub-group decides. The danger in this approach is that each member of the board shares responsibility for a decision he or she may know very little about. Should the decision turn sour or raise legal questions, will non board members see this board as exercising due diligence?
At the other extreme, consensus building takes time and requires that each board member develop a confident grasp of the issue. With a consensus decision, all members see that the decision will benefit the organization. If any member sincerely feels that a proposed course of action may be harmful to the organization, he or she can block the decision. Consensus does not mean that open disagreements are squelched. In a functioning group the opposite is true as members rightly sense that all will back a decision in which each made a good faith effort to understand and improve.
Even if your board does not use consensus, it can benefit from the careful mutual attention to the views of all members…
(From pages 33-35)
THE BOARD HOLDS SOVEREIGN POWERS—IT RULES!
The Three Duties
As a board, you will be safe and well within your powers when you operate within the reasonable expectations of the three major fiduciary duties: the duty of care, the duty of loyalty, and the duty of obedience.
First, the board has a duty to care for the operations of the whole organization, which includes taking reasonable actions to maintain the safety and security of employees, members and clients. Serving on a board and the work of the board itself means serious, responsible work. A board which meets infrequently or one which swallows everything the executive feeds them is slacking off from their duty to care.
The duty of loyalty requires that all board members faithfully serve the interests of the organization. Should friends, family or other associates of a member seek to conduct business with the organization, that board members must divulge their relationship for recording in the minutes and abstain from votes involving those parties. Also, members must not use information obtained in their role as board members for personal gain.
The duty of obedience requires the board and board members to follow the relevant laws which apply to their organization and to stay faithful to the organization’s mission.
Asking questions during official board meetings, and making sure that they get answered, shows the board is taking care of business. Since any inquiry by third parties will start with the written record, make sure these questions and answers are included in the official minutes…
Care can be demonstrated by a bit of “walking around” by members when authorized or approved by the board. Board approval makes it apparent at the second person sensemaking level that specified members will observe specified events or functions. This could help soothe some executives fears about board members micromanaging. The members is expected to report to the board or a committee what they learned. Joining office celebrations and other events when appropriate offers board members a chance to meet staff and directly observe staff interactions.
The board might consider with the executive how board members can directly witness program activities. This is a delicate arena as some board members confuse witnessing with managing and perhaps justly are accused by their executive with micromanagement. This is less an issue in small start-up organizations because the work may not get done if board members do not pitch in.
Larger organizations with more formal lines of authority will have to negotiate what practices and policies in this regard work best for them. Relying solely on reports from the executive director and never observing program activities will leave board members too reliant on a single source of information …
Questions to Consider:
First Person Sensemaking
1. Do you have any business or other arrangements which someone else might perceive as compromising your duty of loyalty or obedience? …
Second Person Sensemaking
4. How does the board orient new members to their legal and ethical responsibilities as board members?…
Third Person
Sensemaking
8. Do minutes reflect sufficient board oversight and deliberation before major decisions are made?…
BACK TO KEEP
THE CHANGE HOME PAGE