Ember: Purpose
Boards can be extraordinarily busy places. There are papers to read, risks to review, performance to scrutinise, decisions to approve and responsibilities that quite rightly need to be discharged.
A board can do all of those things diligently and still leave a more fundamental question unanswered: What is this board actually here to do?
Not what does the agenda require of us today. Not what does the governance calendar say we need to cover this quarter. But what does this organisation need from its board, at this particular point in its life?
That question interests me because boards have limited time and attention. Where they choose to put it matters.
Governing isn’t managing.
One useful place to start is with Bob Tricker’s deceptively simple distinction between governance and management.
Tricker describes governance as involving strategy, policy, supervision of management and overall accountability. Management runs the enterprise; the governing body makes sure it is being run well and in the right direction.
That distinction sounds straightforward. In practice, the boundary can become surprisingly porous. A board asks for more operational detail because it wants assurance. A discussion about strategy moves quickly into how something should be implemented. Directors bring valuable professional expertise and naturally start solving the problem in front of them.
None of those things is inherently wrong. Sometimes boards need to get close to an issue. The more interesting question is whether they notice when they are doing it.
Conformance and performance
Tricker’s framework is useful here because he sees the board as having both conformance and performance responsibilities. Conformance includes supervision, accountability and compliance. Performance includes strategy formulation, policy and working with the chief executive on the future of the enterprise.
Both matter.
But it makes me wonder what we would see if we looked honestly at where a board spends its time. How much is spent assuring ourselves that things are as they should be? And how much is spent thinking about what should happen next?
There is another kind of board work.
Richard Chait, William Ryan and Barbara Taylor add something I find particularly useful. In Governance as Leadership, written specifically about non-profit boards, they describe three modes of governance: fiduciary, strategic and generative.
Fiduciary
The fiduciary mode is probably the most familiar.
Are resources being stewarded properly? Are we accountable? Are we acting within the law and true to our mission?
Strategic
In strategic mode, the board turns towards direction.
Where are we going? What are we trying to achieve? What choices do we need to make?
Generative
But their third mode, generative governance, is the one I find especially interesting. Generative work happens earlier. Before deciding what to do, we have to make sense of what is happening.
What does this situation mean? What are we assuming? What problem are we actually trying to solve? Is there another way of understanding it? What deserves our attention?
More macro governance, less micro management
Chait, Ryan and Taylor argue that this kind of thinking is a critical dimension of trusteeship, alongside fiduciary and strategic work. Their broader proposition is for more “macro governance” alongside less micro management.
For me, that gets close to the particular value a good board can bring.
A board brings together people who aren’t immersed in the organisation in quite the same way as its executive team. They have different experiences, perspectives and responsibilities. Used well, that distance creates an opportunity to see something differently.
But only if there is space to use it. If every minute of the meeting is already accounted for by reports, updates and approvals, we shouldn’t be surprised if very little new thinking happens.
Purpose also helps us know what not to do.
John Carver takes the distinction between board and management considerably further.
His Policy Governance model asks boards to define the Ends the organisation exists to achieve, including the intended results, beneficiaries and worth, while giving the chief executive substantial freedom over the means within boundaries established by the board.
Carver’s model is a particular philosophy of governance and a board doesn’t have to adopt it wholesale for the underlying challenge to be useful.Because it forces a difficult question:
If we are clear about the results we are here to govern towards, what can we stop involving ourselves in?
That’s an important counterpart to purpose.
Purpose isn’t only about identifying what deserves our attention. It can also give us permission to recognise what doesn’t. A board that can’t answer that question can gradually accumulate work. Another report. Another standing item. Another approval. Another area in which directors have become accustomed to being consulted.
Each may have made sense when it arrived. Together, they can crowd out the work that only the board can do.
Something to try.
At the end of your next board meeting, don’t ask whether you got through the agenda.
Take five minutes and look back at what the board actually did.
For each substantive item, ask which kind of contribution the board was making::
Oversight
Were we assuring ourselves that the organisation is well run, accountable and operating within appropriate boundaries?
Direction
Were we making or shaping choices about where the organisation is going?
Thinking
Were we making sense of something together, challenging assumptions or seeing an issue differently?
Some conversations will contain all three. There isn’t a correct ratio to aim for. Instead, look at the pattern and ask:
Given what our organisation needs from us now, is this how we want our board to be spending its attention?
That might be a more useful board effectiveness conversation than asking whether the meeting itself went well.
About this Ember.
Purpose
Board agendas have a habit of filling themselves. There is always another report to receive, risk to review or decision to approve. All of it can be important.
Purpose asks us to lift our eyes from the agenda.
What is this board here to contribute? What can it do that nobody else in the organisation can? What does this organisation need from its board now? And what might we make more space for if we were clearer about the answers?
Sometimes returning to purpose changes the conversation before it has even begun.
Purpose might be the Ember you need today. Or perhaps another word will open up something different.
Take one with you. Turn it over for a while. Notice what it brings to mind.
What Ember will you take today?
Reading trail
Start with Bob Tricker if you’re interested in the fundamental distinction between governing and managing, and particularly his framework of the board’s performance and conformance roles.
Go to Governance as Leadership by Richard Chait, William Ryan and Barbara Taylor for the fiduciary, strategic and generative modes.
Explore John Carver’s Policy Governance if you want to push much harder on the distinction between the board’s work and management’s work.
