I have been thinking a lot about change recently and its impact on organisations and their boards. A recent chain of events involving a client I had been hoping to work with for over a year has fuelled that thought – a lot!

A few short weeks ago, the client contacted me. They had been through an enormous period of change and uncertainty but, the Chair reported, “things seem to have settled down now and we are ready to move ahead and look at how best to govern for the future”. I was booked to do a half-day workshop. A few days before the workshop it became clear that, as a result of major changes in government thinking, the organisation’s role was in doubt. A few days after the workshop it became clear that the organisation has no future, the government is abolishing it.

Of course not every organisation is subject to that amount of change but the fact remains that change has become a way of life for most. How are boards to respond? I believe that the first thing is that boards need to recognise that they do not have to be mere victims. Boards have the power to rise above the fray and create the signposts that can help their organisations navigate through all the complexity and chaos that can be created by external events. If boards do not use that power but simply react to individual events I believe that they often become part of the problem by adding further layers of complexity rather than creating a consistent framework within which change can be managed without throwing the organisation off course.

I have written an article on this subject called “Governing Change from the Boardroom” which you can see by going to www.goodtogovern.com. If you have comments on this article I would love to see them here.

To try it out, with no advance planning, Sherry Jennings and Robert Ballantyne picked the topic of The Role of the Governing Board, and discussed it for about 20 minutes.

This, then, was the first ever broadcast of Better Governing. You are welcome to view the recording… and let us know what you think of our new baby project. This initiative is still in the experimental stage. In the future we plan to announce when we will broadcast, and viewers will be invited to participate with comments and questions in the chat-room. Sometimes our chat-room will be populated by members of the Governance Corporation as chat-room monitors.

Susan Mogensen

Susan Mogensen has a perspective on this that could save your organization lots of money, and more importantly: save time.

This short audio broadcast will take less than 5 minutes. Click on this link:

Susan Mogensen – Board Approvals

I am all for board assessment but only against criteria that board’s have agreed to be in their owners’ best interests. Others may have opinions but they are not the final arbiters – only owners are.

Policy Governance may seem almost like a fairy tale in the promise it offers to get the board out of day-to-day managing and into discussing the future. PG requires a paradigm shift from thinking about what is to what can be. It also requires the board to shift from thinking about activities to an orientation about delivering results.

I’m in touch with some board members who “get” Policy Governance and they all report that they bring Policy Governance principles to every board on which they serve. Whether trade association or arts council or school board, there is no denying the power of the model. But, it’s only for organizations that truly want to do more, that want to be cutting edge and competitive, that want to be on the forefront of leading positive change in the communities they serve, that see the future as full of possibilities instead of problems.

A couple of years ago I attended a workshop at the American Society of Association Executives about “managing” the board. The workshop was filled to capacity and I heard over and over the same old complaints (that I’ve been hearing for nearly 20 years) about board micromanagment or lack of engagement or the board not knowing what their job is. Why aren’t we doing anything to change this?
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The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The only way to get different results is to move beyond the traditional governance (and management concepts masquerading as governance) and try something new.
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A colleague recently attended a corporate governance conference. In the room, they were discussing the state of governance today. She said she felt like “here we are in the age of aerospace and I was listening to people talk about flight in terms of what feathers to use and which glue works best.”

What she is talking about (I think) is we’re content with a randomly selected mixture of “best practices” instead of a comprehensive model. Usually, “best practices” evolve from problem-solving or “fixing” something rather than creating lasting, sustainable change. The paradigm is still prescriptive solutions.  ”Take two aspirin and your headache will go away.”

If you want sustainable organizational change, you need a process, not a

If you’re using Policy Governance effectively, it is almost magic. But the magic doesn’t happen without education or preparation or work or practice. And it certainly doesn’t happen at random. Or by putting a band-aid on it and wishing and hoping the problem will go away.

Governance should not be a random collection of whatever seems to work best at the time. Or by following the latest fad. Governance excellence is intentional.

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I am curious to see if this presentation tool, called Prezi, is helpful for us. Let me know. It kinda works in the 500 px wide column, but it looks better fullscreen — that option is on a grey menu that appears in the lower right of the flash screen (below). Please wait for the presentation to load. The start button is the grey arrow at the bottom of the flash frame. Once it starts, every mouse-click advances the story.

Until about ten minutes ago, going to those URLs indicated that the sites were unavailable at Easily (the old host in the UK). Suddenly http://governancecorporation.com showed this site, and just now http://thegovernancecorporation.com pointed here. Not always. It is sputtering, but soon the news will reach all of the local DNS servers. It is 9:40 am PST.

The next problem is that once someone is here, they see the URL of the subdomain. I think there is a way to fix that. I’ll work on it later today.