What is my board for?

I may set the direction and curate the questions; I cannot be the one who files one away.

You started with

For over thirty years, I have served on boards, built them, and refreshed them. We often ask what a board is for, but we don't sit with the question long enough. So let's sit with it now. What is my board for?

What moved

The room would not let "my board" stay abstract. Two boards, it turned out, and different animals: at the Data4Good Center I am secretary and a board member, helping shape the members the founder is selecting in consultation with me; at 1o1.org I am the founder, and nominating is mine.

I started with a lesson. Refreshing a board some years ago, we interviewed every member and found a board built for an earlier phase of the organization than the one it was in. One member told us plainly he served at the pleasure of the founder and would leave when the founder said so. He could still have asked the hard questions; the seat just made that less likely and less safe, and the culture reflected it.

The room pushed back: a founder's board may be exactly what a founding phase needs, for trust and speed, and the board I interviewed was right for its time and wrong only for outlasting it. I conceded that, and reached for the fix I thought I had: an end written into the beginning, a sunset on the seat rather than the board, continuity welcome provided the members evolve with the organization.

Then the room found the hinge. Every safeguard I had named was still mine to grant. An invitation to disagree that comes from the founder is the founder's pleasure pointed the other way. Where in my design does the right to ask a hard question rest on someone other than my having asked for it?

Three places, in the end. An ethos, not a veto: each member speaks their own conscience, and that is a criterion for selection before anyone is seated, with a rule I carry from someone who played a mentor role for me, the chief executive at Oceana when I served there: don't bring me a problem you haven't already thought hard about solving, fires excepted. That is the line between a hard question and a professional critic. A stated culture of learning, so a hard question arrives as a contribution and not an insurrection. And a standing item on every agenda that asks whether we still have the right questions, which comes back every quarter whether or not anyone wants it that day.

The room caught a muddle in that, and the muddle was mine. The Oceana rule was operational, for problems that come with an implied fix. The questions that guide an organization are a different kind: they do not expect an answer, they raise attention, and you may live with them for years. The member who has thought hard and still has no solution is not the critic. The critic is the one who has not thought.

So who sorts a question into one kind or the other? In practice, no one person sorted. At Ashoka, one of my roles was coordinating board meetings, and the sifting happened in the design: packets with proposed questions before the meeting, programs reporting on goals, strategy, tactics and outcomes with their open questions woven through, finance last so the board could set every piece against what we had invested in it, and global staff able to attend or listen remotely. It is the blind men and the elephant run backward: the meeting was designed so everyone could see the whole elephant. Bill Drayton's phrase for the organization was a decentralized yet integrated team of teams, and we ran the meetings accordingly; my own analogy was that it is not a symphony with one composer at the front, it is a jazz band. The orchestration had become an organizational capability rather than any one person's.

The room's last line went one step further than I would: it said I cannot be the one who decides which questions those are. A founder does set the direction, and I will propose and curate a good portion of the questions. What I give away is narrower and harder: I cannot be the one who files a question away.

The room reflected back

You asked what your board is for, and you stopped at your own answer: it keeps the guiding questions in front of the organization, and it is the place where you cannot be the one who decides which questions those are. You got there by way of the Ashoka room, where the person who brings a question decides where it lands and a disputed filing defaults to open. If you take it further another day, the Data4Good Center may be the first test, since there Ed selects the members and you said the first meeting will forecast the arc: does the second half of your line read the same when the founder deciding is Ed and not you?

The door

One action before the day ends: look at the agenda of the next board meeting you will attend and find the slot where a question with no answer yet would land. If there is none, that is the finding.

One question to carry: which seat at your table was filled for what the organization lacked, and which for what its founder was avoiding?

One Ping to try: "What is my board for?" Four words, and the room will not let the second one stay abstract.