One Minute Governance

You know when you’re learning something new like a sport or a musical instrument or a language or game or whatever? Sometimes it just clicks right away for some reason and you’re like “UGGGGH can we please just move faster! I’m ready!” But then sometimes it feels more like “wait, stop, stop, stop…WHAT IS HAPPENING? I’m really not getting this. I need to slow down.” And if you’re learning in a group, usually there’s at least one person at either end of that spectrum, both of which are pretty frustrated. That’s how it feels sometimes to make decisions in groups. Especially if we’re not intentional and clear in advance about the proposed cadence. Imagine you’re a CEO who’s spent the past six months eating, sleeping, breathing, digesting all of the elements of a potential new path. You walk into a boardroom expecting the board to sit back, listen attentively, smile broadly, vote unanimously in favour of your proposal, and give you a standing ovation. But it doesn’t go as planned. A board member has a question. Maybe it’s a question that you’ve already considered a million times and feel a bit frustrated that the directors don’t just trust that you’ve thought about it. Maybe five directors have questions just like that one. Maybe you’re starting to get really frustrated. Maybe the meeting ends and you look for a governance consultant online and say to them “my board is SOOOO annoying! They’re always diving into the weeds and make everything so slow!” And maybe that governance consultant will say to you, “let’s imagine ourselves in the board’s position. How might you have involved them earlier and more often to bring them on the journey with you?” Cadence matters. There may not be a perfect balance, but being intentional gets you most of the way there.

Every Wednesday, OMG will share an audio version of a definition from the Ground-Up Governance platform. 

OK I know this sounds kinda dumb but I Googled “trust definition” before writing this script. So here’s my class presentation on trust. Oxford Dictionary defines trust as a “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.” In other words, it’s like the opposite of doubt. And one of the things I like about that definition is that we can imagine ourselves trusting someone’s reliability or ability, but doubting the truth of something they say. The fact that someone says something that doesn’t seem entirely believable to us doesn’t mean we lose faith in their character. And each of these intersecting qualities of trust exist basically everywhere in organizations, maybe even more so in boardrooms. Like, directors need to verify the accuracy of information that management brings to them – this is why boards often hire their own auditors and lawyers. Verification is one thing. But if we don’t *trust* management to bring us the truth, we have a whole nother problem. If we don’t have a firm belief in the reliability or ability of the directors around us, that’s an equally big problem. So, obviously, trust is an important input into decision-making. But one of the most common errors that I see in boardrooms and beyond is the assumption that if I don’t trust you, it’s a YOU problem. As in, I have no influence over the conditions that affect whether I trust you or not, or whether we collectively trust each other. Frankly, that’s a load of BS. If, for example, there’s a pattern of behaviour that’s affecting your trust level, what are the steps YOU can take to influence that pattern, respectfully?

Building on the previous episode, a close cousin of psychological safety is conflict. One of the most obvious symptoms of a lack of psychological safety in a boardroom is a complete lack of conflict. Conflict doesn’t have to be toxic or personal. It can arise naturally and constructively from disagreement. Disagreement is pretty normal in an environment – like a boardroom – where there are complex decisions at hand with multiple viable paths to explore. If we all agree on a path right off the bat, then one of two things is happening: a bad kind of group think where it doesn’t occur to us to question each other and ourselves, or people feel unsafe expressing their doubts and concerns. I sometimes meet boards that can’t remember the last time they had any disagreement or conflict around a decision. That might sound like paradise to some CEOs out there, but to me it sounds like a place where effective decision-making goes to die. Conflict can be awful and scary – especially the bad kind of conflict where someone is being deliberately attacked. There’s no place for that in any decision-making environment. But conflict can also be inspiring, like the type of disagreements where we all sincerely want to understand multiple perspectives, especially the ones that run counter to our own beliefs. There may be some tension, but we can deal with it gracefully because we’re all fundamentally there for the same reason: to make the best decisions we can for the organization and its stakeholders.

Every Wednesday, OMG will share an audio version of a definition from the Ground-Up Governance platform. 

There’s a strange thing happening in some boardrooms I’ve encountered over the past few years. The first part of the strange thing is a positive: they’re talking about the importance of psychological safety. In general, I think of psychological safety as a set of conditions where everyone in a group or system feels like they can express what they think or how they feel without fear of being punished in some way. So yeah, no matter how old school you are, I bet you completely agree that psychological safety is important in boardrooms. The second part of the strange thing is not so positive. It seems that some people have misinterpreted psychological safety to mean that they are entitled to feel comfortable all the time. In other words, if someone in the room says something that makes these people feel uncomfortable, they complain that the conditions are not psychologically safe. I get it: feeling uncomfortable can be…well, really uncomfortable. But insisting that you must feel comfortable ALL the time is basically another way of saying “I should be allowed to say anything I want, but you can only say things that make me feel good.” That’s the thing about conditions that make people feel safe expressing themselves. It’s basically inviting discomfort into the room and making an agreement that we’ll deal with that discomfort together, respectfully, thoughtfully, patiently, and in good faith. It may not be perfect, but it’s *so* much better than the alternative.

Before sitting down to start writing the scripts for this season, I wrote a list of the conditions I wanted to cover. Clearly, personal style is a condition that matters when we’re making decisions, but that doesn’t mean I really know how to define it. It’s not the same as personality, exactly. Or is it? It’s also obviously not about fashion sense, but maybe fashion sense is a *result* of our personal style? Maybe what I mean by style is the intentional expression of personality. Like if personality is someone’s intrinsic character, then style is how they choose to express it. It might be a feature of someone’s personality, for example, to feel confident expressing their feelings and opinions. The style in which they choose to do so might be through humour or sincerity or song or a combination of the above or something completely different. Some people may dress a certain way to express elements of their personality, and others might prefer more subtle signals. In any case, a boardroom is a room full of people, each with their own style. It can be a place where some people feel safe expressing their style, while others don’t. It can be a place where we encourage styles that are inclusive, or fail to discourage styles that are toxic. It can be a place of inspiration, or a place of convention. When you walk into the room, how will you choose to express the features of your personality? How interested are you in how that choice might affect the others in the room? If the answer is “not really interested at all,” then you might want to review our working definition of good governance.

Every Wednesday, OMG will share an audio version of a definition from the Ground-Up Governance platform. 

It’s been a bunch of months since I realized that there’s a really strong overlap between good governance and equity, diversity & inclusion. For a refresher of what I’m talking about, listen back to episode 113. ED&I and good governance may not be identical, but maybe a good way to put it is that you can’t be intentional about cultivating effective conditions for making decisions without being intentional about ED&I. Many people are still quick to point out that diversity of demographic characteristics like race, ethnicity, age, gender, and socioeconomic status among MANY others, won’t guarantee diversity of thought and perspective. My first response to that is “are you *sure* about that?” My more thoughtful response is that even if it’s not a guarantee, it definitely is a shortcut. I mean, a room full of people who look completely different from each other is more likely to have meaningful diversity of thought than a room full of people who look the same. Think of demographic diversity as a diversity of thought hack. Anyway, if good governance is impossible without ED&I, and the diversity part of ED&I is a condition that we have control over, then it’s clear why it belongs in our list this season. This may be one of the more complex conditions because it involves investment in building a community, which takes time. We also have to be conscious of tokenizing and other challenges we might encounter in doing the *inclusion* part of ED&I well. But don’t try to tell me that you have no way to be intentional about demographic diversity in your organization, your executive team, your boardroom, because…well, come on.

In the previous episode we talked about technical skills, and the potential need for expertise in a bunch of technical areas. Expertise is weird – for a good summary of exactly how weird, check out Range by David Epstein. Expertise also has a strange relationship with overconfidence, including that people with *deep* expertise tend to have way too much confidence in their ability to make predictions in their area of expertise. So, we have to be careful about balancing technical skill with diversity – including maybe having non experts or even naivete in the room. Someone who’s naïve also needs to be brave enough to slow the experts down and say “I have no idea what you’re talking about and I’d rather not move ahead until I understand.” That’s pretty hard, especially in an intimidating place like a boardroom. Anyway, it’s already clear why expertise is one of the conditions that matter for good governance, in part because we clearly have control over who’s in the room. We have at least *some* control over who our executives and board members are. We have a lot of control over whether we engage specialized consultants and who they are. We can think about exactly who we will engage at different stages of our decisions and how we’ll do it. Will we ask our experts to make crappy predictions? Maybe we can ask them to ask *us* questions instead like we talked about back in episode 119. It’s not rocket science. Unless it is, in which case you probably want a rocket scientist in the room, and maybe also a Rocket League expert just to balance things out.