Three heresies from an advisory board event
Last week I attended a pre-summit event with the Advisory Board Centre, a professional body for people who sit on advisory Boards that also helps private and family businesses set these Boards up. Three things shook my thinking.
‘The need for the paradox’
Someone said it and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. We talk about ‘productive conflict’ but this goes further.
From Greek para (beside, contrary to) plus doxa (opinion, belief, what is commonly held). Paradox means a statement that unmakes itself. But it still carries some sense of its pre-16th century meaning of contrary to received opinion – a paradox is heretical.
A paradox was something that offended a belief, something everybody held to be absolutely true and shared. Not a position argued from within a rational empirical framing but something too obvious to be considered further. The fish won’t question the water.
When applied to organisations, and those leading them, a paradox might reveal something more than ‘productive conflict’ can. Disagreement with analysis and arguing about the impact of a choice are all important, but a paradox escapes the context of the Board’s framing by rejecting it as a self-contained orthodoxy:
‘We must ensure our organisation’s viability’
Maybe we shouldn’t exist?‘We are funded to fix a societal problem’
Do we need the problem to continue?‘Our NFP Board is voluntary’
Should we pay directors, since they’re skilled and effortful?‘We recruit for Board culture fit’
Did the current culture get us into this state, and will it get us out?‘Directors must be independent’
What might a connected and conflicted Director bring us?
What heresy might you bring into a group conversation?
Might you go full Luther and nail your heresies to the front door?
‘Slowness as a gift’
I had been listening to Adrienne Lenker, and her song ‘Sadness as a gift’ was my background earworm when the group asked what I thought. They’d spoken for ten minutes about pressure, urgency, unceasing demands and the challenge of keeping up. They sounded exhausted, beaten down. What could I offer?
Slowness as a gift came out of my mouth unbidden, and then I tried to work out what I really meant (I’m leaning into letting the rational brain follow an instinct, rather than starting with rationality).
In my consultancy, the workshop tool Boards respond to most positively is a Thinking Round: slow, sequential reflection and speaking, without interruption. I’d thought that people were experiencing being heard without judgement as the gift, but now I wonder if it is partly the slowing of the pace.
It is rare for busy leaders to create slowness for themselves. It requires strength to resist the buzzing phone, often built from years of intentional habit formation. ‘I’m going to spend my day working slowly’ isn’t something we would say to colleagues (slowness may be another workplace heresy). But perhaps we could receive slowness as a gift, if our colleagues and advisers were prepared to offer it.
‘We have an Advisory and a Governance Board’
I encountered a parallel universe, in which a CEO has two Boards. One does ‘Governance’ – compliance with financial and regulatory requirements – and the other is ‘Advisory’ – experts and confidants supporting strategy, stakeholder relationships and decision-making. I was told this model is very common in founder-led and family businesses.
From my perspective of government and NFP organisations, it felt like another heresy; it seemed like a dividing line and a tension that the CEO needs to manage.
But then I thought about how my own Board separates compliance from purpose inside one Board rather than across two. At Abound Communities there are three committees: Finance/Audit and Governance carry the compliance work, and Clinical Governance oversees quality and safety. The latter committee comes closest to the expert role in the other model.
Time provides another separation: Board agendas put ‘Strategic Issues’ first, and yearly strategy days put purpose and outcomes at the centre.
On my Board, we directors hold legal duties that cannot be delegated; an Advisory Board holds no such duty. Nonetheless, it’s an intriguing model and has made me reflect on the different ways we organise the practice of directorship. Is the NFP sector orthodoxy helpful or limiting? What might it be like for an NFP’s Board to have a standing Advisory Board instead of expert networks and occasional consultants?
That’s plenty of heresy for this fortnight.
First published in Strategy, Applied.
