My fellow Rotarian Andrew Oczkewicz put out the call for volunteers for the Saint Martin’s burger & curly fries booth at Lakefair in Olympia and I responded. Last night was opening night and I had the very important job of inside coordinator. What that means is that I took the orders from the lovely ladies serving our customers (Cindy, Stella, and Alicia) and made sure the best curly fry cooks on the planet (Caren and Tony) knew how many baskets of fries to drop into hot oil.
Then I handed the order to Caren’s multi-talented daughter Tatiana to get the burgers made to order and the soft drinks dispensed.

What is cool about the Saint Martin’s truck is that all the fries are cut on site using great quality fresh potatoes. The oil is changed frequently and the curly fry cooks are true artists in making these fries the right consistency of crunchy and soft and with great flavor.

And the Saint Burgers are great too!

If you go to Lakefair, be sure to stop by the Saint Martin’s truck and tell them Sherry sent you!

I came home smelling like a big curly fry and my feet hurt, but the people in the Saint Martin’s truck made it fun and worthwhile. Even on the first night, we were a formidable short-order team. If this governance stuff doesn’t work out, I now have experience coordinating fast food orders. Hear that McDonald’s?

The Little Red Hen was an industrious little hen. From a few seeds, she had a vision of a beautifully golden, richly fragrant loaf of bread.

Along the way, she tried to enlist others in the barnyard for help to plant the seeds, take the wheat to the mill, and bake the bread. All who were asked said, “Not I!”

When the bread was done, she asked who would help her eat it. Of course, everyone wanted a piece.

The course of Policy Governance can look much the same. In the beginning, planting the seeds and developing the framework for better governing practices is a lot of work. But in the end, the board has a practical and robust system for managing its work. In the end, everyone wants on board!

A client said, “We had trouble filling board seats and getting board members excited and engaged before we started governing by policy. Now that we’ve had a few years of success, everyone wants to be a part of it.”

One person had the vision of how governing by policy could improve the effectiveness and efficiency of board’s work and create a transformed, successful organization. Once the seeds were planted and the bread was baked, the sweet smell of success attracted everyone.

Does Policy Governance take a lot of work? Yes.

Will Policy Governance make a difference in your success? Yes.

Will everyone take part in the creation of a transformed organization? No. (Just ask The Little Red Hen).

Is having a board organization that everyone wants to be part of worth it?

Well, you need to answer that question for yourself.

Policy Governance practitioners and users are a small ecosystem in the realm of governance. To move Policy Governance consulting from a collection of individual consultants into the next generation, several individuals have banded together in a cooperation experiment called The Governance Corporation. What is behind our cooperative enterprise is developing and evolving the practice of Policy Governance. The main idea is investing in expanding core capabilities through collaborative learning and reinvesting returns into the ecosystem to provide a place for future generations of practitioners.

By pooling development of leading edge governance practices, we believe clients will receive the benefits. Our collaboration will lead to clients having a competitive edge through effective governance. We believe the rewards to the client are products, services, and practices that no one of us could bring individually; or at an affordable price to the client. Our cooperation, collaboration, or coopetition is not just for our mutual benefit but for the benefit of the clients. It’s a win-win-win situation. I win, my colleagues win, you win.

Go to the Governance Corporation website, if you’re interested in watching our experiment unfold. Check out our blog. I’ve started a rant on the current state of governance. Add your comments, join the dialog, or start a debate! All are welcome.

An acquaintance asked me yesterday what I do. “I work with board and executive leaders on a system of governance that helps them get rid of time-wasters and makes the most of the talent in the organization.” My acquaintance said that governance was a new term to her.

For those who are new to the concept, Tom Friedman offered an excellent quote in his New York Times Op-Ed column of January 5, 2010. The quote is “from Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures, and the author of the book ‘How.’ ‘You have to enlist and inspire people in a set of values. People need to be governed both from the outside, through compliance with rules, and from the inside, inspired by shared values.’”

Sound like good governance to you?

So, what’s stopping you from practicing it? The problem I’ve encountered is that too often, bright and capable peoples’ skills and talents are wasted in board meetings discussing whether or not to purchase new office furniture or how many pieces of collateral were distributed at the last fundraiser. Discussions like these are about looking backward rather than creating a vision for the future. Discussions like these enervate, rather than inspire.

Are you tired of operating in a model of scarcity (not enough time, not enough money, not enough people…) and ready to move toward a model of abundance (stop focusing on the past, getting rid of the time-wasters and envisioning what you can achieve)?

Policy Governance® offers a system for governing boards to ensure that they are complying with outside rules and allows them to spend more time discussing what inspires the organization. Policy Governance gets the board beyond what is to what can be.

Last night, President Obama said that democracy is messy.

Democracy is messy. Governing boards represent democracy in action and the complexity of the process of representing diverse owners. That’s why governing boards need every available tool in their toolbox. Policy Governance® represents the most comprehensive body of thought on board leadership and governing.

Caroline Oliver cites Couto and Guthrie:

“Mediating structures are a prerequisite to democracy. They preserve the liberty of citizens to act on public matters apart from government. They permit their members representation and participation in the sociopolitical arrangements of the neighbourhood, community, nation, or state.”

Oliver goes on to say this: “If owners don’t know what boards are talking about or why, if they don’t understand who does what and why, how can they possibly participate? Boards are key agencies in society, bringing democracy to the highest level of every organisation. It is their job to define and demand organisational success and standards of ethics, the law and prudence on our behalf. This is true board leadership and we need it more than ever.”

On a deeper, personal level, I’m convinced that if boards set a better example for governing then there is hope for democracy worldwide. That’s my mission. My theory is that getting the message to governing boards has the potential to create an accelerated learning track in the United States to better governance and improved democratic process.

Boards empower the owners to govern without actually needing everyone to sit at the board table. To do the job right, Boards need the right tools. Policy Governance can boost organizational success and the quality and level of board decisions. Policy Governance will not be the right choice for every board, but it should be a choice.

Policy Governance (PG) is a registered trademark of Dr. John Carver to preserve the integrity of the governance system, not for financial gain. Policy Governance is free to anyone.

From Rick Lamb of The Horse Show came the following gem. People in groups have similar focus issues! When I read this, I thought that these similar things happen in group meetings. The job of a facilitator is to create the focus exercises that help the group stay on task.

With apologies in advance to Rick Lamb, I’ve inserted “people” words [in brackets] for “horse” words. Enjoy!

The world is full of distractions for your [group]. Getting [them] to focus on the task at hand starts with you.

You can’t change what goes on around you and your [group] and sometimes you will lose [their] attention.

Trainer John Lyons suggests that you have an exercise ready to work on, focus on doing that exercise, and be ready for a little mental battle with your [group].

“[Groups have a tendency to mentally wander. They distract themselves by mentally playing] a game. I bet I can make you think [I'm really very important because I need to be constantly in touch via cell phone or text]. No, no, I’m doing this. But I’m [not interested in this part. I want to move on to the next agenda item]. No, no, I’m doing this. But [lunch is] coming up. No, no, I’m doing this. But there’s a lot of people. No, no, I’m doing this. And so it’s just a game and it’s learning how to keep our focus on that game. Then what’s going to happen, the longer [the facilitator stays] focused, pretty soon that [group] is going to come right over and start working on what I’m working on.”

Avoid checking out the distraction yourself. It usually doesn’t matter what it is, and if you let it draw your attention, you’ve lost the focus game.

Those of you who know me know that I’m a big fan of Thomas Friedman. His book, The World is Flat” changed all of my perceptions about the effects of globalization on marketing.

Tom (p. 357) warns that “niche businesses can get turned into vanilla commodity businesses faster than ever in a flat world.” Companies must constantly assess their competitive strengths and make critical decisions regarding products or services that aren’t differentiated from the competition. Friedman uses the example of the Bank of India. The Bank of India was facing increasing competition and realized that it needed to adopt Web-based banking and become more customer friendly. The Bank of India did an assessment of its core competencies and decided that it needed to outsource data warehousing, document-imaging technology, telebanking, Internet banking, and automated teller machines. Guess who got the outsource contract from the Bank of India? An American-owned computer company. Hewlett Packard.

Today’s marketing strategy is knowing your core competencies and knowing what you don’t do well.

Why do I bring this up? Because nonprofits need to perform, as Friedman calls it, an X-ray of their organizational capacity — before there is a funding crisis. The Virginia Treatment Center for Children (VTCC) was created in 1962 by the Virginia Legislature to provide state-of-the-art service, training and research in the field of child mental health. When the state faced budget cuts and told VTCC they needed to shut down, leadership needed to come up with a new strategy — fast. The lack of stable leadership in the past and fragmented, functional silos within the hospital had caused the staff to feel “under siege.” All were doing their jobs, but did not feel supported by other teams or the state bureaucracy. Asking two critical questions was a brilliant move by administrative leadership:

1. What are the most critical child and adolescent mental health needs and problems in the Commonwealth of Virginia?
2. Within its current resource base, what should the treatment center do to most effectively respond to these needs and problems

Instead of asking “What’s wrong with this institution?”, the leadership asked for people to identify what was right; what critical needs were being met, and how the VTCC could effectively build on those services. The right questions were asked to affirm what was working well. VTCC also sought to stop doing things that it didn’t do well.

Overall, the VTCC sought to establish connections with other human services agencies to provide the services that VTCC did not do well. In essence, the VTCC created a network of service support for the community to enable the VTCC to focus on what the VTCC staff did best. Staff were educated on the opportunities provided by an improved network of services; and a framework and processes to enhance staff communication was developed. As Cohen and Cohen note, “In an era of scarce resources, human services organizations are increasingly forced to establish priorities. The treatment center attempted to establish a balance between responding to a small group of children whose needs required intensive intervention and focusing on enhancing the knowledge and capacity of the broader community through research, training, and consultation.”[1]

[1] Cohen, R. & Cohen, J. (2000). Chiseled in Sand: Perspectives on Change in Human Services Organizations.

Terrance Barkan asks:
“Is ‘Social Media’ going to significantly change your organization?”
Take the short 12-question survey!
What do you think?

The results are provided in a free report to everyone that participates and the aggregated statistics will be shared publicly. Even if you are just thinking about social media use, the short 12 questions in the survey will stimulate some important thoughts on this hot topic.

Last week, President Obama spoke of a “failure of leadership” at GM. What happens to GM affects their employees, vendors, retirees, contractors, dealerships. However, failures of leadership happen everyday. A failure of leadership in my community last week caused poor and marginalized people locally to lose services. A private agency closed its doors to these people because of a difference of opinion between the board and staff.

Typically, agencies that serve individuals who are poor and marginalized because these folks are incapable of maintaining a permanent situation due to psychological difficulties; or it may be because they can’t qualify for other public or private agency services. Now, a service those folks came to depend on is closed. Disruption of services for marginalized citizens can be worse than not doing anything at all. All that leadership could say was that it happened before and will likely happen again. A sorry state of affairs, I would say.

The shameful part of this entire situation is that it could have been avoided. Apparently, a disagreement between the staff and board caused the disruption in funding and services. The board accused the staff of not providing information needed. The staff wanted to be on the board. Volunteer or not, as a governance professional, I would recommend that the board and staff become crystal clear about their roles and responsibilities. Marginalized people lost vital services that allowed them some degree of self-sufficiency because of governance policy, not public policy issues. An opportunity to re-start this organization exists in the form of an interim board.

Re-starting this service, the board clearly needs to have a commitment to the specific mission to serve the poor and marginalized. The board’s responsibility is to ensure organizational performance. When the former board didn’t deal with problems and differences regarding decision-making, the clients suffered. The new board needs to get its values straight. Decisions of all sorts, as clearly argued by Drucker (The Effective Executive, 1967, pp. 113-141), rest on principles and generic understandings. Without setting down in writing these principles of how decisions will be made, this board will continue to have difficulties. The former board got so caught up in an event-driven incident that they forgot to focus directly on perspectives and values. Therefore, organizational behavior was dysfunctional and the fundamental services provided by the organization were lost to those who need them.

Defining governance is not easy. If you google “definition on governance,” you will find over 500,000 entries. Governance is a generic term with applications in information technology, Website management, research, corporations. I’ve found that how the term governance is applied in various disciplines is somewhat confusing. That’s why a simple definition for nonprofit board governance may not be enough to gain clarity and understanding.

For nonprofits, relating the process and practice of governing to a familiar or commonly shared experience helps. In my post “On board service“, I use ships. In April, I wrote an article for the Charity Channel Nonprofit Boards and Governance Review. In this one, I use the train analogy. It seems I’m attracted to transportation analogies when describing governance!

From the review in Charity Channel:

Executive Directors who dump a pile of financials in front of board members, expecting them to have the background and expertise necessary to make heads of tails of them, are not meeting their obligations to the board, according to the latest NBGR article by Sherry Jennings. Taking the point of view of a new board member, she writes, “Most of the financial information was incomprehensible to Martin. What was nagging at Martin was that he didn’t feel like he had a complete ‘picture’ of what was going on. The information he had plodded through last night seemed like a box of spare parts.”‘
In If I’m Not Running the Train, How Do I Know We’re On Track? the author uses a down-to-earth story-telling method to drive the point home and offer up the solution.

Caroline Oliver (brilliant author and consultant on governance) likens practicing good governance to riding a bicycle. You need to take the appropriate steps and practice to do it right. She said that the traditional approach to governance is okay but it’s a bit like pushing the bicycle along rather than riding it. Riding a bicycle is difficult at first. One needs to learn a new way of balancing and may fall a few times. But once one is confident and dancing on the pedals, it feels effortless and like flying (another transportation analogy!)

From Caroline’s reflections:
“Most of us want practical solutions and would prefer to skip the theory bit. However, the boards that tend to excel in the way that they practice governance are the boards that have an idea of what they are doing and why – in other words – the ones that have a good theory!”

I would add a good process and good balance.

See Caroline’s article on Creating a Board Dashboard, also at the Charity Channel and her new book Getting Started with Policy Governance