Creating the Future's board meeting will happen right here on Monday, April 14th at 1pm EDT. Scroll to the bottom of this post to watch it live. To share your ideas, questions, and observations, tweet to the hashtag #CTFuture.
Board Packet Materials:
• Agenda
• Agenda video
• Board Report: Video
This month Creating the Future’s board will begin discussing its financial oversight role. As we found with our bylaws discussion, you may never have encountered a discussion like the one we are about to have.
Background
At its February meeting, the board wrapped up (for now) its discussion of bylaws with a surprise twist: Bylaws would be a whole lot more useful if they were written from a functional standpoint, rather than their current legal standpoint.
As the name suggests, bylaws are rules. When a board in 2014 looks for answers in the bylaws, more often than not, they find answers that made sense to the attorney who crafted the bylaws two decades ago – or longer. The 2014 board has no idea why there are X number of board members, or why a quorum is X number, or etc. They simply follow rules that may or may not have made practical sense even when they were first adopted.
What Creating the Future’s board observed in February is that bylaws are reactive documents – doing their level best to predict what might go wrong and thereby prevent it (reacting to potential future problems).
But leadership is not simply about preventing bad things from happening. The primary goal of great leadership – and the bylaws that support such leadership – is about creating what is possible, and only secondarily preventing what might go wrong.
Agile leadership cannot rely on answers that made sense 20 years ago or even last year. As issues arise over time, agile leadership requires systems and processes for making sound decisions, rooted in an organization's vision and values.
Otherwise, we don’t need boards – we just need bylaws that are written once, revised regularly to be legally compliant, and robots to enforce them.
Creating the Future’s board therefore decided the following:
For every functional and legal issue the board is likely to address, the board will document its decision-making process in bylaws (a word we will likely keep, as we are legally required to have something called “bylaws,” but not legally required to have anything in particular in them). Each section will include the following:
- Purpose: Note what that function is intended to accomplish, why that function is important.
- Process for making decisions: Note the questions that will lead future boards to appropriate decisions (What questions / process will it take to accomplish that goal? What questions / process will it take to prevent undue risk and liability?)
- Legal requirements governing that function: Note whatever legal issues are required to be addressed regarding that issue, per Arizona and US law (the state and country where Creating the Future was incorporated).
Which Leads to the Financial Oversight Discussion
At its April meeting, Creating the Future’s board will ask those questions about its financial oversight role – the first function to be addressed in this manner.
The board will NOT start this discussion with the assumption that there is such a thing as financial statements. We will NOT be asking, “What does the P&L make possible? What do we want a balance sheet to tell us?” We will make no assumption that the board will look at any of those documents. They might, or they might just find different reports that make more sense for the work of leading this organization. But if we start by assuming some form of those reports as the answer, we will be reacting and fixing vs. creating what is possible. And as a living laboratory, it is our mandate to explore what does NOT already exist!
The questions we will ask are guaranteed to generate one of the most interesting conversations you’ve ever participated in regarding financial oversight.
- What is important about financial oversight? What does financial oversight make possible, and for whom?
- What questions / process will it take for the board to accomplish that goal? What questions / process will it take to prevent undue risk and liability?
Creating the Future’s April 2014 board meeting will occur right here at 1pm EDT on April 14th. If the video does not appear precisely on the hour, please be patient – we are probably running a few minutes late. To participate in the discussion (and we really want your input!), tweet to the hashtag #CTFuture. We hope to see you!
Listen to the Audio Only:
or Download the MP3
(To download to your hard drive, right-click {or click and hold on a Mac} on the link above and select "Save Target As".. or "Save Link as"… depending on your browser)
Thank you for putting these Board Meetings online. I love learning by seeing things in action, and this is a great way to see how a Board can tackle difficult issues like succession and founders! I love the idea of a Chair role that is a "chief inquiry wrangler". One thing that came up for me was the possbility of having the Chair role shared by two people, where the two work together to discuss the strengths and possibilities for the individual board members, how to realize those strengths, etc. Then the shared role could be moved through almost like squaredancing, with one "experienced" chair pairing with the "new" chair. Then the experienced chair is replaced by the new chair, who is now experienced, and a new co-chair comes in to play.
Wow, this financial oversight conversation is exactly what I am needing to learn about at this time. I love the idea that our resources don’t belong to the organization, they belong to those who are supporting the mission & vision and are being deployed by the organization. We pool resources of funders, donors, supporters, partners, volunteers and manage those resources to move the mission forward, kind of like a group of friends might pool resources for a pizza party. 🙂
It makes me think the key Board questions are:
1. What community resources are we collecting and responsible for deploying?
2. How can we maximize the impact of these resources as we deploy them to advance our mission?
3 What other community partners could be engaged who would have more ideas, reach, etc to deploy the resources we have collected?
Here I am again! So here's an assumption I run into all the time: having more money is necessary and a good thing. But I have been finding that you really have to know what you want that money for, so I have been asking:
– what do I need money for?
– why is the think I need money for important?
– who else would think this need is important?
– how can I work with the other people who think this need is important to find ways to acheive it, either through money or through other resources?
Argh, typos: Why is the THING I need money for important?
And another question: How can we balance making the most of what the resources we have but also be comfortable experimenting with new ways to engage and deploy resources knowing that all experiments yield the impact we hoped for?
My favourite definition of innovation is the ability to fail as fast as you can so you can get to the initiatives that succeed.
Argh, typos part 2: I mean NOT all experiments yiled the impact we hoped for.
True, dat.
Stacey: Oh my, oh my, oh my. Thanks for your thoughtful reflections on what you heard in the April board meeting. Amazing questions, each of which could guide continuing conversation at the May session. I'll be sure to bring them to the attention of board members as we initiate the next stage of conversation.
And your definition of innovation blows me away. Imagine our board – or all boards, for that matter – seeking to find new ways by acknowledging failure as a way of discovering success, all in service to building community. Powerful.
Again, thank you so much! Hope to "see" you in May.
Gayle