Time to Contemplate

I was at a meeting today where board members were being asked to digest a long, complex planning document they’d first seen less than 12 hours ago, if at all.

It had some great ideas.

But it was just too much to absorb “live.”

Now would these board members have pored over the document ahead of time if it’d been sent a week in advance? Maybe, or maybe not.

But by bringing it to the meeting, the executive director all but guaranteed she’d have a “paper board” – a board whose function was to appreciate, not to contemplate.

I don’t think that’s what she intended to accomplish – after all, she went to the trouble of preparing a lengthy exegesis of current trends in the field and their relevance to the agency’s work. If she really wanted a noninvolved board, she could have simply prepared a board packet with financials, press releases and a program update, and called it a day.

So that got me thinking about the power of meetings to force preparation. You know you’re going to face people (especially the board), so you take the time to prepare a thoughtful framing of the issues you want far-sighted deliberation on. Well so far, so good…but the problem was, this executive director should have set a deadline not for the meeting date, but for (a minimum of) a week ahead.

Time to act thoughtfully – not a luxury in these tricky days. A lot depends on our ability to steer our agencies through tea leaves that are murky, at best.