One Minute Governance

New from Sound-Up Governance: Are design and good governance the same thing?

Bonus Crossover Episode from Sound-Up Governance. For more info, visit http://www.groundupgovernance.com

 

TRANSCRIPT

Matt Intro

Hi everyone! This is Matt Fullbrook. It’s been a LOOOONG time since I posted anything here on the OMG channel, and…actually I don’t have any real updates for you. Sorry! I just wanted to let you know that there’s some new content on the Sound-Up Governance podcast. I’ve just launched a short series of episodes based around a cool webinar I did last year with some experts in business design where we explored the connection between design thinking and good governance. Here’s the first instalment. If you like what you hear, be sure to follow along at groundupgovernance.com 

 

Matt Voiceover

Welcome back to Sound-Up Governance. My name is Matt Fullbrook, and today we have the first in a short series of episodes that come from a webinar that I co hosted a few months back with my old friend Michael Hartmann, who's the Principal of the Directors College at McMaster University. He invited a couple of his friends to join us. Karel Vredenburg, who was the global VP of UX Research at IBM, and Tara Safaie, who's the executive Director of Health and Organizational Innovation at the design firm, IDEO. I've become increasingly convinced over the past few years that good governance is a design challenge. If you're familiar with my framing of good governance as intentionally cultivating effective conditions for making decisions and also familiar with design thinking, then you already know what I'm talking about. I honestly had no idea at first that I was talking like a design guy, but now I'm all the way bought in. Tara, Karel and Michael further reinforced this perspective in our discussion. But we'll get to that a bit later. Let's start first with some definitions. The first voice you'll hear is Michael, followed by Karel.

Michael Hartmann

I remember going out trying to introduce companies to this thing called design, and a lot of eyes would be like, blank, saying, what is this? 25 years later, 24 years later, it's ubiquitous. Design is everywhere. But as my colleagues will say, it's everywhere. Not done well. More often than not, we brought it into Directors College and for a couple of reasons. And we're going to explore those reasons. One, if you think about the core roles, responsibilities of board, CEO, selection, talent. Well, of course, strategy is a critical one. You know, setting the lanes for management, sometimes moving the lanes with management as well. But design is a really interesting way to think about strategy development and execution. I wanted Karel to maybe introduce some of the design. What do we mean by design? And for my colleagues around the table here, how can boards leverage design principles for better strategy? So that's a starting point, Karel, and maybe a question over to you.

Karel Vredenberg

Yeah, let's let me start. And some of the people that are listening, I'm sure have heard this story. If you were in my. In my session. But I love to share that I talked about design thinking at a university was an interdisciplinary lecture. The Dean of the business school said as a question later, said, we're all learning design thinking now. This is really, really good. Do we still need designers? I said, yeah, there's a difference between design and design thinking. And so the notion of design, that intentional process to research, ideate, and then actually create and then iterate on things that you're creating, whether it's websites, apps, products or services. That's sort of design and design thinking is really the, as it states the thinking, the, the way to actually take a perspective on a particular problem, to solve a problem in a, in a more intentional empathic, looking at all stakeholders and alike, more holistic sort of approach. And so that's how I see them being different. And the way that I've used design thinking in companies, both for typically the C suite I've worked with and, and then with boards, is really to open the aperture in ways that they've never thought before. There were a couple of instances where after I spent like a day and a half with, with them, they came up with a set of directions strategically where they realized that there were things that they came up with through this way of thinking that they realized there were certain things that were on their five year plan that were absolutely things they shouldn't be doing. And there were other things that were really simple to do but they'd never thought of them because they'd never used this design lens that now became their number one priority. So I think it's an incredibly powerful tool to be able to set strategy for an organization.

Matt Voiceover

Before getting to Tara's perspective, you'll hear her and eventually Karel refer to Agile. Now I'm no expert in Agile, so please forgive me if any of you listeners are experts and I'm messing something up. In short, it's a set of frameworks and practices originally designed for project management in software development that are rooted in certain priorities and principles. For example, it's more important to prototype, iterate and respond to change than it is to adhere dogmatically to a preset plan. Anyway, here's Tara's perspective on what human-centered design means for organizations.

Tara Safaie

Many of these approaches are a combination of pedagogy and methods and you know, certain steps that you're supposed to take. But they also introduce mindsets or ways of looking at and thinking about problems or context in a way that is different from how many organizations traditionally look at problems. So I think what's useful about design as a methodology, and you alluded to it, Karel, is that it often forces many organizations to think about their problems in a more human-centered way because you have to find a case for a desirable solution before you go on to actually making that solution a reality using more agile methods. Agile and design both have as part of their methodology iterative processes. So where you start in lower fidelity and progressively build your fidelity and an investment and things like that as you learn and as you fail and things like that. And so I think it's worth noting that while the methods themselves often yield great results and they are worth in many cases implementing in the right corners of an organization to yield the outcomes and the products that they can yield. And it's also worth noting where those mindsets that they're bringing to the table are most impactful so the two can be treated in conjunction with one another. And then to make them a more sustainable part of an organization's being, to make them really course through the bloodstream of an organization that requires much more kind of long tail change and a different type of approach integrating it into organizations where they're, where it's not present at the moment.

Karel Vredenberg

Hey, Tara, I want to just add one other thought to that and that is that of course, yeah, I always imagine it as if you think that you have this big canvas of what the solution was going to end up being. If you just do Agile, you'll start so say on the top right of that campus that solutions space. Right. And yes, you'll be able to iterate, but you're going to be roughly still in that top right quadrant of the canvas. Design thinking right at the front of it may well tell you that you really need to be in the bottom left to really serve the market. And that's whether products or services or work of a board where you want to think more deeply about what's the bigger picture view of where this company should go.

Matt Voiceover

So you'll already see an important intersection here with my framing of corporate governance as people making decisions in corporations, I the first and most important step in effective decision making is a clear definition of the problem we're trying to solve. As Tara and Karel are defining it, that's where design starts too. Okay, so let's start moving into some useful insights for boards. I mean the design world has in my opinion generally done a pretty poor job at helping boards to do their jobs well. With this in mind, Michael prompted our guests with a reminder that boards tend to be, well, risk avoidant. So how do we embrace design when that's our starting point?

Michael Hartmann

Board directors, when we query about innovation, one of the common feedbacks we get is we wish we could be more open to risk as opposed to de risking embracing innovation design. I also see that it's a really interesting way to kind of, you know, stress test and build a capacity for risk taking. And I don't know Tara, if you've got some thoughts on that.

Tara Safaie

Yeah, absolutely. A couple of anecdotes. One is that I think organizations that have really adopted design in a powerful way in their organization, have adopted the mindset that ideas are disposable.

Matt Voiceover

I just want to interject here. Imagine a world where we approached governance ideas as disposable instead of embracing them as orthodoxy. OMG, it's like a dream come true. Sorry Tara, you were saying...

Tara Safaie

They have right sized the investment that they put into an idea to the maturity of that idea. So what I see many organizations do, particularly my, my clients in the healthcare space, is that they are very quick to jump on the first couple of ideas that they come up with because they are so deeply expert in the area that they're working in. Like many of them have spent decades learning to be the professional that they are. That expertise gets translated into these ideas that when, when thrown into the thunderdome of the real world or of a patient's world, let's say, just don't survive the key shift that occurs with organizations that are able to adopt design mindsets, you know, kind of deeply in their organization and adopt the level of risk that it requires. Have learned how to test their ideas in low fidelity ways. And so where they are able to identify the most core assumptions that they're holding, maybe because their expertise has kind of put blinders on them, or they only work with a particular type of customer and they want to expand to a new type, they don't know that customer as well, whatever it might be, that they're a western organization designing for a non western customer base or a global south customer base, whatever it might be. And so they're able to understand what the most deeply held assumptions in their solutions are and then design tests to test those assumptions in low fidelity ways. You can't build certainty in any of the paths that you're taking, but you can build confidence. So your goal in any type of design exercise, and again, organizations that have internalized this, know this deeply, your goal is not to be certain. Your goal is to gain confidence. And so organizations that are testing their ideas in low fidelity ways are testing whether their assumptions hold. And as they build confidence, then build the confidence to slowly invest more and more as the stakes get, you know, the stakes get higher. They've invested more in the, in the back as well. And that allows them some of the agility, as we were talking about before, to then respond to a change in market context or a change in the competitive landscape or something else that might shift where those assumptions were tested initially. The risk profile that most organizations have does not necessarily preclude them from having low fidelity and therefore small investment, high risk things on the side. What they are not seasoned in doing is then transversing the space between that low fidelity and very low investment idea to the full fledged one. That's really going to require a lot of money.

Karel Vredenberg

Yeah, I would just add, I want to amplify something you said too, like the low fidelity idea. That's really a prototype, right. And what is a prototype precisely? It's, it's really a low risk way of exploring something. So people talk about, oh, you really should be increasing your, your, your failure rate. You learn from failure. And everybody, you know Silicon Valley loves to say that, right? Yeah, they love to say it because 90% of them fail. But in fact, if they did the kind of things that Tara and I are talking about here, doing just a small prototype, it might be a new way of working as a, as a board, let's say. And you want to just try that out? Well, you can just try it out in your meetings. That's a prototype. And then after, let's say you do, you know, sort of an off site or whatever, let's, let's see what that was like, get some feedback on it and the like as well. So it's this whole mindset of, of doing small prototypes that can fail. But you're not failing big, you're testing first, seeing if something's going to work. And then if it's going to work, then you can scale it up and do it across a whole organizational like as well. It's a fantastic, phenomenal way to de risk by taking risks.

Matt Voiceover

That's a wrap on the first episode in this series. Let me just say that this prototyping approach really works in boardrooms. I like to think of it as crafting a 1% intervention rather than a revolution. An intervention designed intentionally and specifically to increase the probability that we'll get a, a better result in some small part of our work together. Maybe it's a change to reporting or a shift in our agendas, or a new conversation prompt after a presentation or a different lunch caterer. Whatever it is, the consequence of failure is essentially zero and the potential for learning is high. Stay tuned for the next episode in the series coming up soon. And drop me a note to let me know what you thought of this episode. If you liked it, please consider spreading the word. Oh, and as usual, I've provided some notes on today's music on the episode post at groundupgovernance.com Catch you next time.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Sound-Up Governance is back on January 20th

Head to http://www.groundupgovernance.com for more

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everyone, this is Matt Fullbrook and I'm back on the Ground-Up Governance platform after a long absence and I've got a new idea. If you're listening to this on a mainstream podcast platform and don't know what I'm talking about, head over to groundupgovernance.com and just start putting poking around. It's the only place you'll be able to check out this new idea, at least for the time being. So, long story short, I created Ground-Up Governance with the amazing Nate Schmold. He's the illustrator who effectively made this whole thing worth following. After a couple of years, Ground-Up Governance became too hard for both Nate and me. 

 

Don't get me wrong, this is for sure at or near the top of the pile of most fun and gratifying things I've ever worked on. But it's so much very difficult work and it got to the point where each new post felt like it was less important than the previous one, but no less difficult or time consuming. Then we both got distracted by other professional and personal things and, well, lots of time passed. So here we are. Sorry about all that. 

 

Just so you know, Nate and I are starting to work on what I hope will turn into another large scale and super fun project. Time will tell on that one. Anyone who follows Ground-Up Governance will be the first to know. In the meantime, I have a cool thing that I want to try out. I'm going to put out new episodes of the Sound-Up Governance podcast, but make them a little bit more like the format of my One MinuteGovernance show. 

 

What I want to do is have conversations with interesting people in the corporate governance space. But instead of turning the recordings into long and heavily edited podcast episodes, I'm going to, you know, grind them up into smaller bits. Get it? I expect each episode to be somewhere in the 3-7-ish minute range. I'm also going to use them as an opportunity to craft some music. Some of it might be kind of janky because I'm not going to have a ton of time to put into it, but the goal is to have different music for each episode, even if some of it is kind of embarrassing or unfinished. 

 

This whole thing is going to start off with someone Ground-Up Governance followers will already know: my awesome friend Andrew Escobar, who's an experienced corporate director, a big governance thinker, an open banking nerd, and one of those obnoxiously thoughtful, generous and fun dudes. He and I had a conversation recently that I think will make up the first 13 or 14 episodes of this project. I'll post the first two on January 20th so be sure to subscribe before then to stay up to date. If you like what you hear then please be bold and let me know. I'm only interested in making content that you find useful, fun or otherwise worth checking out and I only know if you think it's worth checking out if you let me know. You can like or comment on the posts or send me a note privately or whatever else you want. And if you have ideas for people who might make good guests or if you might make a good guest that would be helpful too. I'll remind you about all this when the time comes. Just be prepared to send a thumbs up or down my way so I know how you feel for now. Happy New Year and thanks for listening. It's really exciting to be back at Ground Up Governance. See you in a couple weeks. 

252. Season 5 wrap-up

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Here we are at the end of another season of OMG. Invariably, during the process of writing the last episode of a season of the show, I find myself wondering if I’ll do another one. Not because I don’t want to or because I think it’s not worth it. It’s just never clear if I’ll have any more ideas, let alone FIFTY more ideas. So, who knows? Anyway, I don’t know about you but I think this season has been the one with the greatest potential to transform and improve your board. It’s been about taking the implicit and making it explicit. It’s been about letting go of assumptions and making space for something new. It’s been about taking time to validate the things we think we do really well and welcoming the potential to do things even better, even just a little. My hope in making this show is that every once in a while you might find something in here that sticks with you long enough to actually change the way you work with your board and executives – even if it’s just a tiny change that lasts only one meeting…or even just one minute. Writing this season has caused me to re-think some of my own behaviours when working with organizations. I mean, without OMG I may never have started questioning my own concept – or lack of concept – of what good governance even is. So this is a long way of saying thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend and consider leaving a rating or review on your podcast app. It REALLY helps. And when the time is right, maybe I’ll be back for a sixth season. See you then!

251. What is the point of the question I'm about to ask?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #49: What is the point of the question I’m about to ask? By proposing this question, I guess I’m basically recommending a bit of cognitive behavioural therapy for directors. I won’t dive into CBT other than to say it can help people to develop habits to manage undesired thoughts or behaviours. And if you listen back to the intro of this season, you’ll recall that the inspiration for the season theme is that I think boards and directors have been conditioned, or at least encouraged, to be question-asking machines without giving much thought to the real-world impact and results of those questions. Questions are great! I’m not suggesting you stop asking questions. But try to build the habit where, before asking the question, ask yourself what the point of the question is. If you’re not sure, it might be a good idea to think about it before opening your mouth. If you ARE sure, then go ahead and ask the question. After asking the question, ask yourself if the question achieved its purpose. If not, what else might you try instead of or in addition to the question that might increase the probability that you get the result you hoped for. Could you frame the question differently? Could you make a statement instead? Could you take a break and reset? Could you share a video or song or podcast to help your peers engage differently next time? Could you perform an interpretive dance? I don’t really care what you try as long as it’s got a point, and if you don’t get the result you wanted try not to blame anyone else, but instead consider trying a totally different approach.

250. What, specifically, are we going to do better next time?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #48: What, specifically, are we going to do better next time? I could’ve made this the shortest episode ever by just stating the question and leaving it at that. I suspect it’s obvious what the point of this question is and why it matters. It forces us to abandon the assumption that we’re perfect, and prompts us to make – and hopefully follow through on – commitments. The only reason I have more to say is that I don’t want to pretend that this question is easy to answer. It’s not. The universe of boardrooms is not overflowing with examples of cool new things to try or even little tweaks to conventional processes and approaches. But that doesn’t mean we have to rely on our imaginations. I mean, the whole POINT of OMG is to give you ideas so that you don’t have to come up with your own. And this is episode 250, so there’s lots of material! So, if it’s been a while, take a sec and scroll through the archives of the show and see if a title catches your eye. It might inspire a cool answer to today’s question. Or read The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker or listen to Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths (the song or, even better, the album). Or if you’re getting stuck on details, listen to Perfect Sound Whatever by Jeff Rosenstock. I dunno. Just try something! Also, thanks so much for listening. 250 episodes feels kinda unreal.

249. Are we compromising instead of being intentional?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #46: Are we compromising instead of being intentional? Don’t get me wrong: compromise is a useful hack. Both in the “let’s make everyone equally unhappy” sense and the “let’s shoot down the middle instead of taking an extreme position” sense. And I think compromise is often really appropriate in boardrooms. That said, compromise often turns into a habit, especially in situations where we’re really time-constrained…like a board meeting. And doing things habitually is essentially the opposite of being intentional. Are your meeting pre-reads designed to make sure everybody can live with them, or are there certain parts that are designed to specifically engage certain people whose perspectives you’d really like to consider? Are your meetings structured to follow a predictable and accepted formula, or are you creating moments where spontaneity or creativity might thrive, at least fleetingly? I spent all of season 4 detailing conditions that matter, and about which you might be intentional. And remember, I’m not talking about revolution or even disruption. Just intention and habit breaking.

248. Is the way we do things valuable for our owners/members?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #46: Is the way we do things valuable for our owners/members? We’ve said before on the show – including a few times this season – that questions about owners or shareholders or members or whatever term is applicable for your corporation...have different implications and flavours in different jurisdictions. Let’s also note that we’re asking if the way we do things is “valuable” to our owners or members, not whether we’re “CREATING value” for them because that implies a positive financial result, which can never be fully guaranteed no matter what we do. Doing things that are “valuable” to our owners or members might include exploring new ideas or opportunities. It might involve carefully navigating circumstances that might lead to disaster. It might involve mundane things like making sure we are being compliant and transparent and all that other good stuff. And if you’ve spent much time in boardrooms, you’ve probably spent a bunch of time doing stuff that your owners or members might find…let’s say confusing. Not that the time is wasted exactly, but maybe you’ve gotten fixated on a relatively inconsequential detail or circled around an issue a bunch of times without managing to make a decision. Not bad, but not great. But sometimes it can be helpful to imagine your most significant owners in the room and ask yourself: “how impressed would they be by the way we do things?”

247. Is the way we do things working for management?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #45: Is the way we do things working for management? Today’s question kinda revisits what we talked about back in episodes 214, 215 and 216, except at this point we’ve answered a lot more questions that will help us do a better job here. Even though for the most part I work FOR boards, it’s most often management that reaches out to me first. In part it’s because there’s no really useful playbook for CEOs and other senior executives to get the most out of their boards. In part it’s because executives ultimately have to live with the work product of board and committee meetings. And in part it’s because the very construct of boards and board meetings – as awesome as they can be – is a weird distraction from the way executives really add value from day to day. And it can be hard for boards to fully sympathize with the experience of their senior managers – even when the directors themselves have lots of their own experience as executives. Today’s question – asked every once in a while through a lens of curiosity – can orient the board’s attention toward the consumer of their work product and potentially reveal interesting questions, insights and even opportunities to make things a bit better. Ultimately, the CEO is our employee and as such we’re responsible for empowering them to do an awesome job.

246. Is the way we do things working for my fellow board members?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #44: Is the way we do things working for my fellow board members? I did a session a few months ago with a group of board chairs of cool complex organizations. I made a case to them – similar to the one from the previous episode – that each person in the room has different needs and preferences, and that an important part of a board chair’s work is to understand those needs and preferences the best they can and be intentional about giving directors opportunities to thrive. One of the participants had a very sensible question: “aren’t directors supposed to do what they need to show up ready and willing to do the job well?” My response was that it HAS to be a both-and situation. As in, it’s true both that the directors need to be as ready as possible to do an awesome job AND that an important part of a chair’s job is to do what they can to empower board members to thrive. But why should it stop with the chair? Let’s say you notice that one of your fellow directors is always too cold or too hot. Or that someone is struggling to understand a particular technical topic. Or that someone rarely volunteers to participate even when they likely have awesome insights to share. Or whatever. What could possibly be the downside to taking steps to improve the situation for your peers and increase the probability that they might be the best directors they can be?

245. Is the way we do things working for me?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #43: Is the way we do things working for me? I’ve said before on OMG and elsewhere that your work as a director isn’t about you. You’re serving others. Nonetheless, you’re still a human being with your own preferences, moods, skills, experience and needs. Sometimes mundane things will dramatically affect the way you show up for something – even if it’s something super important like your board work. Ever hear about that research that showed how judges assign different sentences to criminals before lunch than they do after lunch – even if they committed the exact same crime? Lunch matters. It’s a fact. But other less mundane things also matter, like disability or illness or big life events or neurodivergence and so on. There’s no such thing as a group of people who will all thrive under the exact same conditions. And there’s no such thing as an individual person whose needs and preferences will be the same from year to year, or moment to moment. So, does the way your board does things work for you? What could be better? Listen back to OMG season 4 for a bunch of conditions that you might consider. Is the room too cold? Is the information too complex or not complex enough? Do you need lunch? It all matters because it affects the way you engage in the work of making decisions.

 

244. What are we excited about?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #42: What are we excited about? I know that boardrooms aren’t typically environments that provoke much excitement. And I’m not trying to pretend that getting excited is really the point of a board’s work. But just because it’s not the point doesn’t mean that it’s not worth aiming for. Yes, it’s true that the emotions we feel when we’re in an exciting moment can make it hard to approach decision-making rationally. In fact, there’s cool science that shows excitement and fear, when mushed together, can incite risk-taking behaviour. But also the relationship between the emotional and the rational is complex, in that humans simply don’t really make fully rational decisions. We have preferences, biases, and, yes, emotions that cause us to choose different things in different circumstances. But that’s not exactly what today’s question it about – what if there were a question, opportunity, experience or process or whatever that your board were collectively pretty excited to engage with or try out? Chances are you’d all go out of your way to be thoroughly prepared, well-informed, and ready to dive in and engage when the time came. Even though we can’t expect every moment of every board meeting to be thrilling, it’s worth aiming for every once in a while, even for a few minutes.

243. What are we afraid of?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #41: What are we afraid of? I wonder if you’ve noticed something that I’ve started to notice lately. There’s a bit of a trend among people who think and speak and write about corporate governance where some of them seem to be trying to pathologize the way that people behave in boardrooms. For example, classifying boardrooms as places where people are scared to speak up and where systemic power structures make it impossible for directors to call out bad behaviour or question status quo. Now, that might all be true. I’m no expert on fear. But in my experience it seems much more likely that everyone in the room is just doing their best, but the problem is that they’re doing it only within the narrow scope of what counts as normal when it comes to boardroom processes and behaviours. And that, to me, is the fear: boards are often afraid to try new things. This, of course, gets reinforced by regulators and institutional investors who are often trying to impose more and more boxes for boards to tick. It’s all mostly fine, I guess. Except we have no real evidence to suggest that those boxes are any good, let alone “best”. Here’s what I’m getting at: what’s something your board would really like to change or try, but is afraid to give it a shot because it might not conform with “best” practice or the expectations of the regulators or institutions? What might it take for us to give it a shot anyway?

242. Is the way we do things likely to make the world a better place?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #40: Is the way we do things likely to make the world a better place? It’s a coincidence – an actual for real coincidence – that the chunk of my calendar that I had blocked off to write the last batch of scripts for this season of OMG landed on November 6^th, 2024. I’m a Canadian living in Canada, but the weight of last night’s US Presidential election is real and inescapable. And this episode is the first on my list of scripts to write today, which is coincidentally and deeply appropriate. There’s a weird – is it a paradox? – inherent in the job of a corporate director. In any kind of incorporated entity. That paradox is that you are required to bring to the table your own experiences, perspectives and opinions, but that you’re somehow required to do so dispassionately and independently. In fact, the very definition of your job is to serve others, although exactly which others depends in part on the jurisdiction where you serve. Here, in Canada, you’re required to take into consideration the interests of every group and individual that stands to be affected by the actions of the corporation. That, of course, is impossible in a literal sense, but it’s still a useful reminder to all directors in this country that it ain’t about you. If you want to be confident that the way your corporation does things will make the world a better place, you can’t rely on your gut, or on any other single set of opinions or perspectives or interests. Some of the stakeholders to whom you owe your duty will have values that clash directly with your own. To do your job well, you may be forced to confront truths that make you extremely uncomfortable. You will certainly need to admit it’s possible you’ve been wrong all along. But that’s the job. It’s not about you. It’s not even about the people who got you into this precious and high-status position. It’s about ALL of the people you serve.

241. How much should we obsess over our customers' needs and desires?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #39: How much should we obsess over our customers’ needs and desires? I’ve only relatively recently become familiar with the world of business design. Ya, given my positioning for more than 20 years inside an academic institution with a powerful business design pedigree, I should probably be a bit embarrassed. But my shamelessness is so profound that honestly, I’m totally fine. Anyway, one of the core elements of business design or design thinking is an obsession with the customer. You can imagine, for instance, a company having what seems like a super cool idea and investing squillions of dollars and hours into it until it finally hits the market…only to realize that nobody cares. But this kind of obsession has implications not just in product design but also in things as big as corporate purpose or as operational as hiring practices or advertising or office design or whatever. And it’s relatively common now for boards of directors to get training on design thinking, including being indoctrinated with the importance of obsessing over customers. I think this can be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, for instance, when the board is engaged in dreaming about possible organizational futures. A curse, on the other hand, when we’re all the way in the weeds on some operational minutiae that are already foregone conclusions. But that’s why today’s question is more about where we should set the dial. Not forever. In fact, it might just be for the next few minutes. But let’s ask so that the topic is at least on the table and we don’t take it for granted.

240. How well do we really know and trust each other?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer.

OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Question #38: How well do we really know and trust each other? You know what governance myth I find super nonsense? That it’s somehow bad for directors to know and like each other. I remember way back in my early days as a researcher on governance projects at the University of Toronto we used to scan through public filings in granular detail looking for the tiniest shred of evidence that directors might have connections to each other outside the boardroom. Like, if it turned out that two directors were members of the same country club or something we would kinda feel like we’d found some sinister smoking gun. There’s no *way* they could possibly demonstrate independent thought in the boardroom if they’ve both eaten the cobb salad at the same clubhouse or shot a 103 on the same golf course. And this type of cynicism still lingers everywhere in the governance narrative. You see elements of it baked into regulations and proxy advisor guidelines. You see it in the way that certain media frame their coverage of boards. You see it in the gripes of activist investors. But, like, let’s think about this for a second. Boards need to make huge decisions under intense time and information constraints. We want them to consider diverse perspectives as quickly and thoroughly as possible. There’s only one condition I know of that can cause a group of smart people to do that effectively: trust. It’s hard to trust people you don’t know. So, in my opinion, directors really *should* know each other and like each other and maybe even do stuff together. Yeah, maybe there are fine lines that we should be careful about, but I think the downside of boards NOT trusting each other is the greater risk.