“THE way a board agenda is structured will dynamically affect the quality of board focus and its ability to handle the big decisions that are required to create the future. This is further supported by the quality of board reports that provide succinct, focused information that facilitates the Board to understand the choices they have.”
This was the context of “Setting the Strategic Board Agenda” written by Steven Bowman and Brendan Walsh of Malvern, Australia-headquartered Conscious Governance, as well as the webinar I recently attended, “How to Develop your Strategic Board Agenda” organized by BoardPro Ltd., a board management software company in Australia.
The webinar panellists who shared 13 top practices on strategic board agenda setting were: BoardPro CEO and Co-Founder Brett Herkt; Conscious Governance Managing Director Steven Bowman; and, Grounded Governance Managing Director Giselle McLachlan. They shared the following practices associations can immediately adopt:
1. Place your purpose/vision prominently on top of the meeting agenda page. This will remind everyone present why your organization exists and why you are there (not just to hold meetings). It can also steer where the conversation should go and guide board behavior.
2. Create a colorful cover sheet or include a service user story. Try using a cover sheet with a photograph of your important work or key projects plus a short description. This can help to remind board members of the reasons for the organization’s existence. Alternatively, spend 10 minutes exploring a service user story or a “mission moment.”
3. Place strategic matters ahead of operational matters. Prioritize the first part of the meeting for strategic matters. This helps to overcome the problem where a meeting delves into operational matters for extended discussions and then finds there is not enough time left to deal with the strategically important stuff.
4. Use a consent agenda. The consent agenda technique is a powerful tool that reduces the amount of time spent on reports that are “for noting only.” This is sometimes called a “block agenda,” i.e., where a group of items are placed together and approved by the board as a block. As well as separating items for noting, you should also have “items for discussion” and “items for decision” by the board.
5. Color code the agenda for the action required by the board. On the agenda, you can color-code the item, depending on the action required from the board. For instance, you can use green for “Items for Noting,” use amber for “Items for Discussion,” and use red for “Items for Decision.”
6. Create a standard heading on all reports. The heading could read as “Strategic Implications for Board Discussion” (or similar). The mere presence of this heading may prompt a board member to raise a strategic issue or question related to the topic.
7. Measure the right things. Often, board reports are full of data that are unhelpful information for board members (or even management). While many associations measure new member sign-ups, they often fail to disclose how many members were lost, and what the full-year impact of those losses are worth to the organization. Finally, consider benchmarks and targets. Are you measuring the real outcomes of your work, or just activity or outputs?
Octavio Peralta is currently the executive director of the Global Compact Network Philippines and founder and volunteer CEO of the Philippine Council of Associations and Association Executives, the “association of associations.” E-mail: bobby@pcaae.org.