Nonprofit Governance Tips for a Visionary Board

“What if true governance called for the board to make the choices that create the future for the communities they serve?” TerrieTemkin 
prefers this approach by Steve Bowman.

“To lead profound change is to shift the inner place from which a system operates.
This can be done only collaboratively.” - Otto Scharmer

by Margaret Thom, Membership Manager, Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee

Building an active, strategically oriented board of directors is the most common challenge facing nonprofits according to a recent national survey. The board of directors carries responsibility for not only an organization’s fiscal and legal well-being, but also its mission and identity -- past, present and future. While this service is essential, nonprofit board development often comes after more urgent priorities.

What is governance? What is good governance?
Terrie Temkin, editor of the book You and Your Nonprofit Board, tackles the topic in this excellent, readable collection of articles written by nonprofit governance experts with various perspectives. 

Visionary board leadership
Frank Martinelli, of The Center for Public Skills Training and contributor to You and Your Nonprofit Board, writes and presents on encouraging visionary board leadership. He cites three modes of board governance from Governance as Leadership:

1. Fiduciary Mode Principal role: Sentinel
   
2. Strategic Mode Principal role: Strategist
   
3. Generative Mode Principal role: Visionary
   

Given constant change, for the long-term health of the organization, Martinelli and others argue for a nonprofit board to be visionary, as well as fiduciary and strategic.  

• Be sure to engage board members in strategic and generative thinking focused on the future, as well as reviewing reports of what’s happened.
  
• Bundle routine items in a consent agenda to free up time for discussion.
  
• Schedule time for strategic deliberation into every meeting.
  
• Make board development continuous, cycling through the three stages of assessment, action planning and plan implementation.
  

Sensing not seeing
The generative mode of governance requires sensing not seeing: What are our new possibilities? What’s coming? What are the important new questions? For guidance in this area, see the book Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society by the Society for Organizational Learning.

Otto Scharmer, one of the authors, guides one along a path of presencing to sense the future in Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. He writes, “To lead profound change is to shift the inner place from which a system operates. This can be done only collaboratively.” He asks, “What are the principles and practices that will help me and others to link with and realize our best future possibility?” and answers with the Five Movements of the U Process:

1. Co-initiating: Listen to others and to what life calls you to do
   
2. Co-sensing: Go to the places of most potential and listen with your mind and heart wide open
   
3. Co-presencing: Retreat and reflect, allow the inner knowing to emerge
   
4. Co-creating: Prototype a microcosm of the new to explore the future by doing
   
5. Co-evolving: Grow innovation ecosystems by seeing and acting from the emerging whole
   

Quality conversation
Generative thinking also requires quality conversation. Temkin writes, “quality conversation is the heart of governance. … A lot of people are looking at the impact quality conversations are having on the ability to govern - a topic rarely even mentioned a couple years ago.” Interesting.

• Does the board serve the same role for a nonprofit as the heart serves for the human body? The heart senses everything that flows through it, gleans what’s happening throughout the body, and is a center of innate bodily intelligence, striving to balance the whole. It’s also the keeper of our deepest feelings and sense of identity.
  
• How can we develop the capacity to think and know with our heart?
  
  

As Donna Shepard, of the UWM Center for Diversity Learning, said at her keynote for the 2014 Evolving Leaders Conference, “Before I can affect change, I have to work on myself.”

To explore these themes further, join us for Latest Trends and Best Practices in Governance & Board-Staff Partnership, a 5-part series, Tuesdays, 8:00-9:30 a.m, beginning June 10. Register for whole series or individual sessions. 


Bibliography

Governance as Leadership:Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards, Richard Chait, William Ryan and Barbara Taylor, BoardSource

Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers of the Society for Organizational Learning, published by Currency, Doubleday

Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, C. Otto Scharmer, published by Society for Organizational Learning

You and Your Nonprofit Board: Advice and Practical Tips from the Field’s Top Practitioners, Researchers, and Provocateurs, In the Trenches Series, edited by Terrie Temkin, PhD, Charity Channel Press.