Monday, April 16, 2007

Fiddling while Rome burns

Why do boards spend so much energy on trivia?

One reason is that they don't want to confront the real problems -- because if you do, you're under pressure to find solutions. Dealing with trivia is a form of evasion, or denial.

For example, an organization that over a ten year period suffers a 1/3 membership attrition might focus on why it's happened, or how to reverse it -- instead of appointing an ad hoc committee to study a special status for a handful of people interested in the institution but ineligible for membership.

For example, a board that would rather debate where and when to hold their next meeting than to evaluate whether their program is meeting community needs.

For example, a board that tells management it doesn't want to discuss the attrition of an important market sector (200 customers have voted with their feet) but rather to concentrate on making sure the host hotel delivers room service orders timely (three customers complained that lunch was late).

As one savant put it, most temple boards adopt their annual budgets in July, and then spend the next ten months arguing about expenditures they've already decided on. It's easier to discuss which contractor should fix the sound system than how to engage more congregants in coming to the sanctuary to hear the sound system.

This is part of the same syndrome that causes otherwise intelligent people to check their brains at the door when they enter the meeting room of their volunteer board. (This may relate to equating their governance role here with their management role elsewhere.) As one experienced rabbi said, If the people who serve on temple boards ran their businesses the way they run their temples, they couldn't affort to serve on the temple board!

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