Mostly agree. I’ve been involved in local orgs a bit more than most people in EA, and grew up in a house where my parents were often serving terms on different synagogue and school boards, and my wife has continued her family’s similar tradition—so I strongly agree that passionate alignment changes things—but even that rarely leads to boards setting the strategic direction.
I think a large part of this is that strategy is hard, as you note, and it’s very high context for orgs. I still wonder about who is best placed to track priority drift, and about how much we want boards to own the strategic direction; it would be easy, but I think very unhelpful, for the board to basically just do what Holden suggests, and only be in charge of the CEO—because a lot of value from the board is, or can be, their broader strategic views and different knowledge. And for local orgs, that happens much more, the leaders need to convince board members to do things or make changes, rather than doing it on their own and getting vague approval from the board. But, as a last point, it seems hard to do lots of this for small orgs. Overhead from the board is costly, and I don’t know how much effort we want to expect.
Mostly agree. I’ve been involved in local orgs a bit more than most people in EA, and grew up in a house where my parents were often serving terms on different synagogue and school boards, and my wife has continued her family’s similar tradition—so I strongly agree that passionate alignment changes things—but even that rarely leads to boards setting the strategic direction.
I think a large part of this is that strategy is hard, as you note, and it’s very high context for orgs. I still wonder about who is best placed to track priority drift, and about how much we want boards to own the strategic direction; it would be easy, but I think very unhelpful, for the board to basically just do what Holden suggests, and only be in charge of the CEO—because a lot of value from the board is, or can be, their broader strategic views and different knowledge. And for local orgs, that happens much more, the leaders need to convince board members to do things or make changes, rather than doing it on their own and getting vague approval from the board. But, as a last point, it seems hard to do lots of this for small orgs. Overhead from the board is costly, and I don’t know how much effort we want to expect.