Webinar: How high performance boards make decisions better

Rapid change, evolving member expectations, and constant data streams are challenging traditional board decision-making.

Boards today are expected to respond more quickly than ever while navigating economic uncertainty, technological disruption, changing regulation, workforce pressures, and increasing stakeholder scrutiny. At the same time, directors are faced with more information than ever before, making it harder to separate what is important from what is simply urgent.

High-performing boards don't just react to change; they build the capability to anticipate it, adapt with confidence, and make decisions that remain aligned to long-term strategy. That requires strong governance practices, disciplined decision-making, and a clear understanding of where the board adds the greatest value.

This webinar helps directors assess their board's readiness to govern in a fast-changing environment and strengthen decision-making practices that improve resilience, focus, and strategic confidence amid ongoing uncertainty. You'll explore practical approaches to navigating complexity, avoiding common decision-making pitfalls, and creating the conditions for better board discussions, stronger oversight, and more confident governance.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome everybody. Welcome to our webinar today titled How High Performing Boards Decide Better. I'm joined today with Miranda Fleury, who is the president of Hawkeye Strategies and one of their senior consultants, Rochelle Mantier. Welcome to you both. My name's Sean, Sean MacDonald, and I shall be your moderator in the background for the next 40 odd minutes. Firstly, though, thank you so much for attending today. We always appreciate the effort you make to be here for our live webinar events. During the session, if you have any questions, please try and use the QA button on your toolbar. It just enables us to keep a track of the questions as they're coming through. And we'll be answering as many of these as we have time for during the session. And finally, if you stay through till the end, which of course we hope you will do, we have a really short one-minute survey at the end of the webinar for you to consider. Your feedback on the survey, it really helps us bring relevant content to you week after week and enables us to position the wealth of expert presenters that we have for you. So please take a moment to complete the survey at the end as you exit the webinar. Thanks very much. For those who are not too familiar with Board Pro, we are a board software provider, sometimes called a board portal, and we serve just over 35,000 users around the world across about uh 34 different countries, around about 4,500 boards and about 9,000 committees these days. We enable organizations effectively to prepare for and run their board meetings more efficiently and effectively with less time and deliver more impact and value for the uh for the organization. And as much as we are a board software provider, part of our wider mission here at Port Pro is to make the fundamentals of governance free and easy to implement for all organizations, but especially those organizations with uh resource constraints. And one of the many ways we do this is by providing free access to hundreds of business and governance templates, guides and resources, which you'll find funnily enough in the resources section of our website. And these webinars that we host every week are a great way of accessing really neat governance knowledge without the time commitments and costs associated, generally associated, I should say, with in-person events. So for the next 40 odd minutes, just sit back and relax and add to the discussion by asking as many questions as you would like. Uh, a full recording of this webinar, along with the slide deck and the transcript, will be sent to you next Monday. Uh, let me start by having Miranda and Rochelle introduce themselves, starting with you first, Miranda.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Sounds good. Thanks, Sean. So lovely to be back again. My name is Miranda Fleury, and I own Hawkeye Strategies, which is a governance consulting firm, and we work with organizations all over the world to do things like strategic planning to CEO compensation and evaluation, to board assessments, to a whole host of other items, and governance education is one of them. So I am incredibly excited to be here. And I will hand it over to my colleague, Rochelle.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

Thanks, Miranda, and thanks, Sean. It's nice to be back as well and see everyone again. So my name is Rochelle Mance here. I work as a senior consultant with Hawkeye Strategies with Miranda and team. Yeah, really working closely with boards and executive teams in a number of different fashions from strategic planning onwards and board governance training. So a lot of those pieces that Miranda just covered off. So happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Awesome. Okay, Sean, I'm gonna share my screen right now. Uh so let's see. Let me know if that worked, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

I'll stop my sharing. Yep, looks good. Good. Yep, all good.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

I love it. Okay. Um, so we're here to talk about how uh how boards uh decide in a much better fashion. And so I want to start um by painting a bit of a picture about what the external environment looks like and is described as VUCA, which I'll get to just momentarily. And so when you think about the environment that your board is operating in, and there I know there are several types of industries that are represented on today's webinar, but likely a number of you experience whether it's regulatory changes, you've got new competitors emerging, you've got cyber risk is intensifying if you've got exposure to that, you've got tons and tons of data, you've got AI adoption accelerating amongst a whole host of other things. You have many pieces that that are at play. And all of these changes um individually would be manageable when you but when you combine them all together, it becomes incredibly overwhelming. And this it's called this VUCA environment, uh, which is actually shared by Harvard. And so VUCA is where it's volatile, your external environment's volatile, uncertain, complex, and and ambiguous, right? And often many of your industries are sitting in that environment. And so under these conditions, it's actually researched that your instincts become less reliable when in fact you want to trust them more. And the real problem today is that decisions have never mattered more, and you have had less time, less clarity, and less certainty to actually make those decisions. And so here's what we believe at Hawkeye is the biggest risk you're facing is not actually making the wrong decision. The biggest risk that you're facing right now is not making a decision or not being willing to actually pivot, even when there's evidence staring at you in the face to do so. And so I I'm gonna flip in just a second here, but Rashad, I don't know if there's anything that that you want to add to to that environment piece that I talked about.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Yeah, and just the fact that the environment is shifting so quickly. And I think that's another piece that I know Miranda and I have chatted about as the world continues to evolve and the news real um as well. So even just things that are taking place and it shifts your perspectives and does create that ambiguity. And it really does make it easier not to make decisions or get really, really uh uninterested in changing when you maybe do need to make a pivot. So this environment is real, folks. Um, and I'm sure everybody who watches the news as of late is seeing that as well.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Thanks for shouting. Okay, so maybe I'll start off when I said there were two pieces that that we believed were the biggest risks that boards were facing when it comes to decision making. The first is not deciding, the second is not pivoting. So I want to talk about first, not deciding. And when you think about not making a decision around a boardroom table, it often doesn't feel reckless, it doesn't look dramatic. In fact, it actually feels responsible. So here's what it looks like, okay? Picture yourself sitting around your boardroom table. You'll hear things like, let's wait for more information, or let's bring this back at the next quarterly meeting that we've got, or let's see how things evolve over time. But here's the reality of lines like that not deciding, delaying, or deferring decisions is a decision, it just happens to be a quieter decision. And in your minds, it actually feels safer because what it does is it postpones accountability, and even though at the same time, while you're postponing accountability, you're compounding risk at the exact same time, and so often boards feel good about not making a decision, like you're doing something safe, but the reality is you're actually adding risk, and so sometimes in a lot of instances, you're not gonna have all of the perfect information to make a decision, but you need to be able to act fast enough to respond accordingly without all of the information, and part of that is making decisions in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty. So that was number one, not deciding. I'm gonna jump to number two, not pivoting, and then Rochelle will come to you after. And and so not pivoting, number two, is the second closely related risk. Um, and so what I mean by not pivoting is you have a wave of evidence that's in front of you that you have gone down a particular path and you're choosing not to change it. And I've actually sat on boards before where I've experienced this as a consultant. I've seen it myself where people will dig in and they do this because there's a well-documented bias called sunk cost bias, where you put blood, sweat, and tears into something, something that's of material nature, and you're unwilling to actually pivot from it, and it ends up distorting your judgment. And and you don't pivot because or you stop, you you don't actually make changes because you're stubborn or you're confident. That's not actually the case. It's simply because you feel attached and committed to something that's already been made. And oftentimes what I'll see is new data will get presented and it will get minimized or it'll get explained away. And sometimes we tell ourselves when we do a course correction that it's actually failure instead of learning, which is a bit of a problem. But the act of not pivoting again increases your risk and has the potential to steadily erode, steadily um erode your strategic relevance. And so these are things to think about, the two pieces, the biggest risk that I think boards are facing when it comes to decision making, not deciding and not pivoting. So, Rochelle, I I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

Yeah, and you do see it so consistently as well, and some of the key reasons why making a decision can be so hard, because you do default to either deferring or not deciding. And in fairness, a lot of governance structures that structures reinforce caution over clarity when you really think about it. Because you think about that board packet or package that you're getting. A lot of the reporting does anchor you in the past as well. So it does kind of anchor you to what's happened in the past and allows you to put the rearview mirror in where you should be looking forward. So I think not deciding is a really hard one as well, and really take some diligence to break because it is easy to defer to the next board meeting or wait till there's more information. And back to that VUCA environment. The world is moving so fast, we'll never have perfect information. And I think there's just some tools and tips and tricks, and we'll talk to and how to make decision making easier in this environment. And knowing as humans, as the world speeds up and moves faster, it actually makes you want to move slower for decisions. There's a bit of a paradox there.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Yeah, there definitely is. Okay. So I want to show you a model that the Hawkeye team has built for how boards can make decisions more effectively. So it's a three-step model. There's a few steps in one of the one of the pieces here. But the first is to size the decision. So understand the materiality of the associated decision. So we'll talk about that. Number two is to confirm decision rights and who has the authority to do what. And number three is to what we call scope it, which is an acronym to help break down what needs to be um presented to you in order to make effective decisions. So let's start with number one, sizing the decision. So I am sure a number of you have heard of the book Atomic Habits. The author is James Clear. And he actually uses a wonderful analogy that I'm going to borrow here in terms of decisions can be like hats, haircuts, or tattoos. So a hat decision is something that you can put on a hat and you can easily take it off and put on a new one. So it doesn't have the same level of investment. It's easy to change, there isn't a reputation risk attached to it. It's just as simple as hat on, hat off, new hat on, hat off. You can try different things. A haircut decision has a little bit more materiality to it in that if you get a haircut, it takes a while to grow back. And so when you think about that, you can absolutely get a haircut, you can absolutely recover from that haircut, but it takes time. So there's a reputational component that's attached to it. And tattoo decisions are theoretically permanent. And so, um, or or very, very painful to erase for those of you who have ever had laser tattoo removal. I have heard it's quite painful. And and so those are decisions that you need to make carefully with a lot more rigor that's attached, because if you make them, it's going to be either very painful to remove, and or in certain cases, you can't remove it like a merger or an acquisition as an example. So when you're sitting there around the board table and you're thinking about a decision has been put in front of you, I urge you to think about is this a hat, haircut, or tattoo decision? Because that will help you determine the level of rigor, the amount of discussion you're going to have, and ultimately the type of information that needs to come to you will look different in these three different categories. So, Rochelle, did you want to add anything to that piece?

SPEAKER_02 14:37

Yeah, and this is a really important tip as well. So we hear a lot from boards and leadership teams. It's just the time crunch. There's not a lot of time around the boardroom table. By sizing your decision really helps you put the focus on the right decisions because you wouldn't want to treat all decisions like tattoos if you can have a quick hat decision or haircuts, uh, for example. So it is a really great way of thinking about how to size your decision to allocate your time to the right components.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Thanks for that. And Sean, I do see that we've got people's hands are raised. So maybe I'll just encourage them to put their questions into the QA. Um, so those those of you that have your hands raised, if you can throw your questions in the QA, I will happily, or Rochelle will happily respond to to your questions there. So throw it into the QA. We'll happily go there. Thanks. I am sorry, Sean. Can we say something?

SPEAKER_00 15:32

No, no, I was just saying thanks. That's yeah, great prompting. Good.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Okay. Done this just a couple of times, Sean. Uh okay. So we'll jump to the second piece. So I'm actually just gonna refresh you. We just talked about number one, which was size the decision. I want to go on to step two in the model that we use, which is confirm decision rights. So who decides and what's the approval uh what's the approval threshold? So understanding through very clear roles and responsibilities, which is typically outlined by director responsibilities, by how you outline roles and responsibilities of the respective committees that that you have to your board policies, which outline the guardrails that exist, to the governance processes that you have, and even the CEO delegation. Those are five massive areas where you determine who decides what between the board, the committees, and your CEO. If you do not know where the decision rights lie, it ends up creating a lot of inefficiency, back and forth, and a lot of misunderstanding. And so understanding who can make the decision is incredibly important when you're thinking about what information needs to come from where and who is ultimately has the authority. The second piece is what's the approval threshold? And so, what I mean by that is I have actually been sitting around a boardroom table myself where, and I've sat around many actually, where we've decided who's the CEO and uh and and not realized, oh no, is it just going to be 50% plus, you know, 50 plus one in terms of the approval threshold to figure out who's going to be your next CEO? Is that okay that almost half of the board members didn't agree? So making sure that while it would be typical for it to be what we would call in Canada an ordinary resolution on something like that, items that are more sensitive or have a lot more materiality to them, um, because I would consider that one a tattoo decision. That's an example that can be very painful to reverse. Uh, is you want to make sure that you know what's the approval threshold that's required. Now, I just gave you the example of hiring your CEO, but there are many other examples where it might be normally a 50 plus 1% decision. However, um the however you might actually want to investigate it a little bit further. Rochelle, any thoughts?

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Yeah. And the biggest thing when thinking about what the approval threshold is, is realizing if you need to get to full alignment or consensus, allow yourself the time as well. So some decisions where you do have to bring everyone along or a higher percentage, just make sure you give yourself the time to go through the process to bring everybody to that approval threshold that's established. And it's important to confirm those decision rights before you get into making the decision. That would be my other key tip. Because that's where it also can become pretty difficult, is when you're far down the path and you're ready for the decision to be made, then you begin debating the approval threshold. So make sure you clarify that right on the front end and give yourself enough time.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Special. Okay. So going back to the three-step process, we just did number two, which is confirmed decision rights. I want to move on to scope the decision. And this is um, we'll we'll go into quite a bit of detail and would love to love to have folks ask some questions around this content here. Because scope is an acronym. So when you are thinking about the decision that needs to be made around the boardroom table, I want you to think of the acronym scope. And so scope stands for specifying the problem, clarifying what success looks like, having options identified, prioritizing and making decisions, and then ultimately executing the decision. And so let's start at the top. I cannot tell you the number of times I have walked in to a strategy session that I am facilitating, and we are talking about solutions to problems that nobody can agree to. So I have seen this around the executive table before, I've seen it around the boardroom table before. I have I have actually talked about what appears to be the same problem. So, for this is an executive example. Uh, what appears to be the same problem, like accountability in the organization. And I have had three groups of executives define the accountability problem in three very different ways. And so do not ever assume that you are all on the same page about what the problem is. Make sure that the problem is in fact specified at the boardroom table. I often hear uh, and this is you know has to do in financial services, um, but we need more scale. We need more scale. Okay, so like what's the actual problem you're trying to solve? Can you articulate what assumptions you have about the future that is going to require more scale? Can we make sure that we're on the same page about the problem before we start talking about how we deal with scale? So specifying the problem is super, super important. Rochelle, did you have anything that you wanted to add to that? Maybe I'll just come to you after.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

Yeah, I can just hop in on that one because another key thing or trip point you see is where people are trying to solve multiple problems with the same tool or the same solution. So make sure you take the time as a team to get to the point of what is the problem. So you're not treating symptoms, number one. And two, you're not trying to solve multiple problems all at the same time because that's where things become very difficult. And making it explicit what your problem is and just writing it out as a problem statement is very, very helpful to make sure there's full agreement before you move further down the process. Because if you don't agree on the problem, you probably aren't going to agree on the solutions.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

I've seen it happen. It's it's why the solutions, everybody's arguing about the solution, but we have no idea why people are arguing because they're literally arguing on a different problem, right? So yeah, it's a good point. Uh and okay, so C in scope is clarify what success actually looks like. So oftentimes people will skip this step as well because we just want to get to solutions. I can't tell you the number of times I've been around a board table and we're like, this we're not talking about solutions yet. Um and um, but we actually don't, we haven't defined what you know what is the North Star, what are you trying to achieve? What does success look like? Because, for example, if you set targets around the type of growth that you want your business to have, and the the target is incredibly aggressive, looks very, very different than if you have a very conservative target, because the solutions to support a conservative target in growth versus an aggressive target in growth are very, very different. And if you're just talking about the solutions itself, but you have not got alignment from the group that's that's there, you know, at the boardroom table, then you're going to be arguing on the solution. So this is another piece that helps to create alignment within boards and specifically between boards and executives. I do see, and it it probably depends more on the institution itself, but I do see oftentimes where executives are more aggressive, more hungry than boards are willing to be. And they're providing solutions that boards aren't agreeing with, but they don't understand why. It's because they haven't simply identified this is where we're trying to go. This is where we're what we're trying to achieve. Rochelle, anything on that one?

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Yeah, and it's a great opportunity to have that discussion and make sure you're focused on what the outcomes need to be and aligned on it. So when you get further down the path, you're not number one retrofitting your desired criteria to fit what solution you want to move forward with. Um, but it also makes sure you don't get confused between efforts and outcomes. So at the beginning, set out what the outcomes need to be rather than some of those effort metrics. We launched this many products. Well, launching that many products is not necessarily the success you're looking for. It might be deeper penetration within a client group, for example. So it's a great opportunity to make sure everybody's speaking the same language and has that same North Star before you get further down the path.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Oh, is that options are identified? So this is where everybody's super happy to provide options. And and so this looks like okay, we've got, for example, two to three options that that we're presenting. Here's what it looks like, here's what the risks are, here's what we're trying to achieve. Maybe, maybe there's, you know, if you're talking about growth as an example, you're understanding where you know, where you're growing from a geographic point of view, maybe it's the business lines or products that you offer, maybe it's the target segments and the consumers in which you're serving. And and being able to identify those options in a very clear and crisp and easy to understand way is very, very helpful. This is where people often jump to and sometimes do a poor job of trying to explain the options that are there. I always like to say, where possible, use executive summaries. There's nothing wrong with providing detail, but you should be able to summarize it at the highest level so that people know what they're looking at. And what I'll also say is you shouldn't be providing 10 options to dilute the conversation. Ideally, you should be providing, you know, anywhere between two to three options for whatever it is that you're presenting. If you're only presenting one, I also think that's not good. I think you need to be able to have comparisons, but you don't want to dilute it with so many different options. And it's again, it's okay if you're telling your executive team nothing wrong of like laying out every single option but narrowing it down to three for discussion purposes. Anything to add, Rochelle?

SPEAKER_02 26:14

Just a quick tip on that one, too, folks, is when you get to laying out your options, make sure they're framed consistently as well. So you you do have a so you actually are comparing like-to-like uh options. When you use different frames or wildly different templates to present options, it becomes very difficult for those making the decisions to do true comparisons.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

Yeah. The next piece is prioritize and make the decision. So ideally, when you know what success looks like, you have some sort of evaluation criteria to be able to determine. And so being able to hold yourselves accountable to the success criteria and evaluating uh evaluating how the options fit into that, being able to balance risk, connecting it to your strategy and any other uh governing guardrails that need to be in place, and also understanding what trade-offs are you making when you choose this particular option that you're going forward with. And ideally make a decision. Now, that's not to say under any circumstance you shouldn't go back and ask for additional information. Of course, there are circumstances where you need to do that, but ideally you're getting to a point of making a decision.

SPEAKER_02 27:27

Rashad? And I'd say this is the hard part, folks, um, because this is where it starts to narrow the funnel. And this is where it does get to be hard to make a decision and make sure you're holding yourself accountable to those success criteria that were set out earlier in the process. So this is where discipline becomes really important around the boardroom table is to actually prioritize and avoid making decisions based on opinions or or gut reaction at that point.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

I'm gonna move on to the last letter, which is E in a second, but I'm I'm constantly looking at the QA and I see that we're a quieter group and we're coming to just letting you know, we're coming to the end of the lecture part. So I'm looking forward to to having some questions and being able to go back and forth. So please put your questions into the QA so that we can answer those before uh we head out here. So E is execute the decision, and that's of course typically done by by your executive team, unless you're doing something that is uh specifically board related. But with execution comes monitoring. And so, how on material-related decisions, again, is it, you know, maybe it's a haircut, maybe it's a tattoo decision. How are you monitoring the oversight of the success of that? Oftentimes, when I see, let's take lots of us are exposed to mergers and acquisitions. And when I see MA happen, I often don't see tracking to the success that was originally wrote out in business cases to see how successful it was because it's a permanent decision once it goes through, and so we're kind of stuck with it. Um, but I the monitoring piece is really, really important. And it's important not only to see are you progressing as pro as predicted, but also are you taking some lessons learned from that experience? And it doesn't have to be an MA experience, it could be something else. Are you taking lessons learned and in fact uh applying it uh in future circumstances? What do you think, Rochelle?

SPEAKER_02 29:34

Yeah, and it is the hardest part, I would say, too, is actually doing the monitoring afterwards and realizing when things maybe aren't going as the original business case maybe laid out. Um, but that's an important piece of having some honest conversations and making adjustments. And it goes back to the learning and what the lessons learned are, either for next time or taking a lesson and being able to apply that lesson right in that same moment to improve as well.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

Awesome. I'm gonna drop my screen share deliberately right now. I am seeing some questions come in, which I'm excited by. I feel like I just like opened the floodgates, which is great. Um, so thank you everybody for submitting questions. We'll take questions until I guess Sean kicks both of us off this webinar. So I'll I'll start at at the top. So, David, um, you wrote great approach. How could or should this be covered off in the board or committee paper to get the necessary focus? It's harder for directors to skip steps when it's laid out in a meeting paper. Rochelle, do you have thoughts on that? I'm gonna reread that one in my head real quick.

SPEAKER_02 30:41

Um, my initial thought too is for this one, you may not actually be able to lay it out in a like for the scope framework and walk through it all in one session either, right? And I think this is where it takes that discipline because you may end up setting up the specifying of the problem and clarifying success as step one, and then coming back with the management team on the options at a at a later date. So I think that's the other piece too, is unless you have a really well-informed group and you can sit down and move through this within a in a single session, this will take a couple of sessions to move through a scope type or one of those tattoo decisions as well. But it needs to be very intelligent, like diligently put in there.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Yeah, and I I think, yeah, I I like what you said about the fact that you're probably coming to scope more than once. And what I would say, David, on that one is I would say as the board has made decisions, you can design like systematically in your committee papers or board papers to include the prior decisions. So, for example, maybe you only talked about the problem statement to begin with. Now keep the problem statement the next time you go to talk about success. Keep those two pieces the next time you go to talk about the options and so on and so forth, so that you're jogging your memory and you have that there. Okay, I love the question. Thanks, David. Okay, and and it looks like Margaret, Margaret added to have an action sheet for each board meeting. Yes, Margaret, I've sat on a board before where we had uh, and that was actually at the front of our board packages, and and we would have action sheets of like these were the takeaways and what's the status of them. I love that. Thank you for for bringing that up. All right, Steven. Hi, Stephen, by the way. Been a while. Nice to see you again. Is okay, what are some of the best ways you have seen for boards to review their past business assumptions that led to a previous decision and the lessons learned? Michelle.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Yeah, I was gonna say some of the best practices is number one, making sure past business assumptions they're documented. So if you are making a big decision, make sure you're very explicit and clear on those assumptions. But you do need to plan for lessons learned and a validation. And having lessons learned, it's got to be a formal item and brought up. And there's a nice way of doing um a set of questions around it. But I do think it has to almost be scheduled or earmarked. So once you make a big decision, say we need to come back to this in six months and see how we're progressing and do the lessons learned or whatever that right time frame is.

SPEAKER_01 33:17

Yeah, and what I would add to that is probably the easiest way to think about that, Stephen, is like actually in strategy sessions. So when when we go to do strategic planning, we always talk about assumptions. And it's very easy on a year-over-year basis to go back and look and say, okay, you documented these assumptions. How good were you at drafting these assumptions? And how do we get better at being more accurate at listing assumptions that impact our strategy? What did we miss? How do we do this differently? And that's part of that, too, Stephen. What's interesting is like that's a cultural mentality around the board of wanting to like consistently improve and learn. And so that has to be instilled at probably the board share level and reinforced through the processes that that you have around the table. So I love the question again. Thanks. Okay, Leon. Uh this. Oh, let me just see. Hang on, before I come to you, Leon, I just saw somebody else jump to the chat. Um, Alex just said, all this um great discussion. If this is helpful, we've had great results having a defined decision note, decision-making template laying out the decision often impacts analysis. Hey, Alex, I love that. And I think you can probably add attachments here if you're able to share that. We wouldn't complain. Uh, I'm sure everybody on the webinar would probably benefit from that. So great point. Okay, Leon. So uh this model implies a business is constantly responding to problems rather than getting in front and defining the landscape. Sure, we should start with C, uh, which is the clarifying success, and define where we want to be in the future. Yeah, and Leon, I think that's probably like more of a comment than than anything. And and I I agree, by the way, I would love it if we could be super proactive and not actually have to define a problem itself. And so maybe you're just looking at opportunities, but maybe instead of looking at it like a problem statement, it's more becomes like an opportunity statement as to like how we can take advantage of something like this. And I don't know, Rochelle, what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_02 35:25

Yeah, and I I love that you brought that one up, Leon, because it is very true. Because sometimes there's an opportunity that presents itself. So you almost just flip it. So instead of writing it as a problem statement, you write an opportunity statement, a line on the opportunity, then continue on through the process as well. Because yeah, sometimes you are presented with uh a situation that's an opportunity, but same principles of getting really aligned on what that opportunity is becomes really important around the table.

SPEAKER_01 35:52

Okay, moving on to Greg. How do you deal with situations where boards don't pivot because of a strong cultural bias to not lose face because of prior decisions and commitments? Oh, spicy, Greg, spicy. Um, Rochelle, you want to take a stab at it first?

SPEAKER_02 36:09

Yeah, and this is a tough one because this is a cultural piece too, when you start to take your decisions and your identity and they and they move together. Uh, some tips that you can help with this is if you can get them focused on what the future costs or benefits would be as well. Uh so trying to remove the anchor from the past. So if you're in a situation where you have a sunk cost bias and something's already moving, being able to understand what that future cost. So it's like maybe we're, I don't know, $10 million into a project and it's not going well, well, there's another 15 out there. So I would rather put a put a pin on the 10 than spend another 15. It's a bit of a mindset as well. If you are in a situation where there is a culture where you do have a sunk cost bias and you know that exists, one other effective technique is setting some exit criteria before you start something new. So that's a nice way of thinking about it as well is if you can set up a little bit of uh, okay, these things happen, then we exit and agreeing on it before things move down the path. So it is a tricky one though, because sometimes that can be cultural. Uh when you are twining your decisions and your identity together, it's hard to admit that you sometimes just need to put a pin in it and move on. Miranda?

SPEAKER_01 37:22

And the so I I love what you added. I think the the having up front when you might exit from a decision if it's not going well is really important. That goes back to that's like success criteria. And and that's like that's actually e. That's the monitoring piece and making sure that it's actually going according to plan. Now, not everything goes according to plan, and and we know that the only piece I would add to that, Greg, is I would just say, how do you challenge people's assumptions about whatever the decision that was made and how they're thinking about it? And you don't you don't have to challenge it in a disrespectful manner, but you can start to challenge, you know, what people are thinking through asking the right questions. And like one of the one of my famous questions I like to ask is like, what are you assuming to be true when blank? Right. So, like in this case, what are you assuming to be true if we continue doing what we're doing? Because maybe I'm missing something and you see something I don't, because right now I see this as an absolute dumpster fire that needs to get stopped, right? And and you clearly see this as a burning success. So, like tell me what I'm missing, right? And and being able to challenge that and understand that because as soon as you start to get to the assumptions and the bias that exists, and people have to articulate that out loud in front of people, that's when it clicks. And sometimes, Greg, people don't even realize that the bias exists. So you can see it because maybe you're a newer director and you're on the outside of it, and it's like so in plain sight to you. But just because it's in plain sight to you doesn't mean it is for that. And so helping them to articulate that tends to be really helpful, and also making sure like it is helpful if you have other directors who have a similar viewpoint who are actually willing to speak up because sometimes it is hard to just simply go against the grade itself. Um, Sean, do I have? I know we've got we're at 40 right now. So do I have time for one more question or would you like to cut me off?

SPEAKER_00 39:45

No, no, go for one more uh Miranda.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

Okay, awesome. Okay, so Barbara, how do you overcome reluctance to follow a structured decision-making process by some attendees at the meeting?

SPEAKER_02 40:00

Yeah, and you'll always I it's always interesting when you have some folks that say, can't we just make a decision? We don't need a formal process. Uh I would say this is probably one where working with your board chair um as well and making sure they're aligned with the process, but then also right sizing decisions and not realizing every decision will need to go through a formal process with the full scope framework, for example, but right sizing the effort behind the decisions and finding those big decisions, but definitely making sure your board chair is in line with it and bringing through the process to show the value of it.

SPEAKER_01 40:34

Miranda? No, I think for the sake of time, Sean, thank you for that. Um I will hand it back to you, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

Wonderful. Okay, let me get my screen back up. Can you see that? We can. Fabulous. So thanks, guys. Really, uh, really interesting conversation. Please feel free to connect with our presenters today, Miranda and uh Rochelle. Uh if you would like to be put in touch with either of them for business opportunities at the end, uh please indicate your interest on the uh little survey at the end as you exit. We have a full library of our webinars. There's hundreds of webinars uh that are posted on our website in the webinar section. So I prompt you to have a look at those. If you ever uh miss anything in terms of our weekly webinars, that's where you'll find them. This particular webinar will be posted there on Monday, Tuesday of next week. So you'll receive an email from me. Uh, it won't be tomorrow because it's a holiday here in good old New Zealand. It'll be Monday now, but this will include a recording of today's webinar, the transcript and the presentation slides that Miranda and Michelle have put together for you. And as I said, they'll also be hosted on our webinar library on the website on Monday Tuesday. And of course, if you are considering board management software for your organization, we'd love to hear from you. Better still, why not try our free 30-day free trial? It's really simple and straightforward, and you don't need any credit cards to get started. Uh yeah, simple and straightforward, like I said. So thanks again, everybody, for your attendance. I hope you enjoyed the session like I did. Thank you, Miranda Rochelle, for the great conversation again. I look forward to seeing you all, everybody, at our next webinar. Have a great rest of your day.