This playbook is brafe.space’s effort to re-design Board Meetings. It includes a theoretical part, as well as a broad range of examples and templates from experienced board members as well as leadership teams in one easy-to-use guide. It is written both for supervisory members of existing or newly formed boards, as well as for founders or the management team participating in those meetings.
<aside> ⚙ Please note: This is a living document and we are sharing it here in an early format. We make no claim to completeness, but instead expect this document to be updated and expanded in tune with the learnings of the brafe.space community.
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lays out what a board meeting is and which other meeting structures we are targeting with this playbook.
starts with a theoretical description of two different types of board meetings and walks you through the different value systems attached to them.
presents you with a range of case studies in order to give you an idea of the wealth of different kinds of meeting structures and cultures you can choose from.
provides a tool box in which we are presenting a few concrete instruments for your own work. This section has the potential to grow into a much larger resource for innovative board meetings.
We hope you find this information useful when planning your next board meeting. All the best!
Board meetings are a major element of the formal governance structure of organisations. In both for-profit companies, as well as non-profit organisations, participants from different groups, mostly funders/shareholders and the leadership/management team, come together in regular intervals to review performance, discuss strategy, set goals and address major challenges and opportunities.
Despite their importance many participants experience board meetings as deeply unsatisfying. Even though many knowledgeable people are coming together, they don’t seem to deliver much value for neither the founders/management teams, nor for the members of the supervisory board. Some are purely ritualistic, a necessary motion we all go through.
Many participants hide behind their roles and don’t bring their full potential into the meetings. But they can also be conflicted and destructive. Founders or the leadership team often feel misunderstood, overruled and little valued, as board members (mainly consisting of funders) seem to push for maximum results, without truly listening to the real pains and questions of founders. Board members on the other side feel they get a skewed picture of the operations, with founders selling their work, glossing over difficulties and mistakes.
A major factor for the dysfunctionalities is the power asymmetries between the participants. Founders/leadership teams often rely on the good will and support of funders for their survival and are much more dependent on them, then vice versa. In addition there are also often quite large age gaps between the groups, as well as differences in cultural and social capital. Even though power differences are very perceptible and inform the general atmosphere of the meeting and relationships between participants, they are “normalised” by being implicit and rarely made explicit. The general spirit is one of “this is how professional board meetings are run” and not “let’s discover what awesome things this group of people could do together and what would be needed for us to thrive.”
Yet board meetings, turned into a space of joint learning and co-creation, could help their participants to flourish, to enable the organisation to thrive and send ripples of positive change into the wider world. That’s why we feel it is important to dig deeper and discover ways to unfold their potential.
A board (of directors, trustees, …) is a governing body of legal entities. Depending on the legal structure a board is required by law (e.g. listed companies, foundations) or voluntarily established. In for-profit organisations the members are typically elected by shareholders.
The particular scope of responsibility is determined by the applicable jurisdiction or the particular (corporate) governance. But in general, there are elements of control towards operational executives based on the legal framework and internal governance, of advising the operational management in setting the strategy and defining the long-term orientation as well as of taking care of the interests of shareholders or stakeholders (e.g. employees, beneficiaries).