186. Time is not on our side (Condition #34: Agendas)

It’s a bit of a mindf… what’s a polite way to say that? OK, I just googled it and it there really isn’t one. Someone suggested “mindception,” but I think that may be the actual worst word I’ve ever heard. Anyway, it’s a bit of a, ugh, mindception how similar most board agendas are to each other. Not just from one meeting to another, but from one organization to another. Quick aside, if you want a shocking dive into a quagmire of misogyny and racism, check out the Wikipedia entry for “hysteria.” Accordingly, you will notice me deftly avoiding that term in a second. Back to agendas. It’s like we’ve got some mass psychogenic illness that leads us to the false belief that a typical board meeting agenda is actually designed to get us the results we want. But that means that whenever we run over time, or fail to engage in meaningful dialogue, or spend inordinate amounts of time on mundane nonsense, or don’t end up hearing from every director, or whatever other not-great thing, that something is wrong with *us*. Because the agenda is totally fine, right? Why else would so many organizations use basically the same agenda for all their board meetings? And yes, a convenient counter-argument would be to blame the board chair. I agree that many chairs have a hard time managing meeting flow. But what if part of the problem is that they’re working with shoddy materials? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen if you cut the time allocated to presentations by 90%, or scheduled your strategic items at the very beginning of the meeting, or allocated 15 minutes for unstructured dream time? Whatever experiment you try, be sure to try it at least three times before deciding it doesn’t work.