Codematician

When should your board meet

Dec 28, 2024 by Andy R. Terrel

Seems the first duty as a new director at NumFOCUS is to determine when we should be meeting. Simple question deserves a blog post with far too much reflection, but hey I promised more transparency in decision making to numerous NumFOCUS constituents. In my experience through many boards at NumFOCUS, sporting non-profit boards, property boards, and corporate boards, I can confidently say IT DEPENDS!

Fine, Andy, WHAT does it depend on?

Why Board Meet

I posit there are really only three reasons or actions for which a boards meet:

  • A decision needs to be made,
  • A status report needs to be filed,
  • A collaboration to accomplish a concrete task, i.e. drafting a position statement.

Now each of these reasons have other dimensions that govern their meeting frequency, time, and place. These include, but not limited to, some of the following:

  • The deadline for the needed action, i.e. decision, report, or collaboration,
  • The participants needed for the action
  • The prerequisites for the action, e.g. the report is finialized for a status report, a discussion has finished for a decision, or items purchased for a collaboration.

Okay seems simple we can use the needed action and the governing dimensions to determine if a meeting should happen. EXCEPT!!!! Different boards have different types of collaborations and different cadences for delivery. Now we could give some pretty generic advice, like meet every day or only when absolutely necessary, but I have been stung in the past by generic advice 1. Let’s explore different cadences in reference to the various goals of the board.

When do boards meet?

Every single board I have ever been a part of has an oversight role for something, that is usually defined by some charter. For example the NumFOCUS infrastructure board has to provide oversight for IT decisions and my youth baseball league has to provide oversite for baseball games. IT decisions happen almost all the time, but in reality NumFOCUS uses managed services for most everything and so there is not a huge rush warranting a daily meeting. Baseball games happen every blessed hour (M-F 5pm-10 and weekends at 8am - 10pm) during the season, and that makes the occasion for oversight very frequent. Okay the frequency of your deadlines will determine a natural cadence, but the second dimension comes into play, i.e. who is needed for the decision.

Not every single board member will be committed to meet every day, week, or even month. If your deadlines are coming more quickly than your decision points, there will be frustration from your members and many will question your goals. To make decisions faster you need to pair down the number of people needed to make the decision. For example the frequency of youth baseball games has a warranted two boards (executive and full) with board members on duty who can determine when to call an executive meeting at any moment2. Most software teams have deliverables every single day and will need to meet almost daily to even get code out the door later than intended. Their manager doesn’t need to provide oversight every line of code thus we meet every few weeks to look over the sprint’s outcomes. To sum up, you need to understand how frequently your board members are willing to meet and let that guide your cadence and board structure.

Another aspect of meetings is that it may take multiple meetings to make decision. In my experience, I rarely see multi-faceted decisions being made in less than three meetings. The first meeting presents the problem that requires a decision. If it was a decision that needs no discussion, then it probably would not need the board to decide. Not all board members are fully aware of the problem and will want to time to investigate and determine their position, so a decision is pushed to a second meeting. The second meeting generally fleshes out the various elements of the decision. This is the chance for board members to bring new perspectives. New perspectives requires more investigation. That is why we arrive at three meetings3. Of course this is just a minimum number of meetings, often these investigations result in new information that just keeps pushing more meetings. Now combine the meeting cadence with this rule of three meetings and you have how quickly a board can make a decision. Meet weekly, then expect 1 month for a decision; meet daily, expect a week. Thus you determine the speed your board makes decisions by the cadence of meetings4. One hack I use with many teams I run is to have a status report at the cadence I expect decisions to be made and schedule ad hoc meetings for when decisions need to be sped up due to short deadlines.

Okay we have actions and dimensions of an action that determine when meetings can happen. We have a cadence of oversight that determines how often reports need to be made. We even have governance structures being determined by the frequency of actions and the minimum number of people being needed for particular actions. How does this apply to NumFOCUS? Well first we need to talk about the structure and actions of NumFOCUS governance. This blog is already over 1000 words so we will save that for the next posting.

  1. I use to say, “you are not a team if you don’t meet every day”, and I still believe that to an extent. Once a CTO at a company I advised came to me with his resignation complaining that he wasn’t part of the “Executive Team” and used my saying as proof. Oh boy, was I in hot water, here is a company I’m supposed to be helping achieve their goals and a simple off hand truism is causing a rift so wide the team is breaking up! That CTO was clearly frustrated with the other executives on the team but it wasn’t really the meeting frequency that was the issue, it was being out of the loop of the decision process. Today, I do think if you are not meeting regularly, you aren’t working together, which can be fine, but I hold my tongue on demanding daily meetings. ↩

  2. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine when a decision is beyond the charter of a particular board. Once in a youth baseball duty I had two divorced parents showing up and screaming at the umps and coaches about visitation rights. The mother even had a thirty page document which she claimed showed the father was not legally allowed to be there. Here was a case where I needed help from the executive board as there was no right answer. Both the mom and dad where violating our no verbal abuse policy, but kick the dad out you violate his rights as a father, kick the mom out you take the kid away from baseball (which was our whole goal of being there) or don’t do anything and violate the rest of the teams rights to watch the game. In the end we just separated the parents (luckily the foul poles on a baseball field are a long ways apart and yell there is fine) and told the mom to appeal to the local police for determining if the father was breaking a court order. We accomplished our goals but because the decision required different levels of governance we used a separation of concerns to dictate our escalations. ↩

  3. There are ways to speed up the number of meetings, e.g. using email to flesh out details asynchronously. Unfortunately, many boards of filled with busy people who don’t have time to read all their email...I have over 13K emails in my inboxes at the moment. So I think my rule of 3 meetings generally holds. ↩

  4. One of my favorite demonstrations of the principle is the State of Texas legislative session. If the meeting cadence determines the amount of work a board can do, it will also be a limiter to the amount of damage a board can do. The State of Texas lawmakers only meet every other year. I have no idea how to judge if it is a successful strategy but think about how slowing down decisions can have a purpose as well. ↩

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