Governing in ambiguity
This is a ONE THING article, which is featured in FDI’s monthly Some Good Board News email.
Author - FDI Founder, Paul Smith
ONE THING is for the busy (speak of the devil) Future Director. In which FDI Founder Paul Smith picks just one thing Future Directors oughta know or do or stew on for the next month. We hope you got something (at least one thing) out of it.
This month’s ONE THING is one stat – This late 2020 survey of global board directors showed that the time commitment of the most adaptive boards had risen by 50%. That increase in time investment was expected to come down in 2021 to 20-30% more time spent by board directors in their board roles.
So it's now 2022. Still feeling it?
Is this the new business as usual to be a more adaptive and resilient board? When you ask people, “How are you?” the standard answer has gone from “Good!” to “Busy…”. Tim Kreider, essayist of “The Busy Trap” recently penned an op-ed for the NYT that sums up this blip in the zeitgeist, “Everyone is still busy — worse than busy, exhausted, too wiped at the end of the day to do more than stress-eat, binge-watch and doomscroll.”
He thinks it’s to do with a collective disenchantment in the virtue of hard work. That’s spiritually depleting. Morally exhausting.
I think there’s another psychological weight at play too, particularly for board directors: Ambiguity. Let me explain.
The big C has happened. Is happening. We’re now in inflation. Supply chain breakdowns. Recession? Then you have the big CC – Climate Change – and the Russia-evoked urgency to switch to energy-independent economies. Put simply, there are some looming biggies in the world right now that businesses, and their directors, need to weigh up. Carefully.
All that results in more homework. More research. More questions. More forecasting. More analysis. More discussion. More deliberation. More complexity. More humming and arring.
More time.
Couple this with the fact that term limits for boards are becoming more normal. While the old guard still reckons the minimum tenure for a board should be >15yrs, the reality is that boards are refreshing under 9.
That’s a good thing. Refreshment keeps you agile, and adaptive. It lessens rot.
But there’s a flip. It makes the job of governing far foggier. Because the sort of long-term decisions you as board directors are asked to make, likely won’t play out within your tenure.
Our brains don’t deal well with that kind of ambiguity. The neuroscience is hissing at us. In 2016, Nature published a study in which scientists made subjects play a video game. In it, snakes were under random rocks. If you turned over a rock with a snake under it, you got an actual electric zap.
Stress levels were their highest, not when snakes were under rocks (and therefore your risk of being zapped) 100% of the time. Or 0%. But 50%. When it could’ve gone either way. Uncertainty is what makes us stressed. Anxious. Busy. Preoccupied. Exhausted. The pressure to be certain in an increasingly uncertain environment is crushing board decisiveness. Which, paradoxically, stymies the orgs they govern.
So what’s the solution for Future Directors? To care more and pour ever more time into our duties? To stop caring because you won’t have to clean up the muck?
Or is it to care more carefully?
A Future Director is someone who is comfortable in the uncomfortable. It's doing the best we can with what we know and recognising and accepting what is outside our control. Setting boundaries with yourself and your colleagues - removing the pressure to make the right decision and replacing it with the pressure to make the best decision possible.
The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman summed up 10+ yrs of his mental health column with 8 secrets he’s uncovered. One of them is fully reckoning that the future, by its nature, is unknowable:
“It’s freeing to grasp that no amount of fretting will ever alter this truth. It’s still useful to make plans. But do that with the awareness that a plan is only ever a present-moment statement of intent, not a lasso thrown around the future to bring it under control. The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti said his secret was simple: “I don’t mind what happens.” That needn’t mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped.”
Perhaps, if we all try this, we can go from answering “Busy” when someone asks how we are, back to saying “Good”.
