220. How do we hope to spend our time?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer. OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.   TRANSCRIPT Question #18: How do we hope to spend our time? Today and in general. Time scarcity is probably the thing that makes board work most complicated. I guess that’s kind of like saying that time scarcity is what makes life most complicated. Still, my point stands. One of the most remarkable things about my work with boards over the years is how similarly different boards tend to spend their time. This is especially true considering that boards really have tonnes of control over what they do and how they do it. Boards could choose to spend an entire year composing a rock opera about a tarantula and an aardvark who become best friends and travel the world, as long as they do the bare minimum of compliance. It wouldn’t be a particularly smart or savvy way to approach their work, but still…it’s up to them. And that’s really my point: if boards can basically do whatever they want with their time, why do they mostly all do the same things? And funny enough, the pile of standard board stuff seems to expand to fill exactly as much time as we have allocated for meetings – or maybe a bit more, but never less. This means boards have a convenient excuse not to try anything new: we don’t have time! But what if we permitted ourselves one conversation – maybe during a strategic retreat so as not to intrude on precious board meeting time – where we pretended that none of what we tend to spend our time on were mandatory. What WOULD we spend our time on. What topics, what conversations, what presentations, what meals and breaks, how much time on which things? Maybe we could take one tiny step toward that dream at every meeting.