Management runs education sessions for directors on the market, technology, or competitive shift behind a strategy, so by the time a decision comes the board shares the facts it rests on.
An example
Subscriptions, the board of a regional newspaper group believed, were a niche. The chief digital officer thought the company had to move from advertising to subscriptions within three years, and the directors, mostly former publishers and local business owners, were not ready to hear it. A year before she planned to bring a proposal, she asked the chief executive for forty minutes at each of four board meetings. Each session took one topic: what subscribers pay for, how advertising rates had moved, and what similar groups had tried, including two attempts that failed. She brought outside speakers to two of them and handed out the underlying data. When the proposal finally came, a director who had been skeptical asked why the plan waited until the second year to raise prices. The board approved it on a faster timetable than she had proposed.
Why it works
Education sessions make the eventual proposal look better and easier to accept, because the directors already share the facts the strategy rests on: decisions follow from premises, and the sessions set the premises before any decision is on the table. Directors then judge the proposal from an understanding of the market they built themselves. It needs balanced material that includes the evidence against the strategy, started well before the decision.
The thinking behind it
Herbert A. Simon In Administrative Behavior (1947), Herbert Simon analyzes organizations as systems of decisions in which individual choices are shaped by premises the organization supplies, such as goals, information, and procedures, so whoever controls those premises influences the decisions made from them. Board education sessions work on the premises: by the time the subscription proposal arrived, directors were reasoning from facts about the market they already held. The same idea explains why balance matters, since one-sided premises produce one-sided conclusions.
When it fits
Strategies that depend on a market or technology shift the board does not know well, with months to go before the decision. You need the chief executive's support for board time, good outside material, and the willingness to show evidence that cuts against you. With a decision imminent, there is no time for it to work.
How to use it well
Start months before the decision, and ask the chief executive or chair for regular time on the board agenda.
- Teach one topic per session, with data and outside voices.
- Include what cuts against the strategy: failures, risks, competing views.
- Leave the recommendation out of the early sessions.
- Give directors the source material to read on their own, and answer their questions at the next session.
When the proposal comes, tie it to what the board learned, and point out where the facts are still uncertain or contested.
What it costs and where it backfires
Board time is scarce, and education sessions use it. Directors may learn enough to reach a different conclusion from yours. If the sessions look like a sales campaign, the board will discount them and the proposal with them. Balance is the condition. One-sided material, speakers who all agree, or facts that leave out the risks turn education into steering the board, and directors who later hear the other side elsewhere will resent it.
When it is used on you
Attend a rival's education sessions and ask about the evidence against the strategy. Suggest a speaker with another view, or a topic the sessions skipped. Ask that the risks be on the record, in the board's own papers, before the proposal arrives.