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Daniel Student: Let’s just talk about where boards are today. So we identified…five challenges that boards were facing. There is a fear of bringing in outsiders, and I think this is really a commonality, whether you’re a very small start-up board or going through many, many years together. Board culture is extremely important. It takes a lot of work and effort to build, and there is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that goes into an organization to make it successful. So there’s a sense of when things even feel like they’re working, it can be scary to bring folks in. And also there’s a sense of ownership and control that some board members work through, and this can be a little scary to go through that. There’s also an issue that boards reward donors only with board seats. It just becomes sort of a thing you do when you donate enough, and it doesn’t actually recognize whether you’re at a place to really give that engagement and to give that ambassadorship to the organization. Related to the two above, it is a small and overextended talent pool. What we mean by this is we often find that board members are just jumping from organization to organization. It’s the same group. They bring the one person that they invite to the other board, and they go to the next one. And it’s sort of a circle in communities, and that’s really making it hard for them to contribute in any substantial way beyond potentially maybe some financial contribution that would really move forward the organization.

I think, really notably to this process, new voices are hard to find for boards. That’s a constant complaint they have: that they really want to do it and they just don’t know how. And then they do it, and they get lots of high fives, and then a year later, that person leaves because they’re not actually feeling welcome in that space. And the board feels like they’ve done everything they can to make them feel welcome, and it still wasn’t enough, and it’s a really hard cycle to break.

And then I think the most familiar and most near-term thing that we all deal with is just board members that aren’t engaged, and often we’re in a place where we’re not quite sure how to change that cycle, how to get them more engaged, how to find someone else who can come in and be engaged. So this is what we think of as a network problem. This is something where we are constantly moving in the same circles and asking to solve the same issues.…It’s that old adage, right? If you’re going to just keep doing it again the same way and expecting change, it’s never going to happen. Ninety-six percent of boards rely on board members’ personal networks for their recruitment, and 88 percent rely on CEO/ED networks. These were the two largest numbers by far in this poll that was put forward [asking], Where do you get your board members from? The personal networks of your board and your CEO/ED. And the result of that, not surprisingly, is an insider-centric culture, limited innovation because it’s the same group of people, you’re not hearing new ideas, overextended people, and a lack of diverse voices.

So we just have to say to ourselves, what we’re getting is what you would expect to get from the way that we recruit. It’s not that we’re not trying. It’s just the expectation of how we’re trying. That’s what we should expect. We shouldn’t expect anything else.