Structuring How We Think About Governance
Someone’s answer to the questions: “How can I make this nonprofit’s board better?” and “What is the optimal governance system for this nonprofit?” would be quite different, with the first phrasing priming an individual to think iteratively and the second priming the individual to develop a new system from the ground up. The lens we use for investigating governance structures must not be shaped by presuming the preeminence of legacy governance models.
When we were developing our school, The Collins Institute (CollinsInstitute.org), we did not ask the question: “How can education be made better?”
Instead, we asked: “What would the perfect educational system look like?”
We are not the smartest of people, yet through a simple change in framing we were able to develop an educational system capable of outcompeting extant models at a significantly lower cost.
If we want to be able to think outside the box and develop novel governance systems, or identify problems with extant systems others might not be seeing, we will need to take as wide a view of governance as possible. If we define governance as “a system for interacting to help a group of individuals synergize their efforts to achieve a common goal,” we can begin to think about the core components any such system would have.
When we break governances into basic components, they can largely be thought of as consisting of interconnected modules, each made up of deciders and selectors. Deciders coordinate the actions of that governance module’s purview, while selectors determine who or what the deciders will be. One governance module can exist nested within another, like a matryoshka doll, with its decider being an aspect of the other governance module’s selector (e.g., three bodies of representatives elected through different means could themselves vote on another body of governance). That might all sound pretty esoteric, so let’s dive in to get a better example of what we mean.