Syndicates

Continuing peer dialogue where directors consider experience, test perspectives and support one another’s development, sustaining reflection in practice.

Some governance questions do not lend themselves to a seminar.

They arrive untidily.

The facts are incomplete. Relationships matter. Several interpretations are possible. The technically correct answer may not resolve the underlying question.

And experienced directors do not always need another person telling them what to do.

Sometimes they need a sufficiently trusted space in which to think.

BoardElegance™ Syndicates provide that space.

Continuing practice rather than another program

Syndicates bring directors together in a confidential, carefully held environment to engage with contemporary, emerging and complex questions of governance and stewardship.

The work may begin with a carefully constructed case.

At other times, an emerging governance challenge or appropriately protected lived dilemma may provide the point of inquiry.

Cases are not presented as puzzles with a hidden correct answer.

They are entered, examined and sometimes revisited.

Participants may discover that the most useful question is not What would I do? but What is actually happening here?

What assumptions are operating?

Where does authority sit?

What has not been said?

What competing responsibilities are present?

What might be visible from a different perspective?

What changes when the time horizon moves from the next meeting to the next five years?

The wisdom in the room

The facilitator does not occupy the position of expert with the answer.

Nor is the Syndicate conventional coaching or an advice forum.

The facilitator's role is to hold the container: to protect the quality of inquiry, the conditions of trust and the integrity of the conversation.

The wisdom of participants is allowed to do its work.

The Five Tenors may provide lenses through which a matter can be examined, but they are not a template into which every question must be forced.

They offer points of orientation — ways of noticing dimensions of a situation that might otherwise remain beneath the surface.

Trust changes the conversation

For experienced directors and Chairs, there are matters that are difficult to explore in ordinary professional settings.

Not because they are necessarily dramatic, but because context, reputation, relationships and confidentiality matter.

A stable and trusted group makes a different quality of conversation possible.

Difference does not have to be resolved immediately.

Uncertainty does not have to be disguised.

A question can remain open long enough to become a better question.

And another person's experience may illuminate something without becoming advice.

That is why the Syndicates are deliberately conceived as continuing practice.

Judgement develops through experience, reflection, conversation and return.

Governance does too.