Boardpath · How We Work
How we work
Most of this page is about limits. A board is being asked to let an outsider into the room where it decides things, and the terms of that ought to be written down before anyone agrees to anything.
This page concerns
All six disciplines
Six commitments, three of which cost us something
Every engagement runs against matters the board is actually deciding, using the board’s own papers and its own record. Case studies and worked examples are comfortable and they do not change how a board behaves in the room. If there is nothing consequential in front of the board, it is usually better to wait until there is.
Boardpath reads minutes, papers and past decisions before proposing anything. This is occasionally uncomfortable, because a board’s record says more about how it decides than any interview will. It is also the only way to tell which discipline is carrying the weakness rather than which one the board suspects.
The first conversation is forty-five minutes and produces a point of view, not a pitch. If the smallest useful next step is something the board can do on its own, that is what you will hear, and Boardpath would rather say so than sell an engagement that will not hold.
What a director or a chief executive says in a one-to-one stays there. What Boardpath concludes belongs to the board, in writing, including the parts the board would rather not read. An adviser who softens a finding to keep a relationship is worth nothing to a fiduciary body.
Scope, duration and fee are agreed in writing before the engagement begins. Boardpath does not bill by the hour, because hourly billing makes an adviser’s interests and a board’s interests point in different directions.
The measure of the work is whether the board still runs the system a year after Boardpath has gone. Engagements are built so the chair and corporate secretary can carry them, and an adviser who becomes structurally necessary has failed at the actual job.
The shape of the work
Find which discipline is actually producing the difficulty. This is almost never the one the board names, which is why it comes first and why it is done from the record rather than from opinions.
Write down what has been left implicit: what the organization is steering toward, whose call things are, what a board paper has to contain. Written badly this is bureaucracy. Written well it is the thing that makes deliberation possible.
Run it against a real matter with Boardpath in the room. Anything that has not met a live decision has not been tested, and the failure is always the case nobody anticipated.
The board adopts it, the chair and corporate secretary carry it, and Boardpath goes. If the board cannot run it without help, the work was not finished.
Boundaries
Said plainly, because a board that finds this out three weeks in has wasted everyone’s time.
Where a constitution, statute or fiduciary duty governs, that goes to a lawyer. Boardpath works on how a board decides, not on what the law requires of it.
Boardpath does not tell a board what its strategy should be. It works on whether the board is able to choose one and rule things out against it.
No director scoring, no individual performance reporting, no 360 exercise. The unit of work is the board, not the people on it.
If the real problem is that the wrong person holds a role, Boardpath will say so and will not be the one to replace them.
Boardpath does not take standing retainers, and does not sit on the boards of organizations it has worked with.
Free · No contact required
Twenty-four statements about how your board actually works. You get a score for each of the six disciplines and a plain read of where confidence is leaking. Nobody calls you.
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Fees, scope, what happens to what you say, and whether Boardpath is the right thing at all. Those are reasonable things to settle before a board is asked to agree to anything.