A Conference on Governance

So the International Policy Governance Association is putting on a conference--on what else but Policy Governance. The conference is titled "The Future of Boards: Realizing the Promise of Owner-Accountability" and will be held in Chicago, June 10-12, 2004. I am really looking forward to this learning experience from some of the experienced practitioners and consultants in the field today. I have been to several recent seminars on this topic and the approach is to talk about "best practices" in response to the obviously broken parts of the board governance system. They usually tell some stories about a board of director's dysfunctionality, make the audience laugh because everyone has faced some similar dysfunctionality and they the propose some fix for that particular problem.

In the Policy Governance model, the whole system is addressed and a new paradigm is built around some real or perceived value added that the board of directors brings to an organization. This is described as linkage between the ownership and the organization. The values brought by the board then are reduced to an explicit, written form of policies in four categories: ends, limitations or means, board-staff partnership, and board process.

Because I have had the opportunity to serve on several boards and work for one over the years I understand the need for addressing these issues with great clarity. I hope that my experience at this conference proves valuable for my work with MEDA providing technical assistance to community-based and faith-based organizations and for use with other organizations in the future. I will let you know how it progresses.