Do We Need Boards, Really?

In the Industrial Era, having boards of directors, oversight and governing boards were sacrosanct in any consideration of management accountability. That was the era of massive information gaps dividing the world into knowledge haves and have-nots. What you know was literally determined by who you know. Some of us could certainly be smarter than all of us. There were also massive skill gaps where only the educated privileged could rise to the assumed competence of leadership.

In this era, that narrative is in question. We benefit from diverse and deep resource networks of people with unique expertise and connections. And we can have competent organizational governance that can pull in these resources when research and decisions call for them. If people need to learn how to invite, include and integrate resource network expertise, we can provide that learning for them. If people need to learn how to optimize the inevitable contradictions in expert perspectives, we can give them that learning also.