What is the optimal board size?

If you are a swimmer the 16 toes may be perfect but if are part of a decision-making group too many piggy’s can spoil the process. According to Decide and Deliver: 5 steps to Breakthrough Performance in your Organization [ii] seven is the ideal number for a decision-making group and that each additional member reduces performance by 10%.

Where was this little factoid when I really needed it? For years we pleaded with our board of 18 to downsize but to no avail. Others have described this process as being similar to asking turkeys to vote for thanksgiving.  One president justified his support of the big board process by quoting Pareto’s 80/20 law.  I didn’t really understand the correlation but assume he believed that if only 20% of the board actually produced significant results the more the merrier.  A group of 12 would then deliberately reduce their decision-making capacity by 40%, by 17 that number jumps to 65% and by 25 a groups reasoning ability is down to just 15%.

The average nonprofit board size is 16[ii] while the for profit sector board size averages only 11. Granted board members bring more to the table than just decision-making, but is the tradeoff in creative thinking worth it?

Boards come in all kinds, shapes, sizes and purposes.  This article is directed toward any decision making group.  Do you think your group is creative?  The facts say individuals actually perform better in tests of creativity.  But what about those amazing brainstorming sessions.  Eighteen independent studies proved that “groups brainstorming together produce fewer ideas than individuals working separately“.*    The really frightening part is that we have known the ineffectiveness of this process for half a century and many still use it today.  It is not that we don’t need the diversity of ideas we simply need a more refined process.

Roberts Rules, Carvers Policy Governance are both great for control but what if what you really need is innovation?  Add to this collaborative conundrum is the inclination for exaggeration.  If you were to guess what groups take the most creative liberty when applying the “fudge factor” would your thoughts immediately gravitate to those groups with altruistic intentions?  Certainly those without the motivation of personal gain would be more honest but the reality is that the guise of doing for others provides more creative license when it comes to deceptive decision-making.   I am not implying these embellishments are intentional but that we are unaware of the extent to which we are oblivious to our own obfuscation.

The challenge is not just that we don’t know what we don’t know but that even when we do know we can’t stop, what Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman calls our System One thinking from trying to convince us otherwise.

Take this image as an example.   Even after you measure the circles and know for a fact they are both the same size your mind still sees the center circle on the left as being larger.  This is what Kahneman calls the System One override.  It never stops working.

Here are ten questions to consider when thinking about the creativity of your team.

1. Does your board “Get along” too well? Is there a system for creative discourse?

2. Are you a model of efficiency proficient in Roberts Rules and Policy Governance? Do these systems enhance or undermine creativity?

3. Do personalities override policies, are personal agendas allowed to steal away the few precious hours you have together?

4. Are creative ideas nourished and explored or quickly expunged by those who know?

5. Are all sides of an issue explored by everyone at the table, or do roles, alliances and fiefdoms lobby for their own acceptable outcomes without considering alternate possibilities?

6. Do members approach each meeting with an open mind to mutual discovery or with a mind to help others discover what they already know?

7. Do you give equal time to what you should stop doing as you do to what you start?

8. Do you ever “wait it out” for a changing of the guard?

9. Do you spend more time trying to “line up the pieces” than producing an outcome?

10. Does the system occasionally become so unproductive that most real progress happens “back stage” only to be acted out once the meeting begins?

[ii] Decide and Deliver: 5 steps to Breakthrough Performance in your Organization, Marcia W. Blenko, Michael C. Mankins, and Paul Rogers.

[ii] BoardSource Report 2007, National Center for Nonprofit Boards, the National Association of Corporate Directors, The National Center for Non-Profit Boards, National Governance Survey of Chief Executives
*Michael Diehl; Wolfgang Stroebe (1987). “Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: Toward the Solution of a Riddle”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53: 497–509.