Me or your lyin' eyes ...

Imagine you are a board member at the Ford Motor Company. Imagine that you also drive a Ford. Imagine that the Ford you drive is a lemon; it has had numerous seemingly intractable problems that the dealer, despite knowing your role in the company, can't seen to fix. You have mentioned the problem to Bill Ford, Chairman and CEO, and he has been sympathetic, but still your keep having the same problem with your car.Now imagine that you are sitting in a board meeting listening to someone on Bill's executive team report that Ford's customer satisfaction rates are in the industry upper quartile and that "scrap" (cars known to be defective right off the assembly line) is at an all-time low. Who are you going to believe: your own lived experience as a Ford owner or what management is telling you? In short, will you believe Bill or your lying eyes (apologies to the Marx Brothers in "Duck Soup")?Bill will certainly insist that you believe him; after all, good practice says that the board should trust management. But it will be harder and harder to trust every time you hear the same old rattle from underneath the dashboard. At some point, you will likely just conclude that Bill and his team are blowing smoke to obfuscate a serious quality issue.Now imagine that your neighbor--who bought a Ford precisely because you are a board member--tells you his model is a lemon, too. What will you do the next time Bill's CEO report mentions the company's tremendous gains in quality?This scenario plays out every day in independent and international schools. Heads do themselves a disservice when they gloss over the lived experiences of board members, and board members do their heads a disservice when they fail to recognize that their child's experience may not be typical of everyone. In my experience, the onus is on heads, not board members. It's hard to disbelieve your own eyes.