The Road to Ruin for Boards

"We did that last year, didn't we?" was what the board chair from a school said to me last week on a call. She was in touch to invite me back to work with the board again at the start of the coming school year and we were talking about topics; I had just suggested inserting a brief governance refresher geared toward newer board members. We did Governance 101 last year when four of nine board members were brand new, and no one on the board had been through orientation at all. She questioned the value of what seemed to her like repetition.My response was that inculcating good governance practice is an inherently Sisyphean task--the rock rolls back down the hill every year as (1) new members join the board, and (2) returning members slide back toward their own internal notions of how best to govern. Consistent, repeated training in good governance practice is the best way to keep the rock at the top of the hill.This is not a self-serving response from a governance consultant! A refresher need not take all day, and can easily combine with a more strategic and generative board retreat agenda. I don't find the independent school governance model (strategic board delegating all management decisions to school administrators) to be at all "natural" or intuitive to most board members. Left to their sense of governance prudence, too many members default to a stakeholder/operational mode where second-guessing management is commonplace.Stopping (not to mention never starting) training in good governance is among the fastest roads to ruin for private, independent school boards.