The Board Meeting

Today I had my 15 minutes at the board meeting. About half an hour before the call, Leah called and changed what she wanted me to focus on during my bit. That blew the little bit of preparation I had actually mananged to work up, but in the end it turned out okay. I think it freed me up to go ahead and speak extemporaneously, and gave me the self-permission I needed to flub up. Just that little bit of permission was all I needed to speak from the head and the heart.

Members of the board were receptive and asked some good questions. For example, one of the employee networking groups is brand new in the Columbus market. The chair of that group wanted to know if she could interview people in another market since there was no history here. I was able to improvise a decent answer, and it gave me a chance to expound on the immediacy of the appreciative approach. I told her she could certainly interview members in another market, or she might want to use this opportunity to identify potential new members in this market and tailor the interview protocol a bit to emphasize the idea of building a new organization. That option could begin generating excitement and energy about her group.

I had a chance to 'observe' Leah as she facilitated the call. This added familiarity with her style humanized her for me and made the process less intimidating.

Initially I thought the board comprised 17 people. With the expansion of the Cultural Exchange from seven employee networking groups to nine, the 2006 board consists of 22 individuals. This is good news, as it will potentially provide us with a larger number of interviews and a wider variety of stories, quotes, and ideas.

All in all, I think it went well. Now I need to produce some materials to support the board in moving forward with the interviews. First, they will need a few sentences requesting that they identify members of their groups for interviewing. That message will give them some guidelines for choosing people. Leah and I will also need to talk about the appreciative topics around which we want to build the interview protocol. Then, I will need to actually produce the protocol. All of this needs to happen this week, probably.