Some insightsfrom the world of new technologies

Taking Policy Governance to the Mainstream by Caroline Oliver

Have you ever expressed your enthusiasm for Policy Governance only to be met by a blank stare? Do you wonder what could be done to create greater awareness of the advantages ofpolicy Governance both for your own board and for others? Caroline Oliver, Policy Governance consultant, general editor of The Policy Governance Fieldbook, and designated chair of the soon-to-be-launched Policy Governance Association, looks to the world of high technology for some answers.

RECENTLY DISCOVERED a fascinating book I called Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by GeoMey A. Moore (HarperCollins, rev. ed., 1999). As I read it, the parallels between new tech- nology and Policy Governance struck me with considerable force.

Governance is indeed a new technology, what Moore defines as a “discontinuous innovation”-an innovation that places a new level of demand on consumers, requiring that they change their current behavior. Moving to Policy Governance has often been described as making a paradigm shift, and it would therefore not be surprising if it faced many of the same obstacles that new technologies do on the way from initial conception to mainstream adoption.

The Adoption Cycle Moore suggests that adoption of a new technology follows a particular cycle.

nology are “technology enthusiasts,” people who just love technology for its own sake. Enthusiasts, says Moore, are “like kindling-they start the fire.” Hard on the heels of this group are the “vision- aries.” These are the people who have the foresight to “match an emerging technol- ogy to a strategic opportunity,” the people with the ability to translate that insight into a project and the charisma to get oth- ers to buy in. Next are the “early majority,” the people who drive the development of

At the most basic level, Policy

The first people to take on a new tech-

mainstream adoption, followed by the more conservative “late majority” and finally the “laggards,” who may never adopt the technology at all.

The Chasm If your goal is to move a new technology through to mainstream adoption, accord- ing to Moore, you need to move your product as far as possible through the adoption cycle. The problem is that what appeals to each of the groups of people he identified is different from what appeals to the rest. In other words, you need different marketing strategies, depending on where your product is in the adoption cycle.

Moore asserts that the biggest gap, the “chasm,” lies between the visionaries and the early majority. He suggests that failure to understand this chasm and take up the challenge of crossing it has left many potentially great new-technology products to languish and eventually die, stuck in the no-man’s land between pio- neering and mainstream customers.

It seems to me that it could be argued that Policy Governance stands on the edge of that chasm-that mainstream adop- tion is possible, but we are not there yet.

Understanding Who’s Who Looking a little more closely at the people in the different stages of the adoption cycle reveals the nature of the challenge. The enthusiasts hardly need marketing at all. They seek the product out, explore it, and talk to the creator and each other about it. I would suggest that many of the people who

have been through the Policy Governance Academy would fall into this category.

Visionaries are also relatively easy to reach. These are people who are inter- ested in being change agents. They are future-oriented. They like being first and are therefore prepared to bear with the inevitable bugs and glitches that accom- pany all significant innovations. I would suggest that many of the people who have inspired and pioneered the applica- tion of Policy Governance to date would fall into this category.

The members of the early majority are quite different. Theywant to buy a “pro- ductivity improvement for existing opera- tions.” They are pragmatists, looking to minimize the disruption of taking on something new. They do not want to “debug somebody else’s product,” and they are not impressed by endorsements from visionaries, whom they regard as impractical dreamers. I have come across a great many people and organizations whose attitudes toward Policy Governance would place them in this category.

tives who instinctively resist innovation and are highly risk-averse. They will not adopt a new technology until it has gained wide acceptance among the early major- ity. The laggards are the real skeptics who do not participate at all except to block or reject. These are the people who currently dismiss Policy Governance altogether.

Crossing the Chasm Moore’s suggested strategy for crossing the chasm is to iden@ a very clear market segment within the early majority and to go all out to reach them. He also suggests selecting that segment on the basis of the likelihood that it will be considered a good source of references for the next segment you want to target and in this manner to keep reaching ever further into the main- stream. Once a si@cant proportion of the early majority has fallen under your spell, the late majority will inevitably fol- low, and the mainstream will have been won. This makes a lot of sense. Targeting a particular segment means that instead of being scattered all over, resources can be focused on speaking to the members of that group in a way that they are accus- tomed to being addressed in their particu-

The late majority consists of conserva-

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POLICY GOVERNANCE ASSOCIATION UPDATE The founding board of the Policy Governance Association (Caroline Oliver, chair; Bill Chamey, Miriam Carver, Jannice Moore, Raymond Lemieux, Denise Paskiewicz, and Linda Stier) held its second meeting in November. The associa- tion is to be incorporated in the United States as a professional membership organization. The name “The International Policy Governance Association” is currently being verified. The board intends to invite membership starting in early 2001. If you would like to receive membership information as soon as it is avail- able, please e-mail Caroline Oliver at coliver@cgocable.net.

I

lar industq-this is especially important to the pragmatist early majority.

Marketing Policy Governance The inroads that Policy Governance has already made are predominantly in the nonprofit sector; it has been adopted to a lesser extent in the public sector and hardly at all in the private sector. Positive word-of-mouth has spread mainly through speeches and peer networking at industry-specific events, articles in industry-specific journals, and books published for the nonprofit and public sectors. The net result (based on general observations rather than hard evidence) is a thin covering of most segments of the nonprofit sector and a thinner covering of fewer segments of the private sector, mainly in the United States and Canada.

Of course, given that all of this has occurred without the benefit of a large organization with professional marketing staff, the spread of Policy Governance is a triumph. But viewed from where most readers of Board Leadership would like it to be, we have only just begun. I believe that the advent of the Policy Governance Association, due to be launched in early summer 2001, offers an opportunity for enthusiasts and visionaries to come together to build a strategy for taking Policy Governance to the mainstream, and we have a lot of thinking to do about the most effective way to set about that task and organizing ourselves to take it on.

The Challenges Identifymg the most influential market segments and organizing ourselves to reach them is one thing, but perhaps the biggest challenge of all is determining

how to speak to pragmatists and conser- vatives about Policy Governance. These are the people who fear that Policy Governance is a fad rather than a trend, and these are the people who will ulti- mately determine on which side of the fence it falls. Geoffrey Moore mentions that platform technologies, as opposed to applications, have a particular problem in reaching the pragmatists because they are not specific to any one industry or sit- uation that the pragmatists relate to. Policy Governance could be described as a platform technology for governance, and I hear echoes here of the voices of those who resist the implication that Policy Governance is a “one size fits all” solution that can work for any board.

Moore’s recommendation is that for platform technologies to cross the chasm, they need to “dress themselves up” as applications for as long as it takes for the mainstream market to be secured. What would be wrong with marketing Policy Governance for school boards or Policy Governance for human service organizations or Policy Governance for regulatory organizations? The fact that they would all be fundamentally the same thing doesn’t matter. What matters to the pragmatists and conservatives is that they can perceive the program as being tailored to their particular industry.

Developing the “Whole Product” The other strategies Moore suggests relate to creating “whole product” solutions and positioning. People in the mainstream, as already noted, do not want to be sorting out bugs and ghtches. The more conserva- tive they are, the more they want things to be smooth and easy. They do not want to be solving new problems brought on by a

new technology; they want the new tech- nology to come fuuy assembled, with all the add-ons built in and a full panoply of easily available support services-hence the need to offer mainstreamers the “whole product.” What could this mean for Policy Governance?

that there are many more. How about consulting packages that incorporate legal services and coaching? How about creating networks of “expert supports” from different types of industries who would be willing to donate or sell advice to other people implementing Policy Governance in their field? How about more “ready-made” tools for evalua- tion, monitoring, agenda planning, and other governance processes? There are examples in The Policy Governance Fieldbook and other Policy Governance literature, but we have a long way to go in developing Policy Governance tools that are truly user-friendly.

I see several possibilities, and I trust

Positioning One of the things often said about Policy Governance is that it is-for the moment, at least-one of a kind. Nothing else out there comes close to matching it. In fact, it is a solution to a problem that hasn’t even really been fully recognized yet. For the enthusiast and the visionary, all this is music to the ears, but for the mainstream, it is deeply disconcerting. Mainstreamers seek the familiar and the known.

The solution, according to Crossing the Chasm, would be to “create competition”-to position Policy Governance as similar to something that people already know. For instance, how about “Policy Governance is to boards what strategic plans are to CEOs, an alter- native to committee-based approaches to governance”? Or “You are perhaps famil- iar with management by objectives. Well, Policy Governance is governance by objectives-creating trustee agendas as distinct from staff agendas.”

One very important point to make is that feeling superior about our early adop- tion of Policy Governance is not going to help. After all, we are all at different places in the adoption cycle in relation to differ- ent things. For instance, I may be a very

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Monitoring (continuedfrom page 1)

Coaching Analysis: The CEO has done a good job of interpreting the policy crite- rion, but the data provided as evidence are akin to loading up a truck with man- agement reports and dumping them on the board table. It is easy to fall into the trap of simply handing the board reports that subordinates have prepared and submitted for management purposes. However, reports that provide reams of detailed data originally collected for management purposes are not generally useful for governing. Summarize relevant data in key categories to provide “gover- nance-friendly’’ information that gives evidence of policy compliance. This report also demonstrates the “numbers game” problem because it reports only raw numbers, which are difficult to inter- pret in a meaningful way. The following example illustrates how this report could be improved by strategically summariz- ing, providing percentages instead of raw numbers, and including trend informa- tion over time.

Improved Monitoring Report:

Type of Hazard 1999 1998 ment

Hazards likely to 27.4 35.2 22.2 precipitate a fall (scatter rugs, slippery flooring, poor railing, no tub mats)

Fire hazards 14.2 20.0 29.0 (faulty appliances, use of oxygen, unsafe use of elec- trical cords, no smoke detector)

Unsafe storage 5.2 5.4 0.04 of dangerous materials (needles, medication, clean- ing compounds)

Miscellaneous 4.3 5.0 14.0 (aggressive pets)

Total homeswith 41.8 50.0 16.4 at least one hazard

“Based on 21 1 hazard assessments out of 220 clients. “Based on 198 hazard assessments out of 210 clients.

%of %of % Homes,” of Homes: Improve-

“We Haven’t Gotten Around to It”

Particularly for ends monitoring, it may take time to set up data collection meth-

ods that yield good evidence of achieve- ment because no processes may currently provide that sort of information. But this situation should not be an excuse for pro- crastinating forever. Lack of perfect data does not mean that you should provide no data at all. Provide the best that you can at the moment, identlfy the data’s limita- tions, and then get on with setting up bet- ter systems. Let the board know when it can expect to receive improved data. If you have to provide less than perfect information in the interim, even anecdo- tal information, that is better than resort- ing to reporting on means or simply putting off reporting altogether.

Summary To sum up, the CEO’s internal monitor- ing reports should provide real evidence, address all provisions of the policy being monitored, be stripped of nonessentials and “padding,” and be presented in a for- mat that is “governance-friendly.” Such straightforward and uncluttered reports make the board’s job of assessing policy compliance less time-consuming and more effective, leaving the board free to concentrate on ends deliberations that lead the organization into the future rather than waste time “looking in the rearview mirror.” 0

Jannice Moore can be reached at jannicemoore@cs.com.

Mainstream (continuedfrom page 7)

early adopter of Policy Governance, but I still don’t have a cell phone. I was a very early adopter of grocery shopping on the Internet, but please don’t speak to me about Palm Pilots! The last thing I want is some enthusiastic salesperson bamboo- zling me with inexplicable benefits or friends and colleagues making me feel prehistoric. I want plain, simple, fail-safe, easy-to-absorb, and readily available guidance on an easy-to-use product that I can see will make a difference in my par- ticular life. I’ll try hard to remember that the next time I start getting infuriated by the people who are currently resisting the charms of Policy Governance.

BOARD LEADERSHIP P O L I C Y G O V E R N A N C E I N A C T I O N

J O H N C A R V E R , ExecutiveEditor

Nimieliri 53, JAN.-FI;R. 2001

To Create a New Standard of Excellence in Governance

BI)~\RI) ~ , ~ , \ I I P . I I S I I I I ’ (ISSN 1061 -4249)

J o i i l \ i (::\inwi, I’II.~)., is widely regarded HS the world’s most provocative authority o n the gov- erning board role. He has consulted on five conti- nents with a wide variety (~forgaiiizoti~iis and h i i s

published more on governance than anyone else worldwide. Carver is creator of the Policy Governance’ model of board leadership. arguably the only co ii cup t 11 al 1y c o lie r e n t , i i n ive rsiil Iv applicable model o f governance available. I’olicy Governance is not a set structure. hut a paradigm of concepts and principles that enable accotint- ability, leadership, and productive relationships among boards. their constituencies. and their iiianagenients. Carver is author of llonrrls 7%nt Make (1 Diferencc. (Jossey-Bass, 19971, the audio program Emporcwririg Hoards fu r [.endership (Jossey-Rass, 19921. the video program lohit (Ariwr OII Ijoard (kwcwrrrrice (Jossey-Hass. 1993). and with his wife, Miriam Carver, N P i / i i w i f i i t g

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If this article has triggered any ideas that you would like to pass on to me

x as the chair of the Policy Governance Association, feel free to send me e-mail. Ci

? Caroline Oliver can be reached at coliver@cgocable.net. 0

2 ? Q, P-

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