A proposal arrives at a board meeting having been discussed individually with four of seven members over the preceding fortnight. It passes without difficulty.
Two readings are available and both are common. That this is how competent people operate, since nobody should be surprised in a meeting. Or that the meeting was decorative and the decision happened elsewhere.
Which reading is correct depends on something specific that happened during those conversations.
Why it exists
The practice is not a corruption of meetings. It responds to real properties of how groups behave.
People encountering a substantial proposal for the first time in a room, under observation, cannot evaluate it properly and know it. The safe response is to defer or to raise an objection that buys time, and both produce worse decisions than the same person would make with three days.
Individual conversations also surface objections that would never be voiced publicly. A member with a reservation about a colleague’s competence will say it privately and never in a room, and that reservation may be the most important fact about the proposal.
So the alternative to pre-wiring is not purer deliberation. It is deliberation with worse information and more posturing.
The distinction
Preparation and manipulation use identical mechanics and differ in one respect: whether you are collecting information or collecting commitments.
Preparation asks what would concern you about this, and comes away with a proposal changed by what it heard. The person doing it can name three things they modified.
Manipulation asks whether you can support this, secures agreement, and arrives at the meeting with the outcome fixed and a discussion that cannot alter it. The proposal is identical to the one that entered the first conversation.
The test is straightforward and worth applying honestly: could this meeting still change the decision? If not, the meeting is a ratification, and it should be described as one rather than conducted as though deliberation were occurring.
Doing it properly
Go to the sceptic first. The instinct is to start with allies and accumulate momentum. Starting with the person most likely to object gets you the strongest version of the objection while there is still time to address it, and it means the proposal that reaches supporters has already survived something.
Ask rather than pitch. The conversation is for finding out what is wrong with the idea. A person who feels they were sold to in private will resist in public, partly because being managed is unpleasant and partly because the public room is where they can register it.
Change something visibly. If nobody’s input altered anything, everybody learns what the consultation was. One accepted modification, credited by name in the meeting, is worth more than any amount of expressed appreciation.
Do not ask for commitment. Seeking a promise of support converts an exploratory conversation into a transaction, and it binds the person against information that arrives later. Asking whether they see a problem leaves them free.
Public bodies cannot do this
Everything above applies to private organizations. For a board subject to open meeting requirements, a substantial part of it is unavailable and the reasons are covered elsewhere in this chapter.
A chair working through members one at a time to establish where a matter stands is conducting the body’s deliberation outside a public meeting, whatever the intent, and sequential conversations can amount to the same thing as a group discussion. This is the trap that catches conscientious members most often, precisely because the behaviour is normal everywhere else in their professional lives.
What remains available is the packet. Circulating the substance in advance, through the clerk, to everybody at once, accomplishes the legitimate purpose of pre-wiring, which is that nobody encounters a major proposal for the first time in the room. The specifics belong with your attorney.
Being pre-wired
The receiving side deserves the same attention and gets almost none.
Somebody has come to discuss a proposal before a meeting. Two questions clarify what kind of conversation this is. Who else have you spoken to? And: what has changed as a result of those conversations?
An honest answer to the second is the whole tell. A proposer who has modified the proposal is consulting. One who has spoken to five people and changed nothing is counting votes, and you are being asked for one rather than for a view.
Where you have a reservation, say it privately and then say it again in the room. Reservations expressed only in private allow the proposer to represent the body’s position inaccurately and leave the objection unavailable to everybody else who might have shared it.
What the practice costs when overused
An organization where everything is settled beforehand has meetings that are theatre, and everybody attending knows it.
The consequences accumulate quietly. New members learn that influence is exercised elsewhere and stop preparing. Objections stop being raised publicly, which means they stop being answered publicly, which means the record shows unanimity that did not exist. And the body loses the one thing a group deliberating together produces that individual conversations cannot, which is the argument nobody anticipated.
Some matters should arrive undecided, be genuinely argued, and be resolved in the room. A body that has not done that in a year is not a deliberative body any more, whatever its constitution says.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD