Where Local Decisions Are Actually Made
Most of what shapes daily life in an Idaho community is settled by small bodies of ordinary people, meeting in the evening, frequently unopposed at election.…
Read →News & articles
Stories of Idaho leadership.
Leader profiles, participant spotlights, leadership lessons, and updates from across the Idaho Leaders network.
Institutions Under Population Change
Rapid growth strains institutions in a specific way: the arrangements that worked depended on shared assumptions, and newcomers arrive without them. The strain is usually misread…
Read →Running a Board Meeting That Matters
Volunteer boards spend most of their meeting time on reports and almost none on decisions. The agenda is the instrument, and almost nobody treats it as…
Read →The Founder Problem
Somebody who built a thing has an authority no successor can inherit and a set of judgments nobody can distinguish from the institution itself. Both are…
Read →Recording What Is Held
An afternoon, a recorder, and eight questions. The output is a dozen cases in the person's own words, which is the only form in which judgment…
Read →The Quorum Problem
Volunteer bodies fail from recruitment rather than from performance. The people who would serve well are the ones with the least available time, and nothing about…
Read →Holding Something in Trust
A steward is accountable to people who are not in the room and cannot advocate for themselves. That obligation conflicts with present interests constantly, and the…
Read →The Knowledge That Leaves
Institutional memory departs in generational waves rather than one person at a time, and the material lost is precisely what nobody thought to write down because…
Read →An Institution or a Following
Both look identical while the person is present. The difference appears at exactly one moment, and by then it is too late to do anything about…
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