Most governance books hand you a theory and wish you luck. Miriam Carver and Bill Charney’s The Board Member’s Playbook does something a coach would recognize — it makes you rehearse. Fifty realistic dilemmas, each one a moment where a board is about to do the natural thing and the wrong thing at the same time, worked through until the right move is obvious. If Boards That Make a Difference gives you the idea, this is where you practice it before the game is on the line.
There is a gap in most board training, and it’s the gap between agreeing with a principle in the room and remembering it at 8:40 on a Tuesday night when a respected member says “why don’t we just approve it and move on.” The Board Member’s Playbook is built for that gap. Carver and Charney take the model laid out in Boards That Make a Difference and stop explaining it. Instead they put you on the field.
The idea: rehearse, don’t lecture
The book’s premise is borrowed from anyone who has ever performed anything. You don’t learn the hard parts by hearing them described. You learn them by running the play until your body knows it. So the authors build the book as a set of scenarios — fifty of them — each a short, plausible situation a board actually faces, followed by a walk-through of how a board practicing Policy Governance would handle it and why.
They sort the scenarios into the places boards get into trouble: how the board deals with the CEO and staff, how individual members deal with staff, what a single board member’s job actually is, and how the board functions as one team. The situations are ordinary on purpose. A member wants to weigh in on a staff decision. A committee drifts into running something. Someone asks the board to approve a plan nobody on the board is equipped to judge. Each one looks harmless. Each one is a small leak in the boat, and the book teaches you to see the leak before it spreads.
What I like is the honesty of the format. It doesn’t pretend a board reads a principle once and then behaves. It assumes you’ll forget under pressure, and it gives you reps so you won’t.
A play worth running: the board selection committee
Here is the kind of scenario the book drills, and one worth walking through because it decides so much downstream — the work of a board selection committee.
Picture it. Your committee is charged with bringing forward next year’s slate of board candidates. Two temptations arrive almost immediately. The first: a major donor lets it be known she’d like a seat, and the easy read is that a gift of that size has earned one. The second: the executive director, who knows the operation cold, offers to help screen candidates for the skills the organization needs — a lawyer here, an accountant there, someone who knows the software.
Both feel reasonable. Both are the wrong move, and the Playbook’s method shows you why in about a minute.
Start with whose work this is. Recruiting the people who will govern is the board’s own job — not the staff’s. A selection committee is legitimate precisely because it helps the board with the board’s work, and the moment the executive director is screening candidates, the people who will one day hold that director accountable are being chosen by the director. That’s the leak. The committee can gather information from anyone, but the judgment stays with the board.
Now the donor. The question isn’t whether she’s generous; it’s whether she can do the actual job — think about ends, hold to written policy, disagree hard and then speak in one voice, and own the organization on behalf of everyone who isn’t in the room. A seat is not a thank-you gift. If she can govern, recruit her for that. If the seat is really about the gift, you’ve just traded a governing voice for a donation, and the board is weaker for it.
So the play the committee runs is this: decide the qualities that make someone able to govern, put them in writing before you look at a single name, and recruit against that list — not against the staff’s wish list, and not against the size of anyone’s check. The book’s discipline turns a fuzzy, relationship-driven scramble into a clear task with a standard anyone can see. That’s the whole value of rehearsing it in advance: when the donor’s name comes up in a real meeting, the committee already knows the answer and doesn’t have to find its nerve on the spot.
Where it lands
The honest limits are the same ones the model carries. If your board hasn’t bought into Policy Governance in the first place, some of the “right” answers here will read as rigid, and a few scenarios resolve more cleanly on the page than they will across a real table with real history in the room. This is a companion, not a starting point — read it after you’ve met the model, not instead.
But as a companion it’s close to ideal, and I don’t say that about many governance books. Most of them stay at the altitude of principle. This one comes down to the floor where boards actually stumble and lets you practice the footwork. I’ve watched capable, well-meaning boards make the same three mistakes for years, not because they didn’t know better but because they’d never rehearsed better. This book is the rehearsal.
Read it with
Read Boards That Make a Difference first for the model, then keep The Board Member’s Playbook on the table as the practice field. Run a scenario or two at the start of a meeting the way a team runs a walk-through before the whistle. Do that for a season and the mistakes you used to catch in the minutes, you’ll start catching in the moment. That’s the difference between knowing the principle and being able to play it.