All 50 Plays: A Scenario Index to The Board Member’s Playbook

A companion to my review of Miriam Carver and Bill Charney's The Board Member's Playbook. The book's whole method is rehearsal — fifty short, realistic situations a board runs through until the right move becomes instinct. Here is the full list, grouped the way the authors group them, so you can find the play you need or work through one before your next meeting. I plan to expand these into individual walk-throughs over time; for now this is the map.

The scenarios fall into four chapters, each covering a different place boards get into trouble: the whole board's dealings with the CEO, an individual member's dealings with staff, what a single member's job actually is, and how the board works as one team.

Chapter 3 — Board interactions with the CEO or staff

This is the largest set, and for good reason: most governance trouble lives in the seam between the board and the person it hires. These twenty plays cover accountability, monitoring, approvals, and the constant temptation to reach into the work.

Chapter 4 — Board member interactions with the CEO or staff

Nine plays about the individual member — the well-meaning trustee who walks over to staff with “just a suggestion.” These are the quiet leaks that sink the one-voice principle one conversation at a time.

Chapter 5 — The roles and responsibilities of board members

Eleven plays about what a single board member is actually for — from orientation and confidentiality to the dominant member who hijacks the room and the expert who wants to oversee “her” program.

Chapter 6 — The board's job as a team

Ten plays about the board as a single body — fundraising, meeting rhythm, who the work is really on behalf of, and who belongs on the board in the first place. This is the chapter closest to the board-selection questions I wrote about in the review.

Scenario titles are drawn from the book's table of contents. The book supplies the full walk-through and the Policy Governance reasoning for each; this page is an index, not a substitute — read The Board Member's Playbook for the plays themselves.