Have you ever wondered about the terms ‘chairman’ and ‘board’? Do they not seem slightly arcane to you? Have you questioned where they come from?
The answer to this question provides interesting insight into the nature of board meetings, and may surprise you.
Origins of ‘Board Meetings’
The terms date back to medieval times. The board was exactly ‘that’, a very large plank of wood. People set this on trestles to make what we now call a table. (Table derives from the Latin ‘tabula’: a board, plank, flat top piece). Servants brought the board into the middle of the medieval hall for meetings and mealtimes. These were usually coincident. Then the most important person, the landowner or Lord of the Manor, would get pride of position. In this case he would sit on a chair by the fire to keep warm away from the drafty open end of the hall.
This position was referred to as ‘the chairman’ of ‘the board’.
What has changed in several hundred years?
These days, our heating and ventilation have much improved. However, for some reason, our meeting practices remain largely unchanged. As a consequence, there is a lot of evidence that it would not be particularly easy to tell the difference between a board meeting then and a board meeting today, except in terms of the words used and some of the topics discussed.
At the board level of organisations, these similarities may in part be due to legal reasons. However, the same patterns cascade down through our management meetings as well. It therefore seems somewhat strange, given the level of progress that the last 400 years have brought to so many other areas of our work, that meetings should remain so rooted in the past. I wonder what meetings might look like today if they had been improved as creatively and as rigorously as virtually every other business process.
As a parting shot on this, please take a look at the picture on the right. For many organisations, they conduct their most important discussions in environments like this. But the environment heavily influences the approach taken and the mindsets of the people involved. So how much have we reallly moved on since this 1604 painting of the Treaty of London?
True, the pandemic has, in many cases, changed the table to a connected set of screens. But the irony is, we still unconsciously seek to recreate this centuries old tradition. Instead of using the creative, participative potential of the new environment, we cling to the familiarity of the old. And that despite so many of us complaining about meetings!
Maybe it is time for a redesign?
Mike Clargo is a consultant for Culturistics and is a passionate advocate for transforming our meetings to transform our culture
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