Boards That Make a Difference by John Carver

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

+ + + 

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about “the Carver Model,” but never really knew what it was. Well, now I do, and I’d have to say I’m a pretty big fan. At least on the theory side of it. But how much of it is practical? I don't know, but why don’t I start by just trying to digest the 24 dogears I added as I went along?

In fact, the importance of the owners-to-board link is so great that the proper board job is best described as ownership one step down rather than management one step up. This concept alone completely changes the nature of governance.

That pretty well sums up Carver’s Policy Governance Model. The board is not a group of “super-managers,” it is a group of “mini-owners.” It does not manage anything. It determines what success looks like and holds the staff accountable for getting there.

Certain common practices are such obvious drains on board effectiveness that one does not need a sophisticated model to recognize them. Although some boards may avoid a few of the following conditions, rarely does any one board avoid them all.

Time spent on the trivial. Items of trivial scope or import receive disproportionate attention compared with matters of greater scope and importance. Richard J. Peckham, on joining a major public board in Kansas, found it so lost in trivia that “I thought I’d been banished to outer darkness.” Major program issues go unresolved while boards conscientiously grapple with some small detail. An Illinois school board proudly proclaimed the “active role the members of our board take in purchasing decisions…The administration [in replacing desks in two classrooms] was directed to select three chairs from different companies and have them available for the next board meeting. The board then made the decision on warranty, durability, price and color.” A national survey found that almost half of America’s school boards made the purchasing decisions for tape recorders, cameras, and television sets (National School Boards Association, n.d.). Little wonder that Chait, Holland, and Taylor (1996) claim, “Trustees are often little more than high-powered, well-intentioned people engaged in low level activities” (p. 1).

Short-term bias. The time horizon for board decisions is more distant than anywhere else in the organization. Yet we find boards dealing mainly with the near term and, even more bizarre, with the past. Last month’s financial statement gets more attention than the organization’s strategic position.

Reactive stance. Boards consistently find themselves reacting to staff initiatives rather than making decisions proactively. Proposals for staff action and recommendations for board action so often come from staff that some boards would cease to function if they were asked to create their own agenda.

Reviewing, rehashing, redoing. Some boards spend most of their time going over what their staff has already done. “Eighty-five percent of our time was spent monitoring staff work,” says Glendora Putnam, Boston, about a prominent national board. “We can’t afford that. We have too much wisdom to be put to use.” Just keeping up with a large staff can take prodigious hours and even then can never be done fully. But the salient point is that reviewing, rehashing, and redoing staff work—no matter how well—do not constitute leadership.

Leaky accountability. Boards often allow accountability to “leak” around the chief executive. Having established a CEO position, the board members continue to relate in their official capacities with other staff, either giving them directions or judging their performance, rather than allowing the CEO to do his or her job.

Diffuse authority. It is rare to find a board-executive partnership wherein each party’s authority has been clarified. Often, a vast gray area exists. When a matter lies in this uncertain area, the safe executive response is to take it to the board. Instead of using this opportunity to clarify to whom the decision belongs, the board simply approves or disapproves. The event has been settled, but the boundaries of authority remain as unclear as they were before.

Complete overload. Unless a board rubber-stamps decisions or just ignores issues, it is likely to be overwhelmed by a seemingly impossible job. The board just cannot get to everything and is likely to miss important red flags.

This is a great list of dangers to avoid.

In constructing a new wisdom of governance, I found it necessary to create categories to guide a board’s debate and pronouncements, groupings not derived from administration but from the nature of governance. These categories also serve as vessels to contain board policies as they accumulate, and thereby become divisions of the board policy manual. The categories embrace board policies about (1) ends to be achieved, (2) means (defined simply as non-ends) to be avoided, (3) the interface of board and management, and (4) the practice of governance itself.

A big part of the book is about these four areas of appropriate board action and policy setting. I like their elegance, but find the formal adherence advocated in the book a little unrealistic unless the whole model is willingly embraced by the board. Still, the can serve me as guideposts as I work with my board and help shape their agendas. Essentially, they should define (1) what we should achieve, and (2) what we should not do in pursuit of that achievement. What Carver means by (3) and (4) is a little fuzzy for me right now. Those lessons may reoccur to me as I continue to transcribe.

Remember that the most effective governance controls what needs to be controlled, yet sets free what can be free.

Yeah, that’s what I just said. The board should have complete control over what success looks like, but only control how to get there by proscribing those strategies that it finds objectionable.

As construed by the Policy Governance model, then, all board policies fall into these groups:

1. Ends. The organizational swap with the world. What human needs are to be met (in results terms), for whom (outside the operating organization), and at what cost or relative worth. It is important that no means be included in this category.

2. Executive Limitations. Boundaries that limit the choice of staff means, normally for reasons of prudence and ethics. While means includes practices, activities, circumstances, and methods, the most comprehensive definition for means is simply “non-ends.”

3. Board-Management Delegation. The manner in which authority is passed to the executive or staff component of the organization and the way in which performance using that authority is reported and assessed.

4. Governance Process. The manner in which the board represents the ownership, disciplines its own activities, and carries out its own work of leadership.

And here’s the (3) and (4) I was a little fuzzy about before. As described in a diagram on page 74 that’s too hard for me to reproduce here, the Board sets policy in each area until the point that any action based on a reasonable interpretation of policy is acceptable to it. The whole organization is represented as a circle, divided into four quadrants, one for each policy area. The Board defines its policies “downward” toward the center of the circle from the boundary of each quadrant, delving more deeply in some areas than in others. The space between the inward edge of these policies and the center of the circle is the territory of action and implementation, which the Board has no direct role in. For (1) and (2), authority over this zone is given to the chief staff executive, and for (3) and (4) that authority is given to the chief governance officer.

The most insidious counterfeits are activities associated with good intentions or with well-accepted reasoning. For example, because making more handouts available for training sessions shows good intent or sense, the number and quality of handouts might come to be judged as more important than the effect of training. The areas to which such confusion can extend are endless. In response to public clamor to compensate teachers on the basis of competence, it is not uncommon for the education establishment to propose incentives for teachers who take more graduate courses!

In the social service field, a revered counterfeit is unit cost. Unit cost is the cost in dollars of providing a time unit of service. Pupil-day expenditure is a comparable public school term. Unit cost comes to be the measure of whether a service organization is doing as much per dollar as it should. But unit cost is not related to the effectiveness of a service, so it does not measure productivity (efficiency in producing benefits per dollar), as social programs pretend it does. For example, the unit cost mentality leads to the assumption that $80 per hour or professional activity is better than $110 per hour, although there is absolutely no reason to believe so. Perhaps the $110-per-hour serve is 150 percent more effective in attaining the results sought! Unit cost would simply be an innocuous measure if institutions had not come to believe it to be a true productivity measure.

An organization can become so permeated by the belief that well-intended or reasonable actions (rather than results) are the reason for existence that no one realizes something is awry. A striking example is the allegiance given to services and programs as if they were results. Services and programs are often treated as if they have value in themselves; however, they are only packages of prescribed activities. In Policy Governance, services and programs are always and only means. The ends concept prevents righteous busyness from becoming just as meaningful as results, or perhaps even more so.

The threat of good activity being perceived as an end is so great that it can hardly be overstated. Without constant vigilance and systems to support that vigilance, says Odiorne (1974), “People tend to become so engrossed in activity that they lose sight of its purpose… They become so enmeshed in activity they lose sight of why they are doing it, and the activity becomes a false goal, an end in itself… Falling into the activity trap is not the result of stupidity. In fact, the most intelligent, highly educated people tend to be those most likely to become entrapped in interesting and complex activities” (pp. 1-7).

It is not that good intentions or sensible actions by staff are unimportant. It is that they in no way constitute the reason for an organization’s existence. Commendable activities are only means.

Boy, do I hear that. In coming up with our measurements of quality, I had better make sure we are measuring ends and not means.

A deputy CEO to whom everyone else reports when the CEO is unavailable is almost sure to represent wasted managerial power. More than two executives vertically configured, each with supervision over only one person, almost certainly means someone has a position but no job.

Had to throw that one in, since that was exactly the situation I was previously in.

Though it is unlikely to do so, the board may choose not to address more detailed specifications after it has adopted the top statement. If the board agrees that any reasonable interpretation of the global ends language on the part of the CEO would be acceptable, then it need say no more. That is, if all the possible priorities among subresults, subrecipients, and costs are acceptable, there is no reason for the board to narrow the expected results by passing more policies. The board can simply refrain from further pronouncements and allow the CEO to resolve all smaller or narrower choices among ends. Most boards are understandably reluctant to leave such broad issues to the CEO, so they rarely stop at this point.

The top statement is the global ends statement, or the mission statement, so this means that some boards may only define that and leave all implementation to the CEO. Few associations would do that, but the point is an important one. They could. The board should only define as much as they need to and no more.

Further, the policies do not give the CEO power to do this or that. They take power or latitude away (“You may not…”). The CEO has whatever power the board does not withhold: the board is saying, “Go till we say stop,” rather than “Stop till we say go.”

This is truly how my new association runs things and it is a new dynamic for me to get used to.

Here’s a good summary of how Carver thinks the Board and the CEO (“president”) should interact with each other:

Garden City Community College, Garden City, Kansas

Board-Management Delegation Policy

“Delegation to the President”

All board authority delegated to staff is delegated through the president so that all authority and accountability of staff—as far as the board is concerned—is considered to be the authority and accountability of the president.

1. The board will direct the president to achieve certain results for certain recipients, at a certain cost through the establishment of Ends policies. The board will limit the latitude the president may exercise in practices, methods, conduct, and other “means” through the establishment of Executive Limitations policies.

2. As long as the president uses any reasonable interpretation of the board’s Ends and Executive Limitations policies, the president is authorized to establish all further policies, make all decisions, take all actions, establish all practices, and develop all activities.

3. The board may change its Ends and Executive Limitations policies, thereby shifting the boundary between the board and president domains. By doing so, the board changes the latitude given to the president. So long as any particular delegation is in place, the board members will respect and support the president’s choices.

4. Only decisions of the board acting as a body are binding upon the president.

5. Decisions or instructions of individual board members, officers, or committees are not binding on the president except in rare circumstances when the board has specifically authorized such exercise of authority.

6. In the case of board members or committees requesting information or assistance without board authorization, the president can refuse such requests that require—in the president’s judgment—a material amount of staff time or funds or are disruptive.

Wouldn’t it be great if it really worked that way? Careful what you wish for. Here’s more:

Board members and the CEO are colleagues. The relationship between the CEO and any individual board member is collegial, not hierarchical. Because the CEO is accountable only to the full board and because no board member has individual authority, the CEO and board members are equals. The relationship between the CEO and the board chairperson should be one of supportive peers as well. They are not hierarchically related, because to be so would shift the CEO function to the chairperson.

This is one I really need to work on. The Chairman is not my boss. The Board is my boss. The Chairman and I are peers, each working to achieve the Ends set by the Board. I should stop acting like he’s my boss.

If the board adopts the discipline of monitoring only what it has already addressed in policy, its anxiety will drive it to develop all the policies needed. “If you haven’t said how it ought to be, don’t ask how it is,” describes the principle that forces a board to monitor instead of meander.

Great advice. How do you implement it?

The importance of limiting CEO evaluation to the criteria represented by board policies on ends and executive limitations is so great as to merit repetition. It is common for boards to indulge their (or their CEO’s) need to assess CEO skills and personality. To be sure, CEOs, like anyone else, have areas that need improvement. It is to their benefit for them to seek the help of knowledgeable advisors and to continue their education and development. But if, commendably, they do so and ends are not achieved or executive limitations not observed, why should they earn points for self-improvement efforts? On the other hand, if they do no self-development but achieve the ends and observe the executive limitations, why should they be penalized? The purpose of evaluating the CEO is not to become the CEO’s coach. In fact, it is best for the board not to think of itself as evaluating the CEO at all. It should evaluate the organization based on relevant board policies and pin that evaluation on the CEO.

Here, here. And dammit, if that isn’t what my new Board is doing with me. They are giving me a mechanism to pursue my own professional development, but they are not tying my evaluation to it. I’m being evaluated on performance goals for the association.

Governing - Hands On!

Examples of What the Board Should Do Hands On

1. Set the board’s work plan and agenda for the year and for each meeting

2. Determine board training and development needs

3. Attend to discipline in board attendance, following bylaws and other self-imposed rules

4. Become expert in governance

5. Meet with and gather wisdom from the ownership

6. Establish the limits of the CEO’s authority to budget, administer finances and compensation, establish programs, and otherwise manage the organization

7. Examine monitoring data and determine where the organization has achieved a reasonable interpretation of board-stated criteria

Managing the Staff - Hands Off!

Examples of What the Board and Its CGO Should Keep Hands Off

1. Establish services, programs, curricula, or budgets

2. Approve the CEO’s personnel, program, or budgetary plans

3. Render any judgments or assessments of staff activity for which no previous board expectations have been stated

4. Determine staff development needs, terminations, or promotions

5. Design staff jobs or instruct any staff member subordinate to the CEO (except when the CEO has assigned a staff member to some board function)

6. Decide on the organizational chart and staffing requirements

7. Establish committees to advice or help staff

+ + +

The Board’s Responsibility for Board Performance

Board members, not staff, are trustees in a moral sense for the ownership and, consequently, must bear initial responsibility for the integrity of governance. “He that would govern others, first should be the master of himself” (Massinger, 1979). The board is responsible for its own development, its own job design, its own discipline, and its own performance. Before any discussion of board process to improve governance, this responsibility must be clear to board and staff alike. Primary responsibility for board development does not rest in the CEO, staff, funding bodies, or government. These other parties doubtless have an interest in better governance. They may even seize the opportunity to affect governance quality. But they are not where responsibility for governance resides.

Only responsible stewardship can justify a board’s considerable authority. Board members who do not choose to accept this breadth of responsibility should resign. If they do not, it is the responsibility of other board members to structure a board development system in which such persons are, if not “converted,” eliminated from the board. Being warm, willing to attend meetings, inclined to donate money, and interested in the organizational subject matter do not constitute responsible board membership. These characteristics are desirable but far from sufficient.

It is inviting to rely on the CEO to motivate a board. This scenario frequently extends further than the provision of an occasional motivational “fix.” It may extend as far as spoon-feeding. No matter how well the CEO tells the board what to do and when to do it, governance cannot be excellent under these conditions. Going through the motions, even the “right” motions, is fake leadership that transforms a CEO into a baby-sitter. Only a deluded board waits for its CEO to make it a good board.

Under these conditions, public-spirited and ethical CEOs prod the board to do and say what they think a responsible governing body should do and say. With time, observers of such a situation may question the need for the board to be responsible: “If everything turns out well, what is the fuss? Getting the board to be truly responsible may be pedantic and perhaps unrealistic. After all, board members frequently are just volunteers; how can a part-time, outside group of largely nonprofessionals presume to tell a professional or technical staff what to do?” This litany impedes any further inclination to motivate leaders to lead.

The preceding unhappy scenario is the best-case scenario! What if the CEO is not public-spirited and ethical? The improprieties resulting from lackadaisical governance are easy to imagine. I have observed boards whose laissez-faire rubber-stamping came to an abrupt end upon discovery of misconduct. Most nonprofit boards are too private or too small for public embarrassment to be a realistic threat, but they must endure their own awareness of having been asleep at the throttle. Their failure may have been not in misjudging a specific issue but simply in not having realized that the throttle belonged to them. The debacles at Enron, WorldCom, and other corporations are prime examples of the failure of governance that are familiar to anyone who reads a newspaper.

Boards are responsible for their attendance, discipline, governance methods, development, agendas, and ability to envision the future. Others can help. Surely the CEO should even be required to help. Helpers, however, can only assist a body that has assumed full responsibility for itself; helpers can only marginally compensate when ostensibly responsible parties are not taking responsibility.

The board of the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine has set the standards to be met in the conduct of board affairs. Notice how the board makes clear that it, not its staff, is responsible for the board’s governance performance.

Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine, Cleveland

Governance Process Policy

“Governing Style”

The board will govern with an emphasis on (a) outward vision rather than an internal preoccupation, (b) strategic leadership more than administrative detail, (c) clear distinction of board and chief executive roles, (d) collective rather than individual decisions, (e) future rather than past or present, and (f) proactivity rather than reactivity. The board will:

1. Deliberate in many voices, but govern in one.

2. Cultivate a sense of group responsibility. The board, not the staff, will be responsible for excellence in governing. The board will be an initiator of policy, not merely a reactor to staff initiatives. The board will use the expertise of individual members to enhance the ability of the board as a body, rather than to substitute the individual judgments for the board’s values.

3. Direct, control and inspire the organization through the careful establishment of broad written policies reflecting the board’s values and perspectives. The board’s major focus will be on the intended long term impacts outside the operating organization, not on the administrative or programmatic means of attaining those effects.

4. Enforce upon itself whatever discipline is needed to govern with excellence. Discipline will apply to matters such as attendance, preparation for meetings, policymaking principles, respect of roles, and ensuring the continuity of governance capability. Continual board development will include orientation of new members in the board’s governance process and periodic board discussion of process improvement. The board will allow no officer, individual or committee of the board to hinder or be an excuse for not fulfilling its commitments.

5. Monitor and discuss the board’s process and performance at each meeting. Self-monitoring will include comparison of board activity and discipline to policies in the Governance Process and Board-Staff Linkage categories.

This stuff really speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Do I really need to say anything?

Here is a summary of the board’s job products:

1. Linkage to the ownership. The board acts in trusteeship for its ownership and serves as the legitimizing connection between this base and the organization.

2. Explicit governing policies. The values of the whole organization are encompassed by the board’s explicit enunciation and proper categorization of broad policies.

3. Assurance of satisfactory organizational performance. Although the board is not responsible for carrying out the staff’s job, it must ensure that the staff as a total body meets the criteria the board has set. In this way, its accountability for that performance is fulfilled.

Each of these three products is a job output, not a job activity, though any number of attendant activities are implied.

+ + +

Bissell Centre of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Governance Process Policy

“Committee Principles”

The board may, from time to time, establish committees to help carry out its responsibilities. To preserve board holism, committees will be used sparingly, only when other methods have been deemed inadequate. Committees will be used so as to minimally interfere with the wholeness of the board’s job.

1. Board committees may not speak or act for the board except when formally given such authority for specific and time-limited purposes. Such authority will be carefully stated in order not to conflict with authority delegated to the Executive Director.

2. Board committees are to help the board do its job, not to help the staff do its job. Committees will assist the board chiefly by preparing policy alternatives and implications for board deliberation. Board committees are not to be created by the board to advise staff.

3. If a board committee is used to monitor organizational performance in a given area, the same committee will not have helped the board create policy in that area. This is to prevent committee identification with organizational parts rather than the whole.

4. Board committees cannot exercise authority over staff, and in keeping with the board’s focus on the future, board committees will ordinarily have no direct dealings with current staff operations. Further, the board will not impede its direct delegation to the Executive Director by requiring approval of a board committee before an executive action.

If ever there were extracts that I need to take out a read from time to time it is these. Things are so clearly stated and they make SO MUCH SENSE!!!

To promote the degree of strategic leadership championed in these pages, five qualifications, among others, are necessary:

1. Commitment to the ownership and to the organization’s specific area of endeavor. As agents of the organization’s ownership, board members must be committed to that trust. Commitment to the ends as currently stated is important, though less so, for ends are a continuing creation of the board itself. Therefore, fidelity to those in whose name ends are created is more essential than fidelity to the current wording.

2. Propensity for thinking in terms of systems and context. Some people focus quickly on parts. Whatever the relationship of whole to part might be, these persons more readily focus on the part itself for inspection, discussion, and decision. Such persons, with all good intentions, place distractions, if not massive roadblocks, in the way of strategic leadership. Prospective members who are more comfortable with parts have a valuable gift, but one that can more usefully be shared as a volunteer advisor to staff than as a board member. The board needs members who are cybernetically aware, drawn naturally to the harmony of the whole.

3. Ability and eagerness to deal with values, vision, and the long term. The board members who make the best contributions are those who have a natural propensity for looking not only beyond the stream of single events but beyond systems to the values on which they are based. It is only a small step from divining today’s values as they currently are to planning tomorrow’s values as they should be. What stronger argument can be made that a board member’s greatest gift to enterprise is educing, weighing, challenging, and frequently fighting over values?

4. Ability to participate assertively in deliberation. Productive board deliberation depends on bringing the foregoing characteristics to the governance struggle. Boards are overly tolerant of members who fail to share their capacities in a way that enhances the deliberative process. It is not enough to have the potential to be a good board member; the potential must be manifested through participation.

5. Willingness to delegate, to allow others to make decisions. Board members, with respect to one another, must be able to share power in the group process and, with respect to staff, must be able to delegate. Board members who are loath to delegate will impair the board’s leadership by constantly bringing small issues up for consideration. They will impair staff by denying them the opportunity to grow.

+ + +

Mediocrity can pass tests that excellence fails.

This is referring specifically to the funding bodies, regulatory agencies, and lawmakers that may require associations to do certain things or organize themselves in certain ways, things and ways that made run counter to the principles of Policy Governance. Carver’s advice is, obviously, you must follow the law, but that’s not why I flagged this quote. To me its another reminder of the way the mediocre world rejects the unrecognized genius. It’s the mediocre ones who design the tests, so is it any wonder that the mediocre are the ones best positioned to pass those tests? When excellence fails, it isn’t because its inferior to mediocrity, it’s because it’s being measured against inappropriate standards. It’s like the CME world that is set up to measure class time instead of learning.

For self-evaluation to have practical effect, it must be frequent. In fact, frequent crude evaluations have a far greater effect than infrequent precise ones. For that reason, boards should devote at least a brief amount of time in each meeting to evaluating whether they are on course. An annual, more meticulous evaluation may be used as well, but it will not have as great an effect on ongoing board performance. In no event should board self-evaluation be a matter of downloading some generic form from the Internet.

Yes, I’m going to do this.

Universally Accepted Principles of Accountable Governance

1. The board governs on behalf of all owners.

2. The board is the highest authority in the company, below only the owners.

3. The board is the initial authority in the company.

4. The board is accountable for everything about the company.

5. All authority and accountability is vested in the board as a group.

6. Governance roles and executive roles have different purposes.

7. Delegation should me maximized, short of risking the board’s fulfillment of its accountability.

8. Assessing board performance requires evaluation of both governance and management.

And here’s the final summary.

So what are the essential elements of the model, in the absence of which one can be said to be borrowing from Policy Governance but not using it? After all, the use of the word model is not happenstance; used in its scientific rather than its structural sense, it means a system of integrated, interacting parts. As with a clock, removing one wheel may not spoil the clock’s looks, but it seriously damages its ability to tell time. It becomes an ornament, not a clock. So in Policy Governance, which wheels would have to be in place to still have our “clock?” Here, adapted from previous publications, is a list of the minimum requirements:

1. The board connects its authority and accountability to those who morally (if not legally) own the organization—if such a class exists beyond the board itself—seeing its role as servant-leader to and for that group. Owners, as used in the Policy Governance model, are not all of the stakeholders but are only those who stand in a position corresponding to shareholders in an equity corporation. Therefore, staff and clients are not owners unless they independently qualify as such.

2. With the ownership above it and operational matters below it, a governing board forms a distinct link in the chain of command or moral authority. Its role is commander, not advisor. It exists to exercise that authority and properly empower others rather than to be management’s consultant, ornament, instrument, or adversary. The board—not the staff—bears full and direct responsibility for the process and products of governance, just as it bears accountability for any authority and performance expectations delegated to others.

3. The board makes authoritative decisions directed toward management and toward itself, its individual members, and committees only as a total group. That is, the board’s authority is a group authority rather than a collection of individual authorities.

4. The board defines in writing (a) the results, changes, or benefits that should come about for (b) the specified recipients, beneficiaries, or other targeted groups, and (c) at what cost or relative priority for the various benefits or various beneficiaries. These are not all the possible benefits that may occur but are those that form the purpose of the organization, the achievement of which constitutes organizational success. Policy documents containing solely these decisions are categorized as Ends in the terminology of the Policy Governance model but can be called by whatever name a board chooses, as long as the concept is strictly preserved.

5. The board defines in writing the behaviors, values added, practices, disciplines, and conduct of the board itself and of the board’s delegation and accountability relationship with its own subcomponents and with the executive part of the organization. Because these are non-ends decisions, they are called board means to distinguish them from ends and staff means. All board behaviors, decisions, and documents must be consistent with these pronouncements. In the terminology of the Policy Governance model, documents containing solely these decisions are categorized as Governance Process and Board-Management Delegation but can be called by whatever names a board chooses, as long as the concepts are strictly preserved.

6. The board makes decisions with respect to its staff’s means decisions and actions only in a prospective way in order simultaneously (a) to avoid prescribing means and (b) to place off-limits those means that would be unacceptable even if they work. Policy documents containing solely these decisions are categorized as Executive Limitations in the terminology of the Policy Governance model but can be called by whatever name a board chooses, as long as the concept is strictly preserved.

7. The board’s decisions in Ends, Governance Process, Board-Management Delegation, and Executive Limitations begin at the broadest, most inclusive level and, if necessary, continue into more detailed levels that narrow the interpretative range of higher levels, proceeding one articulated level at a time. These documents are exhaustive, replacing or obviating board expressions of mission, vision, philosophy, values, strategy, goals, and budget. They are called policies in the terminology of the Policy Governance model but can be called by whatever name a board chooses, as long as the concept is strictly preserved.

8. If the board chooses to delegate to management through a chief executive officer, it honors the exclusive authority and accountability of that role as the sole connector between governance and management. In any event, the board never delegates the same authority or responsibility to more than one point.

9. In delegating decisions beyond the ones recorded in board policies, the board grants the delegatee the right to use any reasonable interpretation of those policies. In the case of Ends and Executive Limitations, when a CEO exists, the delegatee is the CEO. In the case of Governance Process and Board-management Delegation, that delegatee is the CGO (chief governance officer), except when the board has explicitly designated another board member or board committee.

10. The board monitors organizational performance solely through fair but systematic assessment of whether a reasonable interpretation of its Ends policies is being achieved within the boundaries set by a reasonable interpretation of its Executive Limitations policies. If there is a CEO, this assessment constitutes the CEO’s evaluation.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

At the time, I had thought my secret meetings with Roy Stonerow, where he taught me rudimentary magic and gave me a different vision of the universe, were just that—secret. But now I can’t help but wonder if Otis and my mother might have had some inkling of what I was up to. With the benefit of adult hindsight, it is difficult to believe a young teenage boy could have kept such a thing hidden from his parents in such a small town. But I still like to think they were ignorant, especially my mother. Even now I am just beginning to realize the kind of pain she must have felt knowing what her son was doing in that little red house down the street. I guess I will never know if she knew or not, but I have to say I did not do what I did, I did not learn what I learned, out of any kind of spite for the way of life she offered me. It is a good way, her life, and for thousands it is all they will ever need, but it was not for me. I am not proud of this, but neither am I ashamed.

+ + +

Brisbane followed the back of the black-clad ork down a short, dark hallway with Ternosh and Wister right behind him. The procession marched on in silence and shortly they emerged in another large chamber lit by the flickering light of torches.

How do they keep all these torches lit? Brisbane wondered briefly. And where is all the smoke? These things are burning constantly and none of these rooms are smoky.

Brisbane’s wonderment about the torches did not last long. His attention was quickly captured by the shape and contents of the chamber before him. It was circular, nearly as huge as the banquet chamber, and in the center of the room was a pit, an arena that dropped ten feet below the floor of the chamber with no visible means of entrance or exit. The floor just suddenly gave way and dropped straight down to the circular pit. All around the pit, the pug-trolang which it had to be, were stone benches like the ones surrounding the table in the banquet chamber, except in two places. If the pit was the face of a clock, at six o’clock sat a stone chair and at twelve o’clock stood a stone pedestal. On the pedestal was a golden incense burner like the one Ternosh had used to summon his Demosk.

And, leaning against the face of the pedestal, scabbarded and point down on the edge of the pug-trolang, was Angelika, her emerald twinkling in the torchlight.

Brisbane’s heart rose into his throat as he saw her. Angelika! his mind called out to her. I have found you!

—Be patient,— was her only reply. —Be patient and be strong.—

The black-clad orks quickly went ahead and took their seats around the pit. Ternosh held Brisbane back and Wister stood solidly beside Tornestor. The Sumak gestured to the outer wall of the circular chamber and Brisbane saw it was lined with racks of weapons, red-eye shields, and black armor.

“Grum Wister and Grum Brisbane,” Tornestor said. “These are the finest weapons and armor of the clan. Choose well and may they serve you well in the pug-trolang.”

Wister immediately went to the wall and began to put on a chainmail vest that had been hanging there. Brisbane turned to Tornestor.

“Sumak Tornestor,” he said, summoning as much respect as he could into his voice. “Am I to understand I may arm myself with any weapon here?”

Tornestor looked at Brisbane with a look mixed of surprise and contempt. “You are unfamiliar with our ways,” the Sumak said. “You are not to speak to me unless I speak to you first. I will forget your indiscretion this time. Yes, the choice of weapon is yours.”

Brisbane bowed his head. “I am sorry for misspeaking.” He brought his head up and pointed at Angelika. “May I use that sword?”

Wister was picking out a shield.

Tornestor looked at the sword and then turned back to Brisbane. “No,” he said. “That weapon bares an enchantment upon it and it has been given as a gift to Gruumsh One-Eye. No one may use it.”

Of course you can’t use her, Brisbane told himself. That would have been too easy. He quickly bowed again and backed away from the Sumak.

Tornestor began to discuss something with Ternosh and Brisbane was left alone to arm himself. He looked back at Wister and saw the ork had chosen a huge battle axe to fight with. Brisbane turned back to the weapons.

Angelika, he thought. They won’t let me use you. What should I do?

—Patience, young Brisbane. You will wield me soon enough. You can defeat this evil creature without me. These demons think they can control you and me, but they cannot. Our time will come.—

Demons? Brisbane thought.

—They are abominations of nature, Brisbane. They must be destroyed.—

Brisbane began to look through the pieces of armor, searching for something that would protect him and yet not hamper his movements. He found a chainmail shirt, much like the vest Wister had chosen, and after removing his cumbersome red and white robes, he put it on over the simple cloth shirt and pants he wore underneath. The stiff material under the chains of the armor was black.

Abominations, Angelika?

—Abominations, Brisbane. Twisted creatures of evil born against the will of Grecolus. They must be destroyed.—

Angelika’s voice was like an itch in his head. Brisbane blindly picked a round red-eye shield off the wall and began to examine a rack full of all sorts of swords.

—Choose well, young Brisbane. Even in this den of evil there are some blades of quality. You’ll need something sharp and sturdy to gut this devil.—

Brisbane picked up a sword and swung it experimentally through the air. Its balance was too far off so he returned it to the rack. He chose another and, liking the feel of this one, tested its sharpness against the heel of his head. The weapon was double-edged and had been recently sharpened and oiled. Whoever it had belonged to before the orks got hold of it had taken good care of it.

—A fine weapon, Brisbane. More than enough to spill evil blood.—

Brisbane, oblivious to his surroundings, began to take the sword through the combat exercises Roundtower had taught him so long ago. He whirled it through striking thrusts and defensive postures, getting into the feel of the blade. It felt good in his hands and Brisbane began to speed up the execution of his exercises.

—Yes, Brisbane. That’s the way. You and the sword. You are one.—

Brisbane finished, bringing the blade to his side as if he had a scabbard to put it in. He suddenly became aware of where he was and he looked stiffly up at the orks watching him. Ternosh had left, but both Tornestor and Wister were there, their eyes betraying a certain amazement they felt for what they had just seen.

Brisbane met Wister’s red eyes. “Let’s do it.”

Wister actually smiled at Brisbane and then started off in the direction of the pug-trolang. Brisbane fell into step behind him and Tornestor followed the human.

When they arrived at the edge of the pit, Tornestor took the seat that had been placed there for him and Wister and Brisbane dropped themselves down into the battle circle. They took positions about ten feet apart, facing each other, and stood still waiting for the command to begin.

Brisbane looked up at the edge of the pit and at the orkish faces looking down on him. The black-clad orks sat evenly spaced around the circle, and the two with red stripes sat on either side of the Sumak as they had at dinner. Brisbane was surprised to see Ternosh standing next to the pedestal—and Angelika—with his hands clasped behind his back. Brisbane turned back to Wister and found himself in the middle of an angry staring match.

A hush fell over the proceedings as Tornestor rose to his full seven feet. “The klatru of the Clan of the Red Eye,” he announced formally, “has gathered here around the pug-trolang to witness a masokom between our brothers as described in the ancient ways. At my signal, Grum Wister and Grum Brisbane was clash in battle that will not stop until one of them is dead and gone on to Gruumsh’s battlefield.”

“Praise be to the victor,” the assemblage chanted as one. “And strength to the loser in his new conflict.”

“Grumak Ternosh,” Tornestor said. “Summon your Demosk to witness the masokom.”

Tornestor sat and Ternosh lifted the lid off the incense burner. The Grumak waved his hand over it and Brisbane saw a spark jump off one of his fingers and fall into the golden vessel.

He’s summoning his Demosk, Brisbane thought as Wister’s eyes bore into him. Super. That smoke is going to make us all loopy. I’ll be lucky just to see Wister, to say nothing about killing him.

—He is not your match, Brisbane. None of them are.—

Brisbane looked up to see Angelika but his eyes were drawn to the smoke already pouring out of the five-pointed vents in the lid of the incense burner. Ternosh began his eerie chanting and Brisbane turned back to his opponent.

Wister stood taut, like a dog on a chain, and as the white smoke began to swirl around him, Brisbane thought the ork began to look more and more like a dog. His pig snout became a furry muzzle and his pig ears flopped down like those of a lap dog. The vision was fleeting and sporadic, as most of the smoke stayed well above the floor of the pug-trolang. Every once and a while, a wisp would blow in front of Brisbane, smelling thickly of oranges, distorting Wister from an armored pig-man to an armored dog-man. For a gleeful moment, Brisbane tried to decide which vision was uglier.

Brisbane decided it would be best not to take his eyes off Wister again. There was no telling exactly when Tornestor’s order to commence combat would come, but Brisbane knew when it did, Wister would be on him like all the fury in the hells. To his right, where Ternosh and the pedestal—and Angelika—were, he heard a familiar voice.

“Why have you summoned me, Grumak Ternosh?”

The Demosk. The voice was inside his head again, but this time he could clearly hear it in his ears, too. Except the voice in his mind was speaking common and the voice in his ears was speaking orkish. The effect was strange and unsettling. Wister shifted his grip on the battle axe. Brisbane wondered again exactly what a Demosk was.

“A masokom,” Brisbane heard Ternosh say, “must be witnessed. Grum Wister has challenged Grum Brisbane.”

Brisbane’s head spun as a wisp of smoke flowed around it.

“I am ready,” the Demosk said.

Out of the corner of his smoke-irritated eye, Brisbane saw Sumak Tornestor rise to his feet again. Wister’s right foot took a half-step towards Brisbane and was slowly dragged back.

—Here it comes, Brisbane. The evil must be vanquished.—

“Begin!” Tornestor’s gravel voice boomed out over the pug-trolang and Wister seemed to fly at Brisbane, his shield held in front of him and the battle axe cocked back, ready to strike.

Brisbane stood his ground, watching the ork advance and the position of the weapon in his hand. Wister brought the axe down on Brisbane with deathly quickness, but Brisbane was able to shift to the ork’s side and deflect the blow with his shield.

The first clang of metal against metal was met with a rousing cheer from the orks assembled around the pit. Wister ran past Brisbane with his momentum and turned back when he was out of his attack range.

“I’m going to kill you, human!” the Grum shouted as he charged in and swung his axe sideways at Brisbane’s head.

Brisbane ducked easily under the sweeping strike and stabbed at Wister as his body turned a flank towards him. His blade glanced off the ork’s chainmail vest and left Wister uninjured. The ork brought the axe back in another sweeping arc, this one aimed at Brisbane’s midsection. Brisbane had plenty of time to back up and out of the path of the sharp blade and, as he did, a surprising realization came over him.

Wister was, quite simply, a terrible warrior. His attack was certainly ferocious, but it lacked any semblance of grace or finesse. The ork had no sort of practiced control over his weapon, he just madly swung it back and forth and up and down, hoping to hit his opponent and finish him off quickly. Surely if that axe blade did connect with Brisbane’s body, the combat would instantly be over, but the ork’s strikes were clumsy and repetitious, and Brisbane had no problem avoiding them.

Wister charged Brisbane again with a cry of rage and Brisbane easily rotated away from him, pushing the blow off his shield. The orks around the pit were cheering with every charge Wister made and they let out disappointed moans each time Brisbane thwarted the attack.

Wister was turning to charge again.

—What’s the matter?— Angelika’s voice tolled in his head, muted strangely by the effects of the incense smoke. —He has left himself open to your blade many times. Why do you not strike him down?—

“Die!” Wister screamed as Brisbane brushed off another charge and retreated back several steps.

He’s no warrior, Angelika.

Brisbane thought he was just thinking these words to his sword, but he must have said them aloud because Wister, who had been panting for breath, suddenly opened his eyes wide in senseless rage and jumped into another charge.

—Of course not. Evil can never stand up against holy forces. End his unnatural life, Brisbane. Destroy this evil monster.—

Brisbane pushed Wister’s charge aside and ineffectually struck his sword against the ork’s armor.

—That’s the way, Brisbane. Go for the head. It is foolishly unprotected.—

Angelika, this is not combat. It takes no skill to kill such an opponent.

Wister turned and stood panting out of Brisbane’s reach. Sweat was running down his pig face. Groans were beginning to come from the orks assembled around the pit—groans of displeasure. This was evidently not the sort of spectacle they had expected.

“…kill…you…human…” Wister said in between breaths in a mad litany of rage. He rushed into battle again but this time did not charge past Brisbane. Instead he stopped before him and began to engage in more traditional fighting.

This was much better than the crazy charges the ork had made before, but his attack was still unskilled and clumsy. Brisbane had no problem avoiding or deflecting the slow strikes of the battle axe. He could either dodge aside or absorb the impact on his shield and sometimes he could even foil an attack with the blade of his sword. Wister had left himself open to fatal attack many times, but each time he did, Brisbane found himself unable to take advantage of the opening. Occasionally, he would strike at Wister’s armor for show, knowing he would not hurt the ork that way. It was just hard for Brisbane to kill like this. The orks he had killed before had been somehow different. Their skill hadn’t been much better, but the circumstances had been very different. Then, he had been fighting to protect himself and the others in his party from a vicious attack begun by the orks. Now, it was a fight of honor, with rigid rules and customs, wholly different from the slaughter he had taken part in beside the Mystic River. It was hard for Brisbane to pinpoint, but this battle with Wister down here in the pug-trolang with the entire klatru watching was somehow more important than any battle he had ever fought before. It was important that he win this battle, but there was something else that seemed even more important. To strike Wister down so easily, like a rag doll, was far beneath what this kind of combat demanded. In a way, killing the ork with the ease of removing an opponent’s pawn from a chessboard would destroy the entire orkish institution of the masokom and the pug-trolang.

—What do you care of this? They are evil. They are the enemy.—

So I’ve been told.

Suddenly, Wister broke off his attack and stepped back and away from Brisbane. The ork looked up at the edge of the pit and Brisbane’s eyes followed his. The smoke from the burning incense was much thicker up there and through it Brisbane could make out the vague shapes of the other orks. The huge Tornestor at one end, the black-clad klatru lining the rim, and Ternosh with his glowing Demosk at the other. All were silent and seemed to be waiting for something.

Wister took a moment to catch his breath. He returned his gaze to Brisbane and quietly addressed the group. “He is toying with me,” the Grum said. “His skill far surpasses mine. I am no match for him. I declare myself the loser.”

With that statement, Wister dropped his shield and his axe on either side of himself and pulled his chainmail vest apart to reveal his hairy chest. “You have won, Grum Brisbane. Send me quickly to the army of Gruumsh One-Eye.” Wister closed his red eyes.

Brisbane was not sure what to do. Wister’s intention was obvious. He wanted Brisbane to plunge his sword into his heart, killing him. Wister had named him the winner, but now Brisbane felt like anything else but.

When Brisbane had not done anything for a full minute, Tornestor spoke. “Grum Brisbane, Grum Wister had conceded defeat. Will you not end the masokom?”

Brisbane kept his eyes on Wister. The ork had not moved or spoken since he had closed his eyes. Until Tornestor had spoken, Brisbane had thought all time had stopped.

“Must I?” Brisbane asked.

—Yes!—

“It is your duty,” Tornestor said. “Grum Wister has lost his challenge. He cannot be left alive.”

Brisbane slowly raised his sword. He looked at it carefully. It really was a fine weapon, well cared for and perfectly balanced.

—Do it, young Brisbane. It is your first step in regaining me. Do this and none of them will be able to stop you. I will be yours again. I will be yours.—

The voice was like sweet music in his head. Deep and throaty, if Angelika had been a woman she would have been fair of face of voluptuous of figure. The voice was that of a secret harem girl, the one kept in hiding who could please her master like no other. Brisbane listened to that voice and realized he was reacting exactly as if she were a woman whispering wet promises of sexual ecstasy instead of a sword directing him to kill Wister. His heart was beating hard and fast and he could feel the beginnings of an erection in his underpants.

Brisbane thrust his sword into Wister’s chest and the ork dropped to the floor, his life flooding out of the wound. There was no release for Brisbane, the way there should have been if the metaphor of sexual congress was to be extended. There was no sense of victory in it. There was only a sinking feeling of disgust that quivered in his gut and pulled his testicles back up close to his body.

—It is done. Praise Grecolus for his wisdom and Brisbane for his courage.—

Shut up, Angelika. Just shut up.

“Grum Brisbane has defeated Grum Wister,” Brisbane heard the Demosk say. “Do you require anything else of me, Grumak Ternosh?”

Brisbane looked up at Ternosh and the pedestal.

“No,” Ternosh said.

Instantly, the figure of the Demosk vanished and the smoke stopped coming out of the vents. Brisbane went over to the side of the pug-trolang and he was hauled out by some of the black-clad orks. By then the smoke that had filled the room had almost completely dissipated. Slowly and silently, the orks began to file out of the chamber, leaving only Ternosh, Brisbane, and the body of Wister in the pit. The orks all avoided eye contact with Brisbane as they strode past him.

“What now?” Brisbane asked the Grumak.

Ternosh took the sword and shield away from Brisbane and began to help him off with the chainmail shirt. “You have won,” he said. “You now take Wister’s place in the clan. You are now my first Grum.”

Brisbane looked down into the pit. “I’m your only Grum.”

“What was that?” Ternosh asked.

Brisbane shook his head. “What about his body?”

“It will be removed later.”

“What did he mean?” Brisbane asked. “What is the army of Gruumsh One-Eye?”

Ternosh sighed as he helped Brisbane back into his robes. “Another time, Brisbane. It has been a very long day.”

Brisbane agreed it had been a very long day indeed.

Ternosh said goodnight and left Brisbane alone in the chamber. On his way out, the Grumak put the armor and weapon back in the racks against the wall.

Brisbane turned to look at Angelika leaning against the pedestal under the incense burner. He thought about going over there and taking her. He thought about taking her and trying to find his way out of these caves. He thought about taking her and fighting his way out, killing anyone who stood between him and the exit. He thought about taking her and fighting his way out of the compound, killing the orks and their guard dogs in a mad rush for freedom. He thought about all these things, but in the end he decided to leave Angelika where she was for now and go back to his chamber. Ternosh had been right, it had been a long day, and anything he thought about doing could certainly wait until tomorrow.

Brisbane quickly got out of there before Angelika started talking to him again.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dead Man’s Walk by Larry McMurtry

This would have been a much better book if it wasn’t a prequel to Lonesome Dove.

In his epic masterpieces ‘Lonesome Dove’ and ‘Streets of Laredo,’ Larry McMurtry breathed new life into the vanished American West and created two of the most memorable heroes in contemporary fiction: Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call. Now McMurtry dazzles us once more with the long-awaited story of their early adventures.

As young Texas Rangers, Gus and Call have much to learn about survival in a land fraught with perils: not only blazing heat and raging tornadoes, roiling rivers and merciless Indians, but also the deadly whims of soldiers. On their first expeditions -- led by incompetent officers and accompanied by the robust, dauntless whore known as the Great Western -- they will face death at the hands of the cunning Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump and the silent Apache Gomez. They will be astonished by the Mexican army. And Gus will meet the love of his life….

That’s from the back of my paperback copy. And, as usual, Dead Man’s Walk is all of those things, but it is also -- possibly -- something not described.

Call and Gus stood together, watching. They had never before seen a party of Indians on the move. Of course, in San Antonio there were a few town Indians, drunk most of the time. Now and then they saw an Indian of a different type, one who looked capable of wild behaviour.

But even those unruly ones were nothing like what Call and Gus were watching now: a party of fighting Comanches, riding at ease through the country that was theirs. These Comanches were different from any men either of the young Rangers had ever seen. They were wild men, and yet skilled. Buffalo Hump had held a corpse on the back of his racing pony with one hand. He had scalped Zeke Moody without even getting off his horse. They were wild Indians, and it was their land they were riding through. Their rules were not white rules, and their thinking was not white thinking. Just watching them ride away affected young Gus and young Call powerfully. Neither of them spoke until the Comanches were almost out of sight.

This is clearly the story of “young Gus and young Call” and, as such, it is somewhat limited in its scope. Young Gus and Young Call, after all, have to grow up to be Old Gus and Old Call, so there are only so many scrapes that they can get into in Dead Man’s Walk. But their view here of the “wild Indians” is revealing for what it says and what it doesn’t. 

In the narrative, Buffalo Hump and his Comanche warriors had just attacked the squad of Texas Rangers, killing some and scalping others. The encounter unnerves young Gus and young Call, and makes them both realize that they -- even as famed Texas Rangers -- are up against something neither of them understand nor, likely, are competent to deal with. 

The land before him, which looked so empty, wasn’t. A people were there who knew the emptiness better than he did; they knew it even better than Bigfoot or Shadrach. They knew it and they claimed it. They were the people of the emptiness.

A lot of Dead Man’s Walk is about this journey through another people’s emptiness -- or, more pointedly; another people’s fullness that was only perceived as empty. Time and time again, young Gus and young Call will encounter these Comanches, and the Comanches will slowly kill more and more of their number, steal more and more of their horses, until they are practically alone and barefoot in the emptiness.

They were scared: they had ridden out of Austin into a world where the rules were not white rules, where torture and mutilation awaited the weak and the unwary, the slow, the young.

Thematically, there is this clash of cultures, this way in which “white rules” has been surrounded and subsumed by the “people of the emptiness,” and there are only a handful of times in which McMurtry allows the white rules to exert themselves.

“Ain’t you going to scalp him?” Bigfoot asked. “You killed him. It’s your scalp.”

Call was startled. It had never occurred to him to scalp the Comanche boy. He was a young boy. Although he was glad that he had escaped death himself, he felt no pride in the act he had just committed -- the boy had been daring, in his view, to float down a swollen river, armed only with a knife, clinging to a dead mule in hopes of surprising and killing an armed Ranger. The reward for his bravery had been a bullet wound that nearly tore his head off. He would never ride the prairies again, or raid farms. Although he had had to kill him, Call thought the boy’s bravery deserved better than what it had got him. There would be no time to bury the boy, anyway -- the thought of cutting his hair off did not appeal.

“No, I don’t want to scalp him,” Call said.

“He would have scalped you, if he could have,” Bigfoot said.

“I don’t doubt it,” Call said. “Scalping’s the Indian way. It ain’t my way.”

“It’ll be your way when you’re a year or two older, boy -- if you survive,” Shadrach said. Then he casually knelt by the Comanche boy and took his scalp. When he finished, he pulled the boy well back into the current and let him float away.

It’s small, and it’s feeble, but it is Call’s (and McMurtry’s) way of exerting his misplaced frontier morality. Most of the time, however, it is the Indians and their ways that drive the Rangers, not the other way around.

As Buffalo Hump approached, holding his spotted pony to a slow walk, Call felt the air change. The Comanche’s body shone with grease; a necklace made of claws hung on his bare chest. Call looked at Gus, to see if he felt the change, and Gus nodded. They had entered the air of the wild men -- even the smell of the Indian horses was different.

They change the very air around them, enveloping their white adversaries with an “air of danger,” or the “air where quick death is.”

And even when Call and Gus try to adapt to these Indian ways in order to better survive in their emptiness, they are miserable failures.

“How do Indians ever kill them?” Call asked, looking at the buffalo. It seemed to be merely resting, its head on its knees.

“Why, with arrows -- how else?” Bigfoot asked.

Call said nothing, but once again he felt a sense of trespass. It had taken three men, with rifles, pistols, and knives, an hour to kill one beast; yet, Indians did it with arrows alone -- he had watched them kill several on the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon.

A sense of trespass. That sums up the hidden part of Dead Man’s Walk pretty well. Gus and Call are trespassing in a place they don’t belong. They collide again and again with this rough reality, and throughout, despite all the painful lessons that they are given, they never seem to adapt or truly learn.

“We’re back where it’s wild again,” Call said.

Lady Carey happened to overhear the remark -- she drew rein for a moment, looking toward a faint outline of mountains in the east.

“Yes, it’s wild, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s like a smell. I smelled it in Africa and now I smell it here.”

“It means we have to be careful,” Call said.

Lady Carey looked again at the distant mountains.

“Quite the contrary, Corporal Call,” she said. “It means we have to be wild, like the wild men.”

And that’s, ultimately, the problem. Young Gus and Young Call can’t be wild, because they have to become Old Gus and Old Call. Perhaps Dead’s Man Walk can be read as the set of experiences that helped form those essential characters, but, frankly, I found myself more frequently rooting for Buffalo Hump and wishing for his story to be more fully told.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

+ + + 

Can you beat a book with two colons in its title? Or maybe that’s not the title, because on the first page it just says The Moral Animal, and on the second page it says The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life. Whatever the book is called, it’s both a real mindbender and probably the best book I’ve read on evolution. Wright gets my special praise primarily for the following passage:

Before we return to Darwin’s life, one caution is in order. So far we’ve been analyzing the human mind in the abstract; we’ve talked about “species-typical” adaptations designed to maximize fitness. When we shift our focus from the whole species to any one individual, we should not expect that person to chronically maximize fitness, to optimally convey his or her genes to future generations. And the reason goes beyond the one that has so far been stressed: that most human beings don’t live in an environment much like the one for which their minds were designed. Environments—even the environments for which organisms are designed—are unpredictable. That is why behavioral flexibility evolved in the first place. And unpredictability, by its nature, cannot be mastered. As John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put it, “Natural selection cannot directly ‘see’ an individual organism in a specific situation and cause behavior to be adaptively tailored.”

Hallelujah. This is the first time I’ve seen it explicitly stated that people don’t necessarily consciously act in a way designed to move their genes into the next generation. In stating that humans live in an environment today that is radically different from the one in which we were shaped by evolution, Wright is making an essential point often overlooked or taken as given in other evolutionary texts. As he says:

Of course, the designs don’t always work. Individual organisms often fail, for various reasons, to transmit their genes. (Some are bound to fail. That is the reason evolution so assuredly happens.) In the case of human beings, moreover, the design work was done in a social environment quite different from the current environment. We live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population. It’s no wonder that people often seem not to be pursuing any particular goal—happiness, inclusive fitness, whatever—very successfully.

But I still have a complaint. I wish the evolutionists would stop using verbs like “design” when talking about natural selection. There is no design in natural selection. There is no envisioned end product that natural selection is working to bring into existence, and too often the language that’s chosen to discuss the subject belies that reality. Wright is cognizant of this, and often uses quotation marks to indicate that he doesn’t mean what he’s saying literally, but feels compelled to use the convenient language.

Naturally, the level of the organism is of primary concern to human beings; human beings are organisms. But it’s of secondary importance to natural selection. If there is a sense in which natural selection “cares” about anything—and there is, metaphorically—that thing isn’t us; it’s the information in our sex cells, our eggs and our sperm. Of course, natural selection “wants” us to behave in certain ways. But, so long as we comply, it doesn’t care whether we are made happy or sad in the process, whether we get physically mangled, even whether we die. The only thing natural selection ultimately “wants” to keep in good shape is the information in our genes, and it will countenance any suffering on our part that serves this purpose.

I won’t beat Wright up too much over this. Although he flirts too frequently with the contradiction, he repeatedly tells us that he is flirting, and has helped me think about evolution in ways I haven’t before. I believe natural selection itself is a misnomer, as nothing is actually being “selected” by it. Natural selection is a result of what happens when certain genes that embody certain traits survive and proliferate over several generations and other genes that embody other traits don’t. Species adapt and change, but none of that is because they were selected to do so or designed for some specific end. As gravity is to mass, evolution is to reproduction—a quality inherently present in the medium.

But here’s the mindbending part:

It’s always hard to be sure that people really believe such excuses. But a famous series of experiments shows (in a quite different context) how oblivious the conscious mind can be to its real motivation, and how busily it sets about justifying the products of that motivation.

The experiments were conducted on “split-brain” patients—people who have had the link between left and right hemispheres cut to stop severe epileptic seizures. The surgery has surprisingly little effect on everyday behavior, but under contrived conditions, strange things can happen. If the word nut is flashed before the left eye (which leads to the right hemisphere), but not to the right eye (which leads to the left), the subject reports no conscious awareness of the signal; the information never enters the left hemisphere, which in most people controls language and seems to dominate consciousness. Meanwhile, though, the subject’s left hand—controlled by the right hemisphere—will, if allowed to rummage through a box of objects, seize on a nut. The subject reports no awareness of this fact unless allowed to see what his left hand is up to.

When it comes time for the subject to justify his behavior, the left brain passes from professed ignorance into unknowing dishonesty. One example: the command walk is sent to a man’s right brain, and he complies. When asked where he’s going, his left brain, not privy to the real reason, comes up with another one: he’s going to get a soda, he says, convinced. Another example: a nude image is flashed to the right brain of a woman, who then lets loose an embarrassed laugh. Asked what’s so funny, she give an answer that’s less racy than the truth.

Michael Gazzaniga, who conducted some of the split-brain experiments, has said that language is merely the “press agent” for other parts of the mind; it justifies whatever acts they induce, convincing the world that the actor is a reasonable, rational, upstanding person. It may be that the realm of consciousness itself is in large part such a press agent—the place where our unconsciously written press releases are infused with the conviction that gives them force. Consciousness cloaks the cold and self-serving logic of the genes in a variety of innocent guises. The Darwinian anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, “It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker).”

One could go further and suggest that the folk psychology itself is built into our genes. In other words, not only is the feeling that we are “consciously” in control of our behavior an illusion (as is suggested by other neurological experiments as well); it is a purposeful illusion, designed by natural selection to lend conviction to our claims. For centuries people have approached the philosophical debate over free will with the vague but powerful intuition that free will does exist; we (the conscious we) are in charge of our behavior. It is not beyond the pale to suggest that this nontrivial chunk of intellectual history can be ascribed fairly directly to natural selection—that one of the most hallowed of all philosophical positions is essentially an adaptation.

That’s right. We’re not really conscious beings, different from all the other animals on the planet that run purely on instinct. We have no free will. Our illusion of consciousness and free will is an evolutionary adaptation that has survived and flourished because it has better adapted us to our environment. Belief in our own consciousness and free will makes us more socially adaptable to our ever-changing environment by making us better able to convince others that our intentions are socially acceptable and not necessarily “driven” by our genes’ “desire” to survive into the next generation. I’ve heard theories of everything before, but this one really takes the cake. Want to get rid of God? Here you go. Evolution will not only destroy the biblical myth of creation, but will completely erase the concept of the soul. What is the soul of a man? Adaptable traits inherited by our procreating ancestors.

Even Wright seems blown away by this concept, that natural selection is responsible not just for our physical traits but our sense of superiority and the higher purpose in our lives:

One striking feature of the rewards and punishments dished out by the conscience is their lack of sensuality. The conscience doesn’t make us feel bad the way hunger feels bad, or good the way sex feels good. It makes us feel as if we have done something that’s wrong or something that’s right. Guilty or not guilty. It is amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel as if we’re in touch with higher truths. Truly a shameless ploy.

God help me, I can hear Rick Warren squirming on his cross when I read this. Brother Robert! Your conscience is not a shameless ploy of natural selection. It is the voice of God desperately trying to reach you. But Wright’s mind is closed to that possibility—more closed I think than anyone else I have ever read. He doesn’t even consider the alternative. For him evolution has to explain it all, and this is the best way he can find to explain things like the conscience and consciousness through evolution. If there is a hell, Wright is going to one day find himself in the hottest lake of fire it has.

But wait. Here’s where it goes from mindbending to freaky:

There are various ways to answer this question. Today, among biologists, one common answer is that evolution has no discernible end. Spencer, at any rate, believed evolution had tended to move species toward longer and more comfortable lives and the more secure rearing of offspring. Our mission, then, was to nourish these values. And the way to do so was to cooperate with one another, to be nice—to live in “permanently peaceful societies.”

All of this now lies in the dustbin of intellectual history. In 1903, the philosopher G. E. Moore decisively assaulted the idea of drawing values from evolution or, for that matter, from any aspect of observed nature. He labeled this error the “naturalistic fallacy.” Ever since, philosophers have worked hard not to commit it.

Moore wasn’t the first to question the inference of “ought” from “is.” John Stuart Mill had done it a few decades earlier. Mill’s dismissal of the naturalistic fallacy, much less technical and academic than Moore’s, was more simply compelling. Its key was to articulate clearly the usually unspoken assumption that typically underlies attempts to use nature as a guide to right conduct: namely, that nature was created by God and thus must embody his values. And, Mill added, not just any God. If, for example, God is not benevolent, then why honor his values? And if he is benevolent, but isn’t omnipotent, why suppose that he has managed to precisely embed his values in nature? So the question of whether nature deserves slavish emulation boils down to the question of whether nature appears to be the handiwork of a benevolent and omnipotent God.

Mill’s answer was: Are you kidding? In an essay called “Nature,” he wrote that nature “impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve.” And she does all this “with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst…” Mill observed, “If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals.” Anyone, “whatever kind of religious phrases he may use,” must concede “that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man.” Nor, believed Mill, should we look for guidance to our moral intuition, a device “for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices.”

In other words, our nature, be it bred into us by natural selection or breathed into us by God, is something that we are to overcome, to rise above.

Darwin doesn’t seem to have spent much time agonizing over this conflict between natural selection’s “morality” and his own. If a parasitic wasp or a cat playing with mice embodies nature’s values—well, so much the worse for nature’s values. It is remarkable that a creative process devoted to selfishness could produce organisms which, having finally discerned this creator, reflect on this central value and reject it. More remarkable still, this happened in record time; the very first organism ever to see its creator did precisely that. Darwin’s moral sentiments, designed ultimately to serve selfishness, renounced this criterion of design as soon as it became explicit.

But can we do this? If consciousness itself is merely an adaptation of natural selection, a ploy to keep us from realizing we are acting on pure instinct so we can reason our way through changes in our environment, if free will is only a part of this parlor trick our own minds have been constructed to play on us, how can we possibly step outside of that paradigm and reject it? If natural selection explains it all, even consciousness and the illusion of free will, is it possible for us to have this kind of independent thought? Or isn’t it more likely that any act we think we might take to reject the logic and values of natural selection is one taken by our evolutionary doppelganger instead, and therefore part of the larger force we think we have rejected? Makes your head spin, doesn’t it?

There’s a few other random bits that seemed worth quoting:

One factor is the vulnerability of offspring. Following the generic male sexual strategy—roaming around, seducing and abandoning everything in sight—won’t do a male’s genes much good if the resulting offspring get eaten. That seems to be one reason so many bird species are monogamous, or at least relatively monogamous. Eggs left alone while the mother went out and hunted worms wouldn’t last long. When our ancestors moved from the forests out onto the savanna, they had to cope with fleet predators. And this was hardly the only new danger to the young. As the species got smarter and its posture more upright, female anatomy faced a paradox: walking upright implied a narrow pelvis, and thus a narrow birth canal, but the heads of babies were larger than ever. This is presumably why human infants are born prematurely in comparison to other primates. From early on, baby chimps can cling to their mother while she walks around, her hands unencumbered. Human babies, though, seriously compromise a mother’s food gathering. For many months, they’re mounds of helpless flesh: tiger bait.

The whole first part of this book is about men and women, about why they do the things they do in reproducing and how evolution and natural selection created it all. And it’s also where Wright rams home one of the central points of his book—that we are a species that live in an environment very different from the one we were adapted to by natural selection. I noted the above paragraph because it helps illustrate this. Why are human babies so helpless when they are born? Why are their heads so big and malleable? If you believe in God the answer is simple—because that’s the way God made it. If you believe in evolution—the answer is infinitely more complex. Nothing evolves simply or in a direct fashion. Everything is the result of an untold number of variables at play with one another. Our intelligence, walking upright, the pain of childbirth, the vulnerability of our young, our need to care for them. They’re all inter-related in ways we’ll probably never understand.

It is ironic that hints of mortality can draw a man into marriage, for often it is these same hints, much later, that drive him out, to seek fresh proof of his virility. But the irony dissolves when reduced to ultimate cause: both the impulses to profess lifelong love to a woman and to wander lie within a man by virtue of how often, in his ancestors, they led to progeny. In that sense, both are an apt antidote to mortality, thought in the end futile (except from the genes’ point of view), and, in the latter case—wandering—often destructive as well.

I’m not sure I’ve even touched on this one yet, that emotions themselves are a product of natural selection, meaning we only feel the things that have been useful in propagating our species. The love I feel for my wife, according to this perspective, is only there because millions in the past who didn’t express such feelings did not reproduce and millions more who did express them did.

Morality is the device of an animal of exceptional cognitive complexity, pursuing its interests in an exceptionally complex social universe.

Somewhere along the way in the book Wright refers to the stages of moral development as expressed by Lawrence Kohlberg in 1971. The seemed interesting to me so I went out to the Internet and found them:

Stages of Moral Development

by Lawrence Kohlberg (1971)

I. Preconventional Level

At this level, the child is responsive to cultural rules and labels of good and bad, right or wrong, but he interprets the labels in terms of either the physical or hedonistic consequences of action (punishment, reward, exchange of favors) or the physical power of those who enunciate the rules and labels. The level is divided into the following three stages:

Stage 0: Egocentric judgement. The child makes judgements of good on the basis of what he likes and wants or what helps him, and bad on the basis of what he does not like or what hurts him. He has no concept of rules or of obligations to obey or conform to independent of his wish.

Stage 1: The punishment and obedience orientation. The physical consequences of action determine its goodness or badness regardless of the human meaning or value of these consequences. Avoidance of punishment and unquestioning deference to power are values in their own right, not in terms of respect for an underlying moral order supported by punishment and authority (the latter is stage 4).

Stage 2: The instrumental relativist orientation. Right action consists of what instrumentally satisfies one's own needs and occasionally the needs of others. Human relations are viewed in terms such as those of the market place. Elements of fairness, reciprocity, and equal sharing are present, but they are always interpreted in a physical, pragmatic way. Reciprocity is a matter of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours", not loyalty, gratitude, or justice.

II. Conventional Level

At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences. The attitude is not only one of conformity to personal expectations and social order, but of loyalty to it, of actively maintaining, supporting, and justifying the order and identifying with the persons or group involved in it. The level consists of the following two stages:

Stage 3: The interpersonal concordance or "good boy-nice girl" orientation. Good behavior is what pleases or helps others and is approved by them. There is much conformity to stereotypical images of what is majority or "natural" behavior. Behavior is frequently judged by intention -- "he means well" becomes important for the first time. One earns approval by being "nice".

Stage 4: The "law and order" orientation. The individual is oriented toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of the social order. Right behavior consists in doing one's duty, showing respect for authority, and maintaining the given social order for its own sake.

III. Post-Conventional, Autonomous, or Principled Level

The individual makes a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups of persons holding them and apart from the individual's own identification with the group. The level has the two following stages:

Stage 5: The social-contract legalistic orientation (generally with utilitarian overtones). Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society. There is a clear awareness of the relativism of personal values and opinions and a corresponding emphasis upon procedural rules for reaching consensus. Aside from what is constitutionally and democratically agreed upon, right action is a matter of personal values and opinions. The result is an emphasis upon the "legal point of view", but with an additional emphasis upon the possibility of changing the law in terms of rational considerations of social utility (rather than freezing it in terms of stage 4 "law and order"). Outside the legal realm, free agreement, and contract, is the binding element of obligation. The "official" morality of the American government and Constitution is at this stage.

Stage 6: The universal ethical-principle orientation. Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles that appeal to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency. These principles are abstract and ethical (the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative); they are not concrete moral rules like the Ten Commandments. At heart, these are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of the human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons.

After reading them, I’m not sure they were all that interesting after all.

One more thing about The Moral Animal. It was confusing as hell. Interesting and thought-provoking, but confusing as hell. It was clear that Wright was trying to argue a consistent point of view throughout, but his subject matter is so opaque, he could have said the direct opposite thing on page 400 that he said on page 4 and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.