Early Learnings from the Chair Project

Notes from an experiment in progress

​When I ask Board Chairs how they’re doing, the answer is often something like, “I’m okay… I think,” followed by a pause. Not because they don’t care, quite the opposite - it’s more that they find themselves in a role that is strangely hard to describe. It’s part leadership, part stewardship, part emotional ballast. It lives somewhere between having authority and not quite having it, between being accountable and not fully in control.

Only after spending time with Chairs in this first round of The Chair Project have I come to realize how much ambiguity shapes the experience. Chairs are being asked to care deeply, to hold responsibility, and to keep things steady, all inside systems where authority is shared, and responsibility can feel very personal.

The idea for The Chair Project grew out of a pattern I kept encountering in my interim work and consulting around succession planning. During moments of transition, the Board Chair often becomes a central stabilizing force for an organization - shaping decisions, relationships, and pace - yet there are remarkably few resources available to help Chairs understand or prepare for the role. In a period of significant change for the social sector, that absence began to stand out as something worth examining more closely.

I shared an early version of the idea on LinkedIn, expecting little more than a few nods of recognition. Instead, the response was immediate and wide-ranging. Chairs reached out wanting to be involved. Executive Directors asked how they could better support their Chairs. Friends of Chairs wrote, hoping to be helpful. Other consultants and advisors contacted me, sharing that they too were noticing similar dynamics with their clients. The responses didn’t offer clarity about solutions but did confirm that the question itself resonates.

Given the response, I kept the first round intentionally small - a group of six Chairs - enough to begin noticing patterns, but still contained enough to learn as we go. We’re now about halfway through the protocol we’re testing, and the process has been deeply engaging. It’s still early, and I’m doing my best to stay inside the experiment as designed rather than rushing ahead to define what it might become. That said, while it’s too soon to draw conclusions about impact, the experience itself is already teaching me a great deal.

Early learning #1: Sense-making changes experienceOne of the first things that struck me is how deeply the Chairs I’m speaking with care about their organizations. They care about the mission, about doing the job well, about the people they work alongside, and about the health of the institution itself. They are devoting real time and mental space to meeting day-to-day needs, supporting leadership, and stewarding productive board meetings - frequently under conditions of uncertainty and pressure.

What I’m also beginning to see is that what’s missing isn’t insight so much as permission. Chairs are often uniquely well positioned to make sense of what’s happening: they see across the organization, the board, and the leadership, but the role rarely explicitly invites them to pause, hover, and interpret what they’re seeing. Creating space for sense-making turns out to be as much about legitimizing that perspective as it is about giving it time.

Again and again, I’ve been reminded (and maybe I’m re-learning) that sense-making can be a causal act. Helping someone frame the role they’re in doesn’t just change how they think about it; it changes how they experience it. The way a Chair understands what they’re stepping into shapes what they notice, what they worry about, what they prioritize, and what feels possible to do next. One Chair put it this way: when she stopped seeing herself as the person who had to solve every problem and started seeing herself as someone who could stand slightly above the situation and notice patterns, she felt less frantic and more clear -  even though the challenges themselves hadn’t gone away.

Nothing external has shifted in those moments. The organization hasn’t changed. The constraints and opportunities remain. And yet, the experience can change. Simply creating space to name and interpret what’s happening seems to alter how the terrain is experienced.

Early learning #2: Structure shapes experienceI’ve also noticed something closely related: the way putting in place even very light structure changes how people experience the work. By structure, I don’t mean heavy process or formal governance tools. I mean simple invitations: ways of framing a conversation, a meeting, or a relationship that create space for checking assumptions, naming patterns, and intentionally designing how people show up together.

One of the quiet challenges of being a Board Chair is the sheer cognitive load the role creates. Chairs are holding multiple perspectives at once - the needs of the Executive Director, the dynamics of the board, the long-term health of the organization, and the pressures of the moment. Much of that work happens in their heads, often invisibly. What I’ve begun to see is how even small structures can give some of that thinking a place to land. I sometimes imagine them as literal chairs - a place to set down part of what a person has been carrying.

What’s striking is that these don’t have to be big shifts to matter. Small tweaks in how meetings are framed, how roles are named, or how conversations are designed can accumulate into meaningful changes in how the load feels. Those changes show up in small, human ways: in tone and what feels possible.

For now
What this first round is giving me is not so much a set of answers as a clearer picture of the terrain Chairs are navigating.  They are asked to care deeply about something that does not fully belong to them. To be accountable without being all-powerful. To hold the long view while responding to the urgencies of the moment. It’s an inherently human tension - one we all recognize in different forms - but it becomes especially vivid in governance, where the stakes feel high and the lines of authority are blurred.

What I’m beginning to see is that what helps most in this role isn’t expertise, but support in recognizing and managing what the role demands. Language that helps people name what they’re actually carrying. Simple structures that give shape to conversations that would otherwise stay stuck in someone’s head. Moments of shared reflection that remind Chairs they aren’t wrong in finding this work challenging.

I’m still in the middle of this first round - still listening, still learning, still letting the experience show me what it wants to become. There are undoubtedly things I’m not seeing yet, places where this work will surprise me, and places where it will fall short. That’s part of what makes it an experiment rather than a program.
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For now, though, my job feels pretty clear: to keep paying attention, to keep creating small containers where this work can be made more visible, and to keep walking alongside the Chairs who are willing to look closely at what it means to hold responsibility for something that isn’t fully in their control.

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